LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Already under fire for selecting megachurch founder Rick Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation, President-elect Obama has moved quickly to stem another rising controversy surrounding the evangelical pastor: his intention to invoke Christ in his Inaugural Day prayers.

Ashur, the head of the Assyrian pantheon, is among the gods who will be prevailed upon during Obama's inaugural.

Obama continues to stand by Warren as his choice to lead the inaugural invocation despite a loud backlash from advocates for gay rights over the pastor’s support of California’s Proposition 8. Yet the president-elect is moving quickly to offer concessions in light of the latest protests, which come from several religious groups as well as atheists.

Objections over the evangelical pastor’s intent to invoke Christ initially sprang from some in the Jewish and Muslim communities in America, but other voices soon entered the fray.

Elephant Clansmen, a shaman and spokesperson with the Germanic Neopagan Church of North America, said “For every mention of Christ in the inaugural invocation, our country would step back at least a decade in its proud Civil Rights march.” Clansmen suggested that instead the prayer should invoke Obama’s ancestors and “his choice” of any number of Norse deities.

Meanwhile, on the other extreme, Demoniacal Whew, a spokesperson for American Atheists, said that no deity, be it Christ or any other, should be recognized in the inaugural prayer. “Instead, there should be a moment of profound silence in which Obama recognizes the limitless indifference of the entropic universe within which we are all confined and share a common destiny: absolute zero.”

Seeking to preempt additional and possibly limitless objections from other sects, religions and philosophies, Obama’s administration has provided a final list of “deities, supernatural powers, gods and other celestial influencers” who will be called upon during the seven-hour prayer.

“Our entire campaign was built on change, on diversity,” noted Axed Diva Lord, Obama’s chief media strategist. “What better way to underscore that than with an omnitheistic prayer to mark President-elect Obama’s inauguration?”

The list, as provided by the Obama staff, includes, but is not limited to: Ashur, Ba’al Hadad, Banaitja, Belobog, Forseti, Ra, Tabaldak, Vishnu, Waaq and Zeus.

In a nod to atheism, Warren has also been instructed to pause for a 30-minute period of silence, during which the crowd is encouraged to ponder the “ultimate contingency of human existence, that is, its utter and undeniable thralldom upon an indifferent, open-system universe about which no a priori facts are or ever will be known.”

Lord noted that a deity of some sort would be invoked from every tradition known to humanity, whether or not the tradition is still practiced and even whether or not its corresponding civilization is even still in existence.

“We don’t think annihilation or obsolescence should mean marginalization,” intoned Lord. “This is the marketplace of ideas, after all, and even dead ideas have a place.”

Originally posted 2008-12-31 17:51:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter