And this is Rick Warren??

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

And so, today, this is Rick Warren who will lead the prayer for Obama??

Does Obama know this is Rick Warren?

Does Rick Warren know this is Obama?

Has one of them changed?

Is this just a political sign toward evangelicals? If so, isn't that risky to comfort evangelicals in their views during a so important ceremony, which engages the whole nation?

Obama is President of Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Unitarians, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the non-religious.  Obama's picking Rick Warren was a conscious decision to include Evangelicals in the larger, ongoing national conversation, and be inclusive.  Hopefully we'll have a government that respects the religious and philosophical views of all people.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Outside of Rick Warren, I watched the Inauguration at TV, and, maybe it's my French part (we've a very secular culture), but I've been marked by the fact that, in the ceremony, the power of the US is shown as so close of the Christian religion.

The US has always been an odd hybrid of a Christian and secular nation.  The culture is overwhelmingly Christian, but the state, for very specific reasons, is defined as purely secular.  The founding fathers were both Christians and secular Deists, united in their belief in limiting the power of the state over our affairs and especially over our faiths. 

WWII unified us as a culture, and the Communist scare in the immediate aftermath of the war galvanized us against what we saw as a secular threat to the body politic.  THAT was when you had "under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and when devotion specifically to Christianity became the yardstick of "Americanism."

In the 1970s-1980s, "Communism," was replaced with the new bogeyman of "Secular Humanism," but it was the Cold War and the threat of annihilation in the 1950s that really tied together Christianity with Americanism.  Now that the existential threats have faded, and our chief national enemy is driven by religious extremism (albeit of the Muslim variety) it may be that secularism slowly comes back into favor and we will return to something more resembling the secular republic envisioned by Jefferson and Madison.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

I was kind of annoyed with the two prayers being led during the ceremonies. Being an Atheist, I don't really think the government should force that upon us in a federal ceremony. Swearing in on the Bible is OK, though, as people may choose their book of choice. (Or none at all, presumably)

You can even choose to affirm rather than swear.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

I was kind of annoyed with the two prayers being led during the ceremonies. Being an Atheist, I don't really think the government should force that upon us in a federal ceremony. Swearing in on the Bible is OK, though, as people may choose their book of choice. (Or none at all, presumably)

Same here, which is why I chose not to watch the inauguration (I'm agnostic btw).

I'm an agnostic Christian, in that I don't regard the existence of a transcendent God to be an empirically knowable proposition, but I believe in Jesus with my heart, which does not rely on the empirical.