Jimmy Carter
speaker
288 appearances
16 recordings
12 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 1 May
Jimmy Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes.
It was a very serious mistake for me to make. I was actually in the backyard of a friend in North Carolina, and I was asked, are you a born-again Christian? And I answered truthfully, yes, I am. I had always assumed that that phrase was completely acceptable, at least among Christians. And there were news reporters there.
It was kind of late in the 76 campaign, and it was reported, and the reaction was very severe and negative. because the people who were not familiar with that phrase assumed that I was claiming to have some special endowment from God in visions, and that I also tended to elevate myself above all other human beings in my moral standards, which was not the case at all.
Being a born-again Christian had been a phrase I used since I was probably three or four years old, as used regularly in Christian churches in my area. So it was a very negative reaction to what I had to say. And I was very careful from then on to separate openly and ostentatiously my religious faith from any responsibilities that I assumed when I became president.
Yes. There was one issue in particular that was a very serious problem for me, and that was abortion. I have never believed that Jesus Christ, whom I worship, would approve abortions unless the mother's health or life was threatened, or perhaps if the pregnancy was from rape or incest. This is hard for me to accept.
And at the same time, I was sworn by oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court had ruled that abortions in the first semester of pregnancy were completely acceptable. So I tried to do everything I could within the bounds of the law to minimize and discourage abortions.
One of the easily understood principles is that two-thirds of the women who have abortions claim that the reason is that they cannot financially support another child. So I developed what's known as a Women Infant Children's Program, WIC program, to give special benefits to pregnant women and infant children.
Also, I promoted the proposition that adoption should be easier, and I tried to promulgate training in high school on ways to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But I had to uphold the law. So that particular one was troublesome for me.
Another that was legally troublesome for me that didn't really ever come into effect was the Supreme Court's ruling shortly before I became president that authorized a death penalty. But when the Supreme Court ruled, luckily, I went through my entire term as governor and my entire term as president, and no one was executed under my administrations.
And I have never felt that Jesus Christ, again, would approve the death penalty as it's presently supported so strongly by some of the conservative Christians and others in this country. Those are the two issues.
Well, what's changed is what I described earlier. That is the rise of fundamentalism has affected both politics, including national policy in domestic and foreign affairs, and also has affected the religious community much more than it ever did when I was in politics. And the two have now merged. So there is an ostentatious and very aggressive effort
Among the, you might say, the religious right leaders, and I don't criticize them because of their beliefs, publicly to align themselves with the Republican Party. provided the Republican Party members whom they support are adequately conservative.
So that marriage has been a radical departure, in my opinion, from the ancient values of our country, as espoused most clearly by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated a wall between church and state.
Well, in our Endangered Values book, I describe my feelings about this quite thoroughly. I studied nuclear physics when I was a young man. I was one of the originators of a nuclear submarine program. I worked on Admiral Hyman Rickover. At the same time, as you've already mentioned, I'm a devout Christian. I don't see any incompatibility at all between the two.
My belief is that God created the universe. My belief is that God permits us to understand the new developments that we can witness in universal matters. When the Bible was written, we didn't have the Hubble telescope. We didn't have microscopes so we could look at small items. We didn't have a way to test the age of rocks and so forth. And now we have these scientific capabilities.
And so I think that science is just a revelation of God's creation. And so the two are completely separate, and we can't prove the existence of things in our faith. As a matter of fact, the definition of faith in the Bible is that we know things that cannot be proven. Well, we don't have to have faith to believe that the moon is out there. That's something that we can see for ourselves.
And we can't have science prove the existence of God or all of the things that we know about Jesus Christ as a Christian. So the two are separate. I don't believe there's any place in a scientific classroom to try to prove to the students that God exists. I think the two ought to be completely separate. So I believe in both of them, the science and religion, the two are completely separate.
One should not be imposed on the other.
Well, this was a hero of a lot of stories that I told my children beginning maybe 40, 45 years ago. And this is a monster, but a young one, but still very large and extremely ugly. And he comes out of the ocean on occasion to become involved in adventures with little children who were about the same age as my children when I told them the stories.
And he interrelates in a very exciting and dramatic way to help resolve some of their problems or to deal with crises that affect their lives. And so the little baby Snugglefleet is always fearsome to all the other kids. And usually in the stories, the hero of that particular story, the little child, is the only one who can relate to the little baby Snugglefleet.
Showing 101–120 of 288 · page 6 of 15
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