President Barrack Hussein Obama was born August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii.There is some discrepancy in regards to which hospital he was actually born in. Earlier records indicated that it was Honolulu’s Kapiolani Medical Center and recent documentation suggests it was at Queen’s Medical center in Honolulu.
His mother, Ann Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas and his father, Barrack Obama senior was from Victoria in Alego, Kenya.
They met each other at the University of Hawaii. Both parents at the time of Barracks arrival into the world had no religious affiliation. Barrack Senior was an agnostic sometime before he married Ann Dunham and she did not believe in the need for organized religion.
She believed this was just a way to divide people and to use religion as a way to wield power over others. She felt cloaked behind organized religion lay close mindedness and self righteousness. Barrack talks openly about his mother’s views.
He learned a great deal about religion through the opinions, and ideals of his parents. Even though they had no religious affiliation, with this instilled sense of curiosity, he was able to investigate and truly understand religion as a whole and as a faith. In the book Audacity of Hop, he writes:
- I was not raised in a religious household. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education.
- In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.
- On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might take me to church, just as she had the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.
- In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.
Barrack Senior graduated from Hawaii University in June 1962. He then left for Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall, where he began a graduate study at Harvard University. The long distance proved to be too much for the couple. After graduating from Harvard, Barrack Senior and Ann Dunham divorced. Barrack senior returned to his native Kenya with post graduate degree in hand. Remembering the hardships he had to endure, He felt he had a responsibility to his country to use his knowledge to help other young Kenyan boys and girls. Barracks mother who was now a cultural anthropologist, remarried to an Indonesian business man name of Lolo Soetoro.
