Atypical Guy

The comparisons between George Bush and John McCain are hard to overlook, though it seems that most Americans have found a way.  The evidence seems to show that McCain will carry on the Bush legacy of bumbling and ignorance.  As with Bush, we have always had all the information we need to see that McCain is not a very intelligent man.  His mind seems to be clouded by religion, and he seems to have no interest in learning about things he doesn’t understand. 

It’s refreshing to see a mainstream media outlet like CNN post a valid opinion on what could be our nation’s second greatest disaster.  Jack Cafferty asks some important questions in Commentary: Is McCain another George W. Bush?:

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. “It means I’m saved and forgiven.” Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we’ve all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

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He was asked “if evil exists.” His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to “the gates of hell.” That was it.

He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question — his wife is worth a reported $100 million — he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.

One after another, McCain’s answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has — virtually none.

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

The conclusion is concise, well-written, and terrifying:

George Bush’s record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens’ faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

Sadly, history shows that these “qualities” are what will make McCain a serious candidate in the 2008 election.

It’s a simple fact that the overwhelming majority of people that claim to be religious know extremely little about what they believe.  In previous posts, I’ve cited statistics related to how little American “Christians” know about their Bible.  I doubt most of them could explain away the questions of a ten-year-old.  But, I can understand that group of people – they’re either not interested or are otherwise unmotivated to examine (let alone question) their beliefs. 

What tends to surprise me more are those who claim to actually research their religion and still appear to believe in it.  Just about all religious texts are filled with obvious contradictions.  They’re internally consistent (let alone completely inaccurate with respect to the real world).  Still, the majority of humanity professes to believe in a supreme creator of the universe.

Thanks to a link from RichardDawkins.net, I ran into a web site called God is imaginary.  As the title suggests, the site includes a list of “50 simple proofs” that God does not exist.  It focuses on Christianity, but many of the proofs apply just as well to any religious beliefs.  Here’s a list from the site’s Table of Contents:

1. Try praying
2. Statistically analyze prayer
3. Look at all historical gods
4. Think about science
5. Read the Bible
6. Ponder God’s plan
7. Understand religious delusion
8. Think about Near Death Experiences
9. Understand ambiguity
10. Watch the offering plate
11. Notice that there is no scientific evidence
12. See the magic
13. Take a look at slavery
14. Examine Jesus’ miracles
15. Examine Jesus’ resurrection
16. Contemplate the contradictions
17. Think about Leprechauns
18. Imagine heaven
19. Notice that you ignore Jesus
20. Notice your church
21. Understand Jesus’ core message
22. Count all the people God wants to murder
23. Listen to the Doxology
24. Ask why religion causes so many problems
25. Understand evolution and abiogenesis
26. Notice that the Bible’s author is not “all-knowing”
27. Think about life after death
28. Notice how many gods you reject
29. Think about communion
30. Examine God’s sexism
31. Understand that religion is superstition
32. Talk to a theologian
33. Contemplate the crucifixion
34. Examine your health insurance policy
35. Notice Jesus’ myopia
36. Realize that God is impossible
37. Think about DNA
38. Contemplate the divorce rate among Christians
39. Realize that Jesus was a jerk
40. Understand Christian motivations
41. Flip a coin
42. Listen when “God talks”
43. Realize that a “hidden God” is impossible
44. Think about a Christian housewife
45. Consider Noah’s Ark
46. Ponder Pascal’s Wager
47. Contemplate Creation
48. Compare prayer to a lucky horseshoe
49. Look at who speaks for God
50. Ask Jesus to appear

While there’s nothing revolutionary about many of these ideas, I found them to be particularly well-written.  I hope they’ll have the intended effect on readers, but somehow doubt it.  After all, if something is taken “on faith”, then proof really doesn’t have anything to do with it.

A commonly argument for religion is that, without it, humanity would have no basis for morality.  The world would devolve into chaos and a seemingly endless stream of bad thins would happen.  I find this argument to be exceptionally annoying in that it ignores all evidence, research, and reason to the contrary.  Sam Harris addressed this issue in a brief but thorough examination of the issue in The Myth of Secular Chaos (you can find a better-formatted version on RichardDawkins.net).  In the article, Harris addresses some of the most common arguments:

1. If a book like the Bible were the only reliable blueprint for human decency that we had, it would be impossible (both practically and logically) to criticize it in moral terms. But it is extraordinarily easy to criticize the morality one finds in the Bible, as most of it is simply odious and incompatible with a civil society.

The notion that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is really quite amazing, given the contents of the book. Human sacrifice, genocide, slaveholding, and misogyny are consistently celebrated. Of course, God’s counsel to parents is refreshingly straightforward: whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13–14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshiping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.

Most Christians imagine that Jesus did away with all this barbarism and delivered a doctrine of pure love and toleration. He didn’t. (See Matthew 5:18–19, Luke 16:17, 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 20–21, John 7:19.) Anyone who believes that Jesus only taught the Golden Rule and love of one’s neighbor should go back and read the New Testament. And he or she should pay particular attention to the morality that will be on display if Jesus ever returns to earth trailing clouds of glory (e.g., 2 Thessalonians 1:7–9, 2:8; Hebrews 10:28–29; 2 Peter 3:7; and all of Revelation).

It is not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas thought heretics should be killed and that St. Augustine thought they should be tortured. (Ask yourself, what are the chances that these good doctors of the Church hadn’t read the New Testament closely enough to discover the error of their ways?) As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn’t also happen to have the Qur’an.

It is important to point out that we decide what is good in the Good Book. We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses; we read that a woman found not to be a virgin on her wedding night should be stoned to death, and we (if we are civilized) decide that this is the most vile lunacy imaginable. Our own ethical intuitions are, therefore, primary. So the choice before us is simple: we can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about ethics—availing ourselves of all the arguments and scientific insights that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

In addition, here are the other two points addressed in the article:

If religion were necessary for morality, there should be some evidence that atheists are less moral than believers.

If religion really provided the only conceivable objective basis for morality, it should be impossible to posit a nontheistic objective basis for morality. But it is not impossible; it is rather easy.

Obviously, few Christians (at least in the United States) read their Bibles.  And extremely few actually questions its teachings.  I contend that the majority of the world’s problems (at least ones that are human-made) stem from religion.  The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition clearly could have been handled better (or, best of all, would not have occurred at all).  We have a President in the White House – one that is widely considered the worst in the history of the United States – who claims that God guides his decisions.  And no one seems to question that.

Several studies have shown that there’s a strong positive correlation between intelligence and atheism.  In fact, the U.S. is somewhat of an anomaly in the fact that we have a fairly decent educational system (at least when compared to the entire world).  We have elected (or appointed, as the case may be) a President who says that God comes to him in dreams and has commanded him to attack Iraq.  Yet people, for the most part, seem to be OK with it.  After all, how can you question an irrational belief?

The Telegraph has posted another article that draws what shouldn’t be a surprising conclusion.  From Intelligent people ‘less likely to believe in God’:

He told Times Higher Education magazine: “Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God.”

He said religious belief had declined across 137 developed nations in the 20th century at the same time as people became more intelligent.

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Dr David Hardman, principal lecturer in learning development at London Metropolitan University, said: “It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability – or perhaps willingness – to question and overturn strongly felt institutions.”

I have written previously about the strong correlation between religiosity and rates such social issues as teen pregnancy and violence.  You can see that within the U.S. (e.g., in the Bible Belt and in Republican States) as well as throughout the globe.  Yet, people seem to cling to the idea that religion is good.

A common response to this kind of evidence (when there’s even one at all), is that the belief in God is fundamentally good, but people just seem to always get it wrong.  That is, it’s the people that are the problem – not faith itself.  I clearly disagree.  If faith is generally defined as the belief in something without evidence, then how can it be considered a good thing? 

And then there are those who maintain that religious beliefs should be personal.  I disagree there, as well.  If the goal is the search for truth, then we should treat religious claims like any other.  We should demand evidence and research the claims that are being made.  The truth is, of course, that there is no reliable evidence whatsoever for the existence of a supreme being of any sort.  Those that choose to believe in one should admit at least that much. 

Finally, it’s always interesting to me how most religious people can quickly dismiss any religion other than their own.  They readily see the internal and external contradictions and hypocrisy associated with any God other than their own (or, in some cases, even within different interpretations of their own holy books).  Richard Dawkins sums it up nicely in stating that most humans have chosen to disbelieve in thousands of religions (past, present, and most likely, future).  Some of us just go one further.

Also, as Dawkins has expressed in his book, The God Delusion, we should stop being “polite” to people who have indefensible views.  Just as we would correct people that make any wild assertion about math or science without any background, we should ask for more from those that claim to be faithful.  I’d like to think that the tide is turning (in the direction of rationalism), but the last decade or so in the United States is not a good sign.

In recent months, even the mainstream media hasn’t been able to ignore the horrific impacts of religion on American politics.  To me, it seems clear that Bush’s Holy War in the Middle East is something that the majority of Americans agree with (or at least choose to allow).  But certainly there should be a backlash against this, right?  In most ways, McCain seems to be every bit as fueled by war-related fantasies as is Dubya.  Therefore, I think it’s important to consider the views of his supporters and influencers.

BraveNewFilms.org reports in McCain’s “Spiritual Guide” Wants America to Destroy Islam:

You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual “sins.”   Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam.  According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.”  In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis. 

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Since the media won’t question McCain about his deeply bigoted pastor, it’s up to you to call attention to this issue.  Make McCain’s pastor problem a major story by forwarding this video to your family, friends, and colleagues.

We can’t let McCain get away with aligning himself with a religious leader who’s called for an all-out war on Islam, someone who draws no distinctions between Muslims and violent Islamic extremists.  Now is the crucial time to act.

Most Americans seem to believe that Islam is a violent religion and is a threat to their own views.  Surprisingly, most of these people seem to be able to overlook the horrific acts in the Old Testament and the amount of violence in the New Testament.  Studies have shown that few Christian Americans read the Bible, and that gives hate-mongers clear reign to influence politics.  At the very least, we should be asking questions about what McCain – someone who has stated that the doesn’t think Americans would mind another 1,000 years of war in the Middle East – really thinks.

It’s no secret that the United States is engulfed in a culture of fear.  From Amber Alerts to a resurgence of homophobia, we seem to be scared of everything.  Local news stations in small towns will go far out of their way to report on any death that might have occurred.  And it’s not uncommon for violent news to dominate the airways.  Unfortunately, this often trumps more important and relevant news, like tax cuts for the rich and scientific research.

Could this be one of the reasons for the large numbers of Americans that are in prison?  The New York Times reports on statistics in American Exception: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. 

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

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Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

We have far fewer prisoners that the entire nation of China.  A lot of this information seems consistent with statistics cited in Michael Moore’s movie, Bowling for Columbine.  That movie explored Americans’ obsession with violence.

The sad thing is that imprisoning people should be a last resort.  The cost of housing a prisoner is tremendous (not to mention the lost opportunity cost of having an individual that cannot contribute to society in any way).  So what’s the cause?  The article offers some theories, but I think the rise of religion in the United States is partly to blame.  We showed how cowardly and blinded we could be after the September 11th attacks.  We follow a leader who says that God told him to attack a nation, completely unprovoked.  We watch for Amber Alerts that state that a “Gray Volkswagen” was involved in a kidnapping (how could that help anyone?).  Christians fear that a God that supposedly loves them would torture them for all eternity if they break some arbitrary rules.  When we can identify these people, why not lock them up to keep them away from the “good” people?

Living in any society comes with risks.  Unfortunately, it looks like Americans are so terrified of crime, that we would spend amazing amounts of money on removing people from society.

It’s always amazing to me that people continue to tolerate George Bush’s Presidency.  Perhaps some Americans think that he’s almost out of the White House, and that we should just sit back and wait it out.  But there’s still an incredible amount of damage that he and his puppet-masters can do, and the thought that King George will get away with all of his many crimes is appalling to me.

While most of us seem to hope that Bush was history already, it appears that historians can agree that his administration has been a disaster.  The History News Network reports in HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst:

A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent.

An unscientific poll of professional historians completed the same week produced results far worse for a president clinging to the hope that history will someday take a kinder view of his presidency than does contemporary public opinion.

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In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.

Those are the statistics.  Hopefully the complaints are fairly obvious.  However, here’s one particularly well-worded summary:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one [historian]. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

But that’s just one “review” of his presidency.  I would encourage people to read the others to see if there’s any part of it with which they disagree.

Of course, Americans have grown into a habit of ignoring professionals and experts.  Along with reason, logic, and a reliance on evidence, these things seem to be just annoying aspects of living in our universe.  It’s safe to assume that few Americans will care about what historians say.  Still, the fact that we’ll allow the Bush Administration to continue to damage the nation makes me wonder: What won’t American accept or tolerate?  The list is getting shorter…

Part of the challenge with atheism is that many of us are too scared to speak up in public (does this sound familiar?).  If you’re interested in voicing your opinion on atheism, please visit The OUT Campaign, an organization that encourages atheists to Come OUT, Reach OUT, Speak OUT, Keep OUT, and Stand OUT.  I strongly agree with the site’s message that there are far more atheists out there than most people would like to recognize.  If you have a blog consider adding the Scarlet Letter of Atheism to your site and adding it to the Campaign’s BlogRoll.

In general, I would consider myself a supporter of Barack Obama.  He seems to be a rational man that’s not blinded by the “political” side of politics.  One part that does bother me, however, is his emphasis on the fact that he’s a Christian.  Even without the recent fiasco related to his preacher’s hateful comments, the idea that someone that believes in a supreme being doesn’t sit well with me.  After all, we’re living in a nation where the President states that God has told him to attack a nation, completely unprovoked.  And Americans seem to be fine with that (those that aren’t completely ignorant of it, at least).

But, assuming that a political candidate must profess (or at least, pretend) to believe in some magical Creator of the Universe in order to have a chance of being elected, Obama is probably the least of numerous evils.  At least the Mormon guy is out of the race. 

On the topic of his religious beliefs, I ran into a June, 2006 article by Obama titled Call to Renewal Keynote Address.  From the article:

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

So it sees that he’s at least capable of thinking about religion rationally.  And he’s not afraid to draw a line between absurd claims and the laws that govern the United States.  That alone is a huge step forward from the reign of King George. 

But I wonder if Obama really sees the many contradictions he pointed out.  The Bible is filled with tons of garbage that’s absolutely unconscionable by today’s standards.  Imagine if we had laws that made it acceptable to own slaves or murder children.  Yet, many Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of The Bible.  The other stories and examples of comments and statistics in this article should be terrifying.  But, because they’re based on “faith”, people accept these horrific views of the world. 

I truly hope that Obama can help save religious Americans from themselves.  Today, that seems to be a problem that God – even if one did exist – couldn’t solve.

Americans now live in a country where our leader claims that God commands him to make some of his most important (and devastating) decisions.  Rather than being shock and awed by the this unjustifiable belief in commanding voices in his head, we seem to just go along with it.  After all, how could anyone question “God”?  Never mind that hatred, injustice, cruelty, and economic ruin that it includes.

It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that extreme views are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. The Washington Post reports some statistics in Hate Rises.  From the article:

The dwindling Ku Klux Klan may seem like a relic of crueler times, but the number of hate groups operating in the United States has actually jumped a staggering 48 percent since 2000. Many of these groups have sprouted along the border in Arizona, California and Texas, where their ringleaders have often hijacked the immigration debate. – Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

This seems to be fairly typical of situations in which “faith” starts to control societies.  While the religious seem to preach incessantly about tolerance and openness, they’re messages (and the teachings of their God) are often exactly the opposite.  Today, homophobia is clearly on the rise (didn’t we get over this in the late 80’s?) and Americans accept that torture is necessary (despite the fact that the action is considered a crime against humanity).  Over a million Iraqis are dead subsequent to our baseless attack on the nation.  Yet, we have a leader that claims that God commanded all this, and he’s still in power.  The correlation between religion and the many things most faiths claim to oppose is staggering.  Until he can free ourselves from the tyranny of Dark Ages thinking, hate in America will continue to rise.

One might hope that, with all of the violence caused by religion, that people would start to learn that there’s a strong correlation between the two.  But not in the United States: We have a leader who claims that God told him to attack Iraq.  Apparently, this all-powerful and “good” deity didn’t mention anything about torture or the complete lack of evidence for creating a new war that has killed over a million people (I guess they were destined for Hell, anyway). 

But the greatest hits don’t stop there.  Dubya’s at it again.  The Raw Story has posted an article, Cheering God, Bush says war with Iraq ‘will forever be’ the right decision, that presents some truly scary thoughts:

Speaking Tuesday to the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention, President Bush declared the decision to “remove” Saddam Hussein in 2003 the “right decision at this point in my presidency, and it will forever be the right decision.”

The 42-minute speech, covered in the New York Times, drew rousing applause, “mixing faith and foreign policy as he told a group of Christian broadcasters that his policies in the region were predicated on the beliefs that freedom was a God-given right and ‘every human being bears the image of our maker.'”

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“The effects of a free Iraq and a free Afghanistan will reach beyond the borders of those two countries,” Bush said. “It will show others what’s possible. And we undertake this work because we believe that every human being bears the image of our maker. That’s why we’re doing this. No one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.”

In another political and intellectual time, people would be horrified to hear this kind of thinking.  Sadly, in the U.S. it’s all just part of “business as usual.”  Let’s just hope that King George’s Holy Wars are nearing an end.

It’s really easy to see the effects of religion in just about every aspect of American life, and I can hardly think of any positive effects.  The President of this country apparently believes that God has ordered him to create wars (and also has no problem with torture), and the American people seem to be quite content with that.  Fortunately, it looks like there’s some hope in the rest of the world.  The UK Times Online reports in Over half of Britons claim no religion.  From the article:

In a 23-page report published this evening, a UN rapporteur claims the 2001 Census findings that nearly 72 per cent of the population is Christian can no longer be regarded as accurate. The report claims that two-thirds of British people now do not admit to any religious adherence.

The report also calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England. The role and privileges of the established Church are challenged because they do not reflect “the religious demography of the country and the rising proportion of other Christian denominations.”

I’m really encouraged by this, and I hope we have seen the last time that the “pendulum” will swing toward religion.  I also suspect that the number of Christians is actually lower than reported here.  While statistics show that most people don’t lie on anonymous surveys, I wonder if that holds up when people thing that some God (who reportedly loves them) will sentence them to an eternity of torture if they don’t say that they believe. 

On a side note, the site also has many interesting links related to atheism and religion, including some interviews and commentary on Richard Dawkins.  Personally, I find listening to Dawkins to be extremely “enlightening” and refreshing, especially in the wake of the tragedy of the Bush Administration.

I have often quoted numbers and statistics related to the bigotry and close-mindedness of the American people.  Of particular concern to me is the relatively large numbers of people that they would never vote for a person based on certain factors (examples include being black, being a woman, being homosexual, or being an atheist).  PollingReport.com’s Politics page provides a summary of the various findings from the many different polls that are taken. 

Of particular interest to me is the result of a fairly recent Gallup Poll.  Here are the details and the question asked to over 1,000 adults in the United States:

“Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [see below], would you vote for that person?” Trend includes slight variation in wording.

Note: The left-hand column in the charts is used to express the dates of the results.  It’s extremely difficult to read, but it does convey the data.

There are many results in the list that I find disheartening (and others that I find downright scary).  For example, Atheists rank at the absolute bottom of the list.  Put another way, no single group is more despised by American adults.  Anyone who planned to run for President would at least have to pay lip service to religion (read: Christianity) in order to have a chance of leading the country. 

Note, however, that almost anyone would vote for a Catholic.  Apparently, issues such as hypocrisy in the church and widespread, organized child sex rings aren’t much of a detractor as long as one claims to adhere to these bizarre, outdated, and backwards practices.  People report that they are much more likely to vote for a Mormon or a homosexual than an atheist.  I have to wonder, though, how many of these people have any idea what it is that Mormons actually teach and believe.

On the bright side, the general trends are positive.  A large majority of people would vote for a black or female candidate (compare this to the early numbers, and we’re clearly headed in the right direction).  Still, it’s extremely frustrating to me that there’s so much outstanding prejudice in areas such as race and beliefs. 

Apparently, it’s fine for the leader of our nation to wage war on another country without evidence.  No one seems to care about his claim that God told him to do it.  Yet someone who chooses not to believe in supernatural forces, mysticism, miracles and superstition stands little or no chance of ever running the United States.

Note: The Polling Report page that I linked to earlier is a wealth of information from numerous other polls and studies into Americans’ attitudes.  Upon reviewing some of them, it looks like the Gallup Poll results were actually optimistic.

Religion will be an important topic for many votes in the 2008 elections.  We have some candidates that believe in some of the most outrageous and extremist views (even for religion) that are candidates for the highest position in the nation.  We already have a President that believes that God talks to him in dreams.  We have Republican candidates that believe in Mormonism and that think that God has chosen them to lead the United States.  In some ways, it seems like these people are almost ashamed of their beliefs (as I believe they should be).  They try not to talk about their ideology (which is often indefensible anyway) and cast enough doubt so the religious sheep of America overlook the plain contradictions in what they’re saying.

Much of that is expected nowadays from conservative Republican candidates.  But what about the Democracts?  Several months ago, Barack Obama spoke on the topic.  You can read the entire contents in Call to Renewal’ Keynote Address.  From the beginning of the article:

But today I’d like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments that we’ve been seeing over the last several years.

I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible; and we can raise up and pass out this Covenant for a New America. We can talk to the press, and we can discuss the religious call to address poverty and environmental stewardship all we want, but it won’t have an impact unless we tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.

Later, Obama presents the following, highlighting the standard view of many religious people:

For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest “gap” in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.

Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.

He also recites some statistics that I have also posted on this blog in the past:

And if we’re going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

And later he talks about the difficulty and risk of trying to define public policy based on religion:

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

Overall, I have mixed feelings on these statements.  On one hand, it finally restores a sense of separation between church and State (something that shouldn’t be optional in our current government).  However, I wish Obama would have gone further.  I wish he would have pointed out that there’s no evidence whatosever for the believe in a magical, supreme being (despite what the majority of under-educated people might claim).  I wish he had drawn the parallels between violence and religion.  And I wish he had said more about encouraging people to really question their faiths.  (On the last point I quoted, I do agree with Obama: If Christians were to read their bibles, I think there would be far fewer religious people.)

Then again, the most important thing for this country is to get religious zealots that manufacture wars out of office.  In that respect, Obama is a step in the right direction.  I just hope I live long enough to see nations abandon these silly notions of religion and start to thing logically, rationally, and based on study and evidence.  It’s a real long-shot based on the recent history of the United States, but I’m holding out hope.

The term “standards” seems hardly fitting when we evaluate the quality of political candidates in the United States.  We have a President who wages war with no evidence (other than, apparently, God’s voice in his head), and a population that seems to be just fine with that.  Worst of all, it seems that we’ve learned nothing, and these people are still able to run for office.

TheRawStory reports on another example in Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in ‘God’s standards’.  From the article:

The United States Constitution never uses the word “God” or makes mention of any religion, drawing its sole authority from “We the People.” However, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee thinks it’s time to put an end to that.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Perhaps it’s worth reminding people that this kind of change is exactly what the authors of our Constitution wanted to prevent against.  Religion tends to pollute everything it touches, and government is no exception.  If this were some backwoods, uneducated, country preacher speaking, it would be easier to dismiss.  But this guy is actually in the running to lead the United States!

I recently saw the following paper included with a vehicle registration renewal form for Texas license plates:

Incase the text is a little hard to read, the statements include:

Fight Terrorism

God Bless America

God Bless Texas

I have always wondered exactly what kind of message these license plates are supposed to convey.  If you really believe that some omnipotent being is watching over the entire universe, then why should this person bless only America or Texas?  And what about “fight terrorism”?  What exactly should we do – live in fear or continue unbridled funding for the Bush Administration’s pointless wars? 

It’s not much of a surprise that this comes from Texas (I’m sure other states have similar offers), but it’s actually quite embarrassing.  It looks like the irony is completely lost on drivers of 5,000-pound SUVs that have stickers suggesting that we should “fight terrorism”.  Ugh…

I was happy to hear that at least some individuals and groups are pressing the 2008 candidates on topics that actually matter.  To me, views on sciences are extremely important.  Wired reports in Scientists Push Presidential Candidates for Positions on Science.  From the introduction:

A Who’s Who of America’s top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations — a question they say is key to the future of the country, if not the world.

“Right now we have a confluence of issues facing candidates: embryonic stem cell research, global warming, science and technology education, biotechnology and energy policy — it’s just becoming an avalanche,” says Lawrence Krauss, a physics professor at Case Western University, and author of the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. “I think at some level, you have to get some insight into what the candidates know, or what they’re willing to learn.”

Behind the call is a growing fear that the United States is falling behind in science and technology education, and that a leader who is scientifically illiterate won’t be able to keep the United States ahead in the global economy.

Americans seem to have developed a distaste for rational and logical thought.  We focus on the latest escapades of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and the like.  The only time real issues seem to come up is when ultra-religious-types oppose things like stem cell research and the teaching of evolution.  It’s certainly time to get some more intelligence in our government.  Another Dubya might sink this nation into another Dark Age.

A Redmond, WA conservative preacher is attempting to take on Microsoft’s “sinful” ways.  Could this be about anti-trust or anti-competitive actions?  No.  This guy’s talking about Microsoft’s acceptance of gay people.  The Telegraph reports in Pastor in Microsoft ‘gay rights’ share bid:

“There are 256 Fortune 500 companies alone pouring millions upon millions of dollars into pushing the homosexual agenda,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“I consider myself a warrior for Christ. Microsoft don’t scare me. I got God with me.

“I told them that you need to work with me or we will put a firestorm on you like you have never seen in you life because I am your worst nightmare. I am a black man with a righteous cause with a whole host of powerful white people behind me.”

Mr Hutcherson’s office is decorated with the heads of deer, elk and a buffalo – “when I run into animals, I kill them and bring them home and eat them” – as well as invitations to the White House and signed pictures of himself with President George W. Bush.

His ambitious plan signals a new offensive in his two-year battle with Microsoft after it abandoned its neutral stance on gay rights legislation, which he says he helped secretly negotiate before outraged gay employees intervened.

By trying to become a political player in Washington state, he said, the company was trying to impose its sinful ways on others.

This is just but one more example of how neo-conservatism can make outrageous claims against progress.  Thousands of people apparently believe (or will at least listen to and pay) this guy.  From treating homosexuality as a choice (I’m sure lots of people want to line up to be persecuted) to seeing his mission as a Crusade against “sin”, this would have been rather shocking a few years ago.  Now, it seems to be the norm.

I have always wondered about how neoconservatives (generally ultra-Christian conservatives) can reconcile their supposed belief in faith with the violence, racism, hatred, and bigotry that they so often preach.  It seems strange to me that affluent people would feel so threatened by equity in the world. 

Populist America has an article that sheds some light on the subject.  In the The Morality of Neoconservatism, the article states:

Blinded by such an ethnocentric vision of the world, they tend to become convinced that we, as a nation of people who have received the special blessing of God, are somehow inherently better than, somehow superior in relation to, and thus more worthy than all others in the world — vis a vis, Western civilization along with its associated religious beliefs excel all else in the world.

 

The result is an egocentric world view that breeds a vitriolic arrogance that inclines so many of us as Americans to ignore the fact that other people value their lives just as much as we do, and that their values, their beliefs, their ways of living are every bit as important to them as ours are to us. Such a harsh and brutal way of approaching others can do nothing but lead those of us who hold such an outlook to have nothing but contempt for the rest of the world.

I hope most people thing there’s something odd with the “God Bless America”-type bumper stickers that are so fashionable these days.  Couldn’t an all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the Universe just bless everyone?  Why should the purchaser of said bumper sticker by privileged to be born in a place that seems to guarantee his or her carriage into Heaven? 

The results of this kind of thinking are far from harmless:

Consequently, neoconservatives have seemingly come to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with our having invaded the country of Iraq even though as many as 100,000 or more Iraqis have died (been killed?). With little concern for those who have died, the dead have been degraded as nothing more than “collateral damage“– a simple, yet unfortunate cost of war, an inauspicious accident of having taken residence at the side of a beleaguered enemy.

I wish I could say that this kind of thinking were extreme.  Unfortunately, friends of mine seem to think this way.  I question whether they even think of “those Middle Easterners” as human beings.  Imagine if another country ha attacked the U.S. without any provocation.  Should we welcome them as liberators? 

Bush, in his infinitesimal wisdom, has claim that God told him to attack Iraq.  I think Christians, most of all, should be outraged by this.  But, as group, they’re his biggest supporters.  We’re a long way off from making rational and logical decisions, and neoconservatives are definitely not pointing the nation in the right direction.