The day Ann supports the Dems is the day Hell freezes over.

    

And about Business leaders and the Christian right (both of which are generally for the republicans, by your logic there shouldn't ever be any democratic nominees). McCain hardly has dominate support among either groups. Romney has most successfully courted big business and the Christian right is mostly for Huckabee.  

Just throwing something in here to consider. Especially for those of you who do not live here and only read/hear what your own media tells you...

I hate the fact that other countries portray any conservative as a right wing religeous nut. I know a lot of small business owners who are not religeous at all and are VERY socially liberal, but vote republican for financial reasons.

Is anyone aware that our corporate taxes are the second highest in the world?????? Even socialist countries like Sweden has learned that it only hurts everyone to heavily tax those who create jobs. It has nothing to do with religion.

Business is more straightforward, A democratic president cannot afford to have an anti-business stance in this day and age.

Maybe they will push through more regulations, health and safety, higher taxes etc.. But would never stray far from the centre ground on business and many decisions will be more theatrical than have any real meaning in the boardroom.

I disagree. I think some democratic polices would have huge impacts on boardroom meeting. For example, the push for universal health care with price caps and forced coverage. I think that is going to have more then just a theatrical (do you mean theoretical) effect on the bottom lines of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.  

Hey,



I think there is some truth to what you're saying. I think it's probably necessary to make some promises and consolidate support but I also think that you are kind of exaggerating it.

For example, John McCain is probably going to be the republican nominee. While, I'm sure he has cut some deals I don't think its fair to say that he has "pulled all the right strings and greased all the right palms".

He's repeatedly shoved his thumb into the eye of the republican party establishment. In fact most of the Republican establishment and elites absolutely despise him and would much rather have another candidate. I believe Ann Coulter has recently said that if McCain gets the nomination that she will be campaigning for Clinton.      

And about Business leaders and the Christian right (both of which are generally for the republicans, by your logic there shouldn't ever be any democratic nominees). McCain hardly has dominate support among either groups. Romney has most successfully courted big business and the Christian right is mostly for Huckabee.  

On the democratic side I think it's kind of similar. While it's kind of changing now, in the beginning the Democratic establishment didn't want Obama, Hillary was their girl and I'm sure she's greased a lot more hands and pulled a lot more strings ( she's at least had a lot more time to do it) yet there is still a really good chance that he'll get the nomination.
  
sheepwalker

I remember we discussed this exact issue a while back.

I still contend that religion is inseparable from the office of President (it shouldn't be but it is).

IMO, religion in the US plays a huge part in campaigning and not just in gestures and rhetoric but in justification of policy. Moreso than anywhere else in the (first) world.

As for the question, no (openly) atheist or agnostic president will ever be elected in my life-time. I'm fairly sure about that. Look at the math: right wing christians procreate faster, more and earlier than atheists or seculars.

Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion By Richard Dawkins

Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired a reputation for pugnacity toward religion. Colleagues who agree that there is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement. Why are you so hostile? What is actually wrong with religion? Does it really do so much harm that we should actively fight against it? Why not live and let live, as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal energy and ley lines? Isn't it all just harmless nonsense?

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: "Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wing nuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?" I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common.

Holy Books vs. Evidence

Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.

Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning, and even more especially those infected with "cultural relativism," may raise a tiresome red herring at this point a scientists belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. I have dealt with this elsewhere, and will only briefly repeat myself here. All of us believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on.

*******

I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that.

It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can't see it--or, more usually, refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.


It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said--with passion--"My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal--unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

Fundamentalist Religion Saps the Intellect

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect. The saddest example I know is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Centre for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. It is no accident that Bryan College is named after William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor of the science teacher John Scopes in the Dayton "Monkey Trial" of 1923. Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been "Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher degrees in geology and palaeontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.

I find that terribly sad; but whereas the Golgi Apparatus moved me to tears of admiration and exultation, the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic--pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life’s happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. All he had to do was toss out the bible. Or interpret it symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did the fundamentalist thing and tossed out evidence and reason, along with all his dreams and hopes.
Perhaps uniquely among fundamentalists, Kurt Wise is honest--devastatingly, painfully, shockingly honest. Give him the Templeton Prize; he might be the first really sincere recipient. Wise brings to the surface what is secretly going on underneath, in the minds of fundamentalists generally, when they encounter scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

The Doublethink of Religious Faith

Poor Kurt Wise reminds me more of Winston Smith in 1984  struggling desperately to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says it does. Winston, however, was being tortured. Wise's doublethink comes not from the imperative of physical torture but from the imperative--apparently just as undeniable to some people--of religious faith: arguably a form of mental torture. I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.

Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.

What do you mean by separated? I don't think it's possible to have a religious person serve as president and completely cut that part of themselves off. Nor do I think they should. Religion is their source of morality and I think morality should inform their leadership. Just like I think an atheist who's source of morality is some sort of humanist tradition should be informed by that.

I agree that it plays a bigger part here then anywhere else in the first world. The part I kind of object to is the justification of policy part. Any serious politician that is making a decision informed by his religion usually also has secular arguments to go with it. If they didn't it usually isn't going to work in the current political landscape. (There are a lot of people that are pretty into a strict understanding of separation of church and state.)

Yeah the breeding part is true. But if that's the case, how do you explain away that we are less religious now then we were 50 years ago. Has there been a mass migration of atheists and secularist to the US?

The part I don't think you're considering is that some of our institutions really persuade people towards secularism and atheism. I also think in recent years that atheists have become more militant and I sure that will gain them some more converts.

sheepwalker