continuing proofs America is wacko

Since it's popped up on various threads, I think it's time to gather all the proofs together. This is to celebrate nutball cultural trends that will only be seen in America. Typically around here when the president leans to the left, the wackos in the right get stirred up, and vice versa. Given the current president we lead with a politician from the right (being elected indicates a social trend, and my guess is he may be re-elected). There's sure to be some equal wackiness from the left, they've just been a little preoccupied acting smug for the last few years.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/no-do-si-dos-here-indiana-republican-rips-girl-scouts/

I never suspected my cookies were communist.

Wow! Thats insane, but at least everyone else seems to recognise its insane.
But would be good to know from an inside perspective on America just how religous it is, looking in from the outside there times when the US seems almost indistinguishable from countries run by religions. And that is frightening. But is it accurate?

Not accurate. The majority either have a sane approach to religion, or don't feel it's seemly to talk about it. There is a vocal somewhat crackpot vein, strong enough to tip elections, and loud enough to dominate the conversation. But it only takes about 5% to tip an election. Because these votes can be counted on if you just say the right thing, many politicians will go after this vote. The rest of the population is, well, I wouldn't say balanced in the way they go about choosing a candidate (they are typically too misinformed to make a wise choice), but their buttons are not so easily pushed.

So in your view would someone get elected in the US who is openly athiest and who did not say God Bless America all the time because they did not believe in God?

American is not a theocracy by any stretch of the imagination, but in much of the country being Christian is an unofficial requirement for office because many voters won't vote for a non-Christian. Heck, it was only fifty years ago that we had our first Catholic President. Every other President has been a Protestant. You've probably seen the hand-wringing over Romney being a Mormon. A ton of people freaked out when a Muslim was elected as a mere Representative.

Incidentally, this event in 2007 marked the first time there had ever been a Muslim elected to Congress. That year, 2007, was also the first year that a member of Congress openly admitted to being an atheist, something he hadn't mentioned for more than 30 years of public service. That's not surprising since, according to one study, anyway, religious Americans distrust atheists as much as they distrust rapists.

The U.S. Constitution prohibits religious requirements to hold public office and the Supreme Court affirmed this as early as the 19th century. However, a handful of states still have religious tests written into their constitutions, although these are overridden by the U.S. Constitution and are therefore not enforced. Nonetheless, this has no bearing on how many American citizens think and vote about non-Christians.

I'm not sure if that helps or muddies the waters Eldo!

Are you saying that at the current time in the US a non Christian could not get elected President? If so that would seem to me to make the US no different to any other nutty religous state.

In the UK it is unusual to know what religion the PM is, or for anyone to really care, a sure fire way not to get elected here is to bring religion into your politics.

In America two strains are often linked together: blind faith in religion, and blind faith in America. Those most likely to get elected must show a starry-eyed faith in America, which means they must cater to a starry-eyed faith in religion. I don't see religion being decoupled from politics any time soon. What keeps it slipping into theocracy is that every single founding document and voice says they should be decoupled. So people are free to worship as they please here, and they keep coming for that fact....they just won't do well if they run for high office.

And while I don't think there will be a change in religion/politics (many would claim there's no reason to change it) I still hold out hope for two things that should change america for the better and are common sense enough they may happen.

1. Who ever brings a civil suit and loses should pay all legal costs of all involved. This would greatly reduce the sue-happy culture we have here, fixing the health care crisis along the way. It's largely due to doctors needing to protect themselves from lawsuits, so their costs are exorbitant.
2. The Dominique Strauss-Kahn case made it clear the French are right: journalists should not be able to take pictures or even report the names of suspects in criminal cases. It amounts to guilty until proved innocent.

Okay, that's not part of the America is Wacky theme, but there may be some connections.

I feel that any official state religion is bad. I don't want the government teaching religion to my children, except in an historical context.

But let me say again (this may have come up in an old thread) that while most religions are responsible for at least SOME bad things, that's not because all religions are bad. I'm Lutheran, and I will freely admit that Martin Luther was anti-Semitic. That was about him as a person, with prejudices that were common in his time and place. His prejudices had nothing to do with his protests against the Roman Catholic Church, which became Lutheranism. It's true that Lutherans in Germany under Hitler did very little to protest The Final Solution. But that was despite my religion, not because of it.

It is as wrong to say that "religion is bad" as it is to say that "the absence of religion is good." While the 21st century is seeing a lot of death caused by minority religious fundamentalists, let's remember the cataclysmic genocides of the 20th century were caused by atheists: Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Those governments were not bad because they were atheist ones, but the absence of religion did nothing to make those governments good.

I'm not trying to say that all atheists are amazing, wonderful people; because the reality is that all groups have different sorts of people in them. Also, unfortunately, all groups have their violent wackos too. However, the difference between someone like Stalin or Mao and, say, the Inquisition or the Crusades is that Stalin wasn't killing because he was an atheist or in the name of atheism. Their ideologies were atheistic (though Soviet Communism had enough of its own "saints" and holidays that some scholars consider it to effectively be a religion) but it was other components of those ideologies that drove Stalin and Mao to mass-murder. Things like the Inquisition and the Crusades were inherently religious, though there were of course other factors at play as well. On the other hand, I don't really care to bring up such examples of either theists or atheists, because I think it's rather underhanded to make statements about a group based on their most extreme members (not saying that you're doing that, Paul!).

Also, going off on a tangent here, I mentioned Stalin and Mao specifically because Hitler wasn't an atheist. As far as I know his beliefs (insofar as we understand them at all) are hard to classify since Hitler drew from so many different (and contradictory) belief systems. He was definitely not a mainstream Christian - for example, he denied that Jesus was Jewish - but he espoused certain elements of Christian theology. For example, members of the Nazi Wehrmacht wore these belt buckles. The inscription translates to "God [is] with us".



In any event, on the original topic of the thread, I don't think it's controversial or unfair to say that it is not good to restrict who can hold public office on the basis of religion (either a specific religion or having religious beliefs of any sort), either formally or informally. That's not a criticism of religion; it just worries me when a society shuts people in a minority group out of political participation.

A lot of the vocal atheists I've met over the years have been pretty nutty, to the point that I tend to lump them with the other proselytizing religious beliefs.

A candidate answering the question of his religion honestly when asked is one thing, but personally I'd never vote for anybody who made their religious faith or lack of faith a part of their platform, and I think a lot of Americans feel the same.

A president is understood to have personal beliefs, but he still is expected (or at least hoped) to be objective and impartial That's what would scare me most about an atheist. Just give me a good old fashioned agnostic please!

David H wrote:A president is understood to have personal beliefs, but he still is expected (or at least hoped) to be objective and impartial That's what would scare me most about an atheist. Just give me a good old fashioned agnostic please!

I'm not entirely sure what you mean there, David. Are you saying that you're scared an atheist President would be unable to be objective and impartial in his or her decision-making?

I think I understand what David is saying. Crusading atheists aren't any better than crusading religious zealots. Agnostics are saying right up front they don't know, so they can't crusade!

An agnostic candidate may actually have a chance at the presidency. An atheist, never.

Surely having someone who looks at the evidence and comes to as balanced a view based on that as possible is a better sort of person to be President than someone who thinks, in spite of all the evidence, the world is only 6000 years old was made in a week by a superbeing and that people are made out of some dust and a takeaway rib order? And even more so if they have access to nuclear weapons.
Sorry but for me choosing to believe these things in the face of overwhelming evidence puts a person into the same category as someone who still believes in the Sandman or the Tooth Fairy.

halfwise wrote:I think I understand what David is saying. Crusading atheists aren't any better than crusading religious zealots. Agnostics are saying right up front they don't know, so they can't crusade!

I suppose I can understand that, but it sounded to me that David was worried about having any atheist as a President, as if all atheists are crusading zealots. Unless I really misinterpreted him, I find that a bit presumptuous, but I'm not sure why else David would be fearful of having any sort of atheist President. Sadly - and I'm speaking more generally here, not about anyone in this thread - a lot of people tend to act as if any atheist who is open about their beliefs is "angry" or "militant" even if they aren't saying anything more extreme than what mainstream religious leaders say.

It often feels like a lot of Americans don't recognize that there are moderate (for lack of a better word) atheists out there who aren't trying to "convert" or oppress everyone. I find that assumption to be as nonsensical as assuming that all religious people are out to convert or destroy believers in other faiths. It's simply not true of the majority of people, and making sweeping generalizations about millions of people based on the few atheists (or believers) any given person happens to know personally is supremely fallacious.

An agnostic candidate may actually have a chance at the presidency. An atheist, never.

At this point in time I doubt an agnostic would have a chance of becoming President either. For that matter, I would be shocked if a Christian who simply didn't mention their religion was elected because they would become a target for all sorts of malicious rumors. It's true that the word agnostic doesn't have the same pejorative meaning that the word atheist does in America, but in the end, it still usually means someone who is not religious and who does not actively believe in God. Agnosticism isn't just a watered down or milder form of atheism. It's a philosophically distinct approach, though I doubt the distinction is all that well understood by most people.