A recent Gallup poll, via Daily Kos:
If your party nominated a well-qualified Candidate For WH ’08 who was _, would you vote for that person?
Yes No
Catholic 95% 4%
Black 94 5
Jewish 92 7A woman 88 11
Hispanic 87 12Mormon 72 24
Married for third time 67 3072 years old 57 42
A homosexual 55 43An atheist 45 53
Nothing new, of course.
But what if the race were between an atheist and a black Mormon lesbian, huh? What then?
Belizean: I think you will find that many of the so called xtian values you attribute to Robertson are incorrect. Not incorrect that they may perhaps be xtian values, though that is an argument for another day, but incorrect in that they apply to Robertson. If Pat Robertson and his brand of xtians had their way many of these so called xtian values along with the constitution would be removed from any that disagreed with them. Thus the label xtian on its own means absolutely nothing unless you first investigate what a particular xtian promotes.
This is one area that I have some sympathy with the moderate xtian who is constantly being whacked because of what the fundies like Robertson espouse. Of course, if they sit back and allow their more moderate version take a back seat to the fundies then they only have themselves to blame. Additionally, as Dawkins and Harris have said, any belief system that relies purely on faith, even if in the face of contrary evidence, held by moderates legitimises the very same process in the less moderate.
If I heard that a particular politician was an atheist I would be more likely to vote for them as I would assume, based on the atheists I do know, that they based their world view on rationality. On the other hand, any politician that claims any belief based on faith is either lying to garner votes or is already displaying at least one level of irrationality.
What do you call an atheist seeking political office in the US – a Unitarian
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Which ones? Is he pro female genital mutilation? Pro murder? Anti equality of all before God?
I’m more interested in the correctness of a candidate’s world view.
Unfortunately, those ostensibly most devoted to rationality, e.g. academics, seem to have incredibly naive world views (e.g. men and women have fundamentally similar natures, human beings are fundamentally good, no culture is better than any other, poverty is the cause of crime and terrorism, war is never the answer, the threat of human evil is negligible compared to that of climate change, corporate power is more dangerous governmental power, etc.). A bible-toting country bumpkin is more likely to get it right.
This is because the bumpkin relies more heavily on traditional views. These have the advantage over the academic’s ideas in having been tested over several generations if not hundreds of years.
The difference between the ideas of the academic and those of the bumpkin are like that between elegant code that has not been compiled and patch-work code that has been running successfully on at least one machine. As anyone who has written code can attest, a program that hasn’t been compiled and run (on a society in this simile) is almost certainly wrong.
Because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen this last few years, fakey old down-home wisdom is exactly the right stuff for running a country and a complicated war with its associated Foreign Policy.
No, wait.
One thing that worries me about such polls is that you don’t get a proper choice of answers. You may have noticed that almost all the options add up to 99% if you add the Yes to the No. This presumably means that the “couldn’t care less” option was not available.
I often have this problem with questionnaires. At least on the old paper ones I could draw an extra box with a comment and tick that, but online you cannot do that. At times this reminds me of Feynman’s application to join the army as remembered in his autobiography.
Belize said
“A bible-toting country bumpkin is more likely to get it right.
This is because the bumpkin relies more heavily on traditional views. These have the advantage over the academic’s ideas in having been tested over several generations if not hundreds of years.”
And the country bumpkin will thus ensure that he reproduces a society in which he remains a country bumpkin and that will do it’s utmost to ensure his children remain country bumpkins.
Belize
When the code you are running is malfunctional, it is at least time to debug it or even compile completely new code. You don’t just keep running it again and again and getting the same old errors. Unless of course you are a “bible toting country bumpkin”.
Belizean said:
The point is that when you know that someone is a Christian, you know infinitely more about his values than if you were only to know that he is an atheist. The first is a determination of belief, but the latter is merely one of disbelief.
The reality is that one can assume more about a person’s values from their culture than from a fill-in-the-blanks religious label. In this context, “atheist” would mean native-born American atheist, which already tells you a great deal about their probable values — which would include most of the values you listed (absent specifically theological ideas like “original sin”, though it’s certainly possibly for atheists to hold similar ideas).
By itself, a self-identification as “Christian” includes a huge array of possible values, from Saint Francis to Torquemada, from 19th Century pro-slavery Southerners to abolitionists, from Mother Teresa to Bishop Desmond Tutu to (openly gay) Bishop Gene Robinson to Pat Robertson to abortion-clinic bombers to the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda.
As for Pat Robertson’s “values”: well, we can note that he has publically advocated assassinating foreign leaders, that he has associated with and supported oppressive and brutal dictators, and that he runs a large business empire (including past mining deals with dictators in Liberia and Zaire). I would suggest that, at the very least, he’s not that concerned about murder or greed.
Of course, he will publically say that he’s opposed to such things, which may be all that you want: the appearance of morality without the substance. By saying that you’d rather vote for a candidate who declared himself or herself to be a Christian, you’re coming close to admitting that you’re naive and easily manipulated by politicians.
It occurs to me that a candidate in an American political race who identified as “atheist” would, at the very least, be demonstrating a certain commitment to truthfulness, in the sense of not offering up an easy and politically expedient lie about his or her beliefs.
This is not something you can necessarily say about an American politician who claims to be Christian.
The thing that stands out in those results for me is how untruthful they are, for example a majority declares they will vote for an openly homosexual candidate? yeah, right…
In view of that the results make perfect sense, it just quantifies how much shame people feel discriminating against various groups, evidently people just don’t feel they need to hide their true feelings towards atheists.
Looking over post #29, I think what’s really going on is that Belizean thinks that atheists may be more likely to have certain political views that he disagrees with.
Herb said (#37):
Looking over post #29, I think what’s really going on is that Belizean thinks that atheists may be more likely to have certain political views that he disagrees with.
Could be… but that would certainly contradict his claim that atheists will believe absolutely anything, and that you have no idea what their values/views are.
True, but I don’t know if he’s claiming that honestly.
“well qualified” what loaded description. On paper Dick Cheney would be considered “well qualified” as a world leader he is an unmitigated disaster. Give me the “inexperienced” Barack Obama.
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In the context-free situation that I posed in which one literally knows nothing other than one candidate is an atheist and the other a Christian, I’d choose the latter for the reasons stated (insufficient knowledge of the atheist’s purported values).
In the context of American politics I’d choose the Christian, because the atheist is more likely to be a Leftist.
There seems to be a lot of that going around, such as the support for oppressive and brutal dictator Fidel Castro among leftist notables (including Danny Glover, Steven Spielberg, Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, Jesse Jackson, Jack Nicholson, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Spike Lee, Kevin Costner, Alanis Morissette, Robert Redford, Sidney Pollack, Shirley MacLaine, …)
The bumpkin’s only advantage is that his code runs, not that it’s optimal. The lesson to be learned from the programming analogy is not that you should never improve your code. The lesson is humility. You don’t roll out your code changes (irrespective of how confident you are about them) onto a live telephone network lest you bring it down (as an AT&T programmer did in 1990). Similarly, you don’t foist untested theories on an entire society lest you incur massive runtime errors (such as the 30 million needless internal deaths in the Soviet Union, the 30 million in Communist China, and the millions starved in North Korea ). Certain political factions have yet to learn this lesson. In these the prevalence of atheism is significantly higher.
The current administration was written in Cobol on VAX and ported to Fortran 77 on Itanium, is what you’re saying, Belizean?
adam,
please don’t insult Fortran with analogies to the current administration. It’s still my favorite language.
😉
Elliot
You really should consider looking into C once it matures.
Belizean: then so what you are saying is that your problem with an openly atheist politican who you now nothing else about is that in your opinion they are likely to be opposed to your political views while an openly xtian politician who you also know nothing about is more likely to share your politics. In which case, all I can say is, doesn’t that say more about you than either of the unknown politicians. Especially when, from even recent history, it can be seen that most politicians who have claimed the mantle of xtianity act in ways that are invariably the opposite of their apparent core beliefs.
Belizean said:
There seems to be a lot of that going around, such as the support for oppressive and brutal dictator Fidel Castro among leftist notables (including Danny Glover, Steven Spielberg, Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, Jesse Jackson, Jack Nicholson, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Spike Lee, Kevin Costner, Alanis Morissette, Robert Redford, Sidney Pollack, Shirley MacLaine, …)
But Pat Robertson was not just supporting Mobutu (Zaire) and Taylor (Liberia), and lobbying Congress and the State Department on their behalf — he was making business deals with them (gold and diamond mining operations).
In any case, at least some of the people in your list are Christians, so we seem to be agreeing that being a “Christian” is no guarantee you won’t cozy up to nasty dictators.
Yes, it says that I am rational. That is, I assume that a politician who is likely to espouse my political views is more likely to implement them in office than a politician unlikely to espouse my political views.
Being a Christian is also no guarantee that you won’t commit mass murder. I would contend, however, that Christians are less likely to coddle dictators than are (their fellow) atheists. Although I know nothing of the business dealings of typical-prominent-Christian Pat Robertson, I’m sure that any of their detrimental effects have been slightly exceeded by those resulting from the activities of typical-prominent-atheists Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-il.
Belizean said:
Being a Christian is also no guarantee that you won’t commit mass murder. I would contend, however, that Christians are less likely to coddle dictators than are (their fellow) atheists.
And your evidence for this is…? Given that there haven’t been any atheist American presidents for at least the last hundred years, it’s kind of hard to imagine you would have solid evidence for this assertion. Admittedly, US presidents have “coddled” numerous dictators — Duvalier of Haiti, Mobuto of Zaire, Habré of Chad, Marcos of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, any number of Latin American dictators, etc. But those US presidents have all been Christians.
Although I know nothing of the business dealings of typical-prominent-Christian Pat Robertson, I’m sure that any of their detrimental effects have been slightly exceeded by those resulting from the activities of typical-prominent-atheists Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-il.
Hmm… but they’re not Americans, and they’re not capable of running for US President, are they? Whereas Pat Robertson is, and has.
(For what it’s worth, Castro’s supporters have included Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic. And Richard Nixon made supporting Mao and his successors official US policy.)
i guess the people questioned assume by default the president is going to be a religious guy of some sort, that tells you right away what her/his positions are on a lot of things, you kind of think you can control better or frame better or at least know better a religious person than an atheist, the latter(especially if you cannot picture some real person as it was for the people questioned) might scare people more.