Would You Be Comfortable with an Atheist President? 2011 Survey Says…

The “All voters” block is BELOW democrats… Have they miscalculated or are more than half of the people who voted considering themselves “independent”?

Our opposition leader in the UK, Ed Miliband (Labour) has declared to the nation that he is an atheist.  It caused a little bit of uncomfortable bum shuffling at first amongst a few conservatives, but apart from that, no one really batted an eyelid.  I think the reality in the UK is that church and state are viewed as pretty separate, whereas in the USA, the opposite is the case.

On the other hand, so did Nick Clegg, before he moderated it to a sort-of atheist under pressure from the political establishment.

As long as you have atheists acting like PZ Myers, atheism will be in the minority.

So just keep telling believers how superior you are to them, morally and intellectually.

In fact, what ever happened to the name BRIGHTS?  I like that.  You should use it mroe often.

Surely this doesn’t surprise you.

Regarding the low percentage of those who would be uncomfortable with an evangelical President – if that doesn’t convince one that America is finished, I don’t know what will.

This can’t really be read as being anything other than a sad sign of how entrenched and socially acceptable open bigotry towards nonbelievers is. I’m pretty sure there have to be people who would be uncomfortable with a Muslim or a Jew as president but said they’d be fine with it (or softened their stance) because they know that in polite society open bigotry against those groups is met with disapproval. Not so with us. You can stand up in friggen CNN and say things about us that, if they were said of a Jew it would end your career instantly.

However, we don’t actually know how the electorate would react to a credible candidate who was a nonbeliever. It’s one thing to say you would be “uncomfortable” with an atheist candidate, and it’s another to say you are uncomfortable with Gov. Smith, with her dedicated husband, cute children, high popularity as governor of her state and an ideology close to yours. Certainly anti-atheist bigotry would still count against her, but once a person isn’t just a faceless, nameless atheist, but an actual human that you can actually judge against the stereotypes you were taught about atheists, things can change.

So independents are less “crazy” than democrats? 😉

(Disclaimer, I am an I who normally votes D)

(And how the hell are people more comfortable with Mormons than with
us?! Their story is even crazier than that of evangelical
Christianity!)

I say the trick is in the PR. Most non-Mormons have no idea how crazy the Mormon dogma is. I mean, how many here even know that the Mormons think that god the father lives on a planet called Kolob, whose light is reflected by the sun toward us on earth? or that god is ‘omnipresent’ but also has body of flesh, and that we human can also become gods and rule our own planets in the after life? (find all that in Doctrine & Covenants… LDS.org has full texts of all the Mormon scriptures online.

On the other hands, atheists, as freethinkers are wont to do, don’t easily form a united front armed with an aggressive PR machine like the multi-billion dollar LDS organization. People are afraid of ideas they aren’t familiar with, and atheism isn’t that popular a concept in the USA (at least not ones most religious folks have spent time pondering over).

Right and David “Call me Dave” Cameron says that his Christianity comes and goes.  Presumably when it waxes when it gets him votes and wanes when it loses him votes.

I wonder how much of the response is down to people’s perception of what an atheist is compared to their perception of a person who doesn’t believe in gods.  For some unfathomable reason* a lot of people seem to think that atheist means something other than someone who doesn’t believe in gods.  It would be good to see the results of asking “Would you be comfortable with a President who didn’t believe in God?”

*Not really that unfathomable.  It is down to ignorance and misinformation from the religitards.

I’m not sure this difference is statistically significant. It is small. If it significant, I suspect that this is  to more independents simply not knowing what “atheist” means. There’s a fair bit of evidence in general that people of moderate political beliefs have smaller vocabularies than people with strong political beliefs on either end. The GSS ( http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website/ ) data shows this pretty strongly when one looks at the WORDSUM score and compares that to the political affiliation variables. In general, as one increases vocab, there are two trends: a move to the left and a move towards the extremes. So the distribution of political views becomes more bimodal and as well as the center of the distribution moving leftward. This is true for many other variables such as education level in the GSS, or if one looks at other studies using SAT or Wonderlic scores. There are other similar patterns in the GSS data. The self-identified moderates also perform more poorly on answering the true/false science questions than either “conservatives” or “liberals” when taken as percent right on average, and one gets a similar result when one looks at Republican v. Democrat v. Independent. 

I’ve heard some commentary lately suggesting that the independents aren’t moderates or centrists at all, but are rather more extreme than either party’s candidates. Independent never has meant moderate or centrist, by definition, it means someone who does not associate with either of the two major parties. So that includes Libertarians, Greens, Communists, Socialists, white supremacists, as well as moderates who don’t pick a party. The usual media assumption, of course, is that the vast majority of independents are centrists who swing back and forth between the two major parties, and that may once have been true, and some of them certainly are, but a lot of them, and maybe most now, are more extreme. And given that if you actually describe what a centrist position in this country is, and then describe Obama’s position, you’ve just repeated yourself, it follows that centrists ought to be voting Democrat, while independents are dissatisfied liberals and conservatives. I expect more of them are on the political left these days, but we ought to also be looked on more positively by Libertarians too, who I think are the next big independent block. 

Why do the Democrats hate us so much? This is disappointing. 

Except the vast majority of theists in the world have no idea who PZ Myers is. This notion that he’s ruining our case is absurd. I’m certain that PZ pisses off plenty of extreme religious people who’ve been sent trolling to his blog, but for the wider populace all he does is motivate and encourage atheists, and if those atheists come out while just being themselves, that’s good for us. Mainly because this notion of atheists who are dicks in person is pretty much a straw man.

” Their (Mormons) story is even crazier than that of evangelical Christianity!” I disagree. Talking serpents, virgin births, resurrection, creation myth…how is that less crazy than magic underwear? Mormonism just “seems” weirder because its falsehoods are alleged to have occurred in the more recent past. They’re all nonsense.

Mormonism sounds more “modern” in one respect: Joseph Smith and his fellow cult founders knew about post-Galilean astronomy, so their literature refers to stars as sunlike bodies and to what we now call exoplanets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob

BTW, I’ve wondered why skeptics assumed that exoplanets had to exist, well before all the exoplanet discoveries astronomers have made in the past 15 years or so. Before we had that evidence, the belief in exoplanets, propagandized by science fiction, sounded a lot like a faith position which skeptics would have criticized regarding other claims.

You don’t think the notion that our Sun is somehow unique in having planets among the 200 billion other stars in our galaxy is more of a faith position than the assumption that among those 200 billion stars there are others that have planets much as ours does?

I don’t know of anyone I’d call a sceptic who ever said “exoplanets must exist” as if it was a certainty before one was actually discovered. Maybe such people did exist and considered themselves sceptics…I would agree with you that such people would be taking a faith position. I think the prevalent viewpoint among sceptics, myself included, was that it was very likely that exoplanets would exist given the size of the universe and our understanding of how planets form. Unlike a god-belief, we knew for a fact that planets could and did form (hell, we were standing on one) so it was reasonable to think that similar conditions were likely to exist elsewhere in a vast universe. Considering something likely or very likely is not a faith position. Claiming with certainty that something is so, particularly without any credible evidence (like every god claim) is a faith position.

The sample size is 360 Republicans, 484 Democrats, and 590 Independents. The math works out.

To put that more clearly, with something like 200 billion stars in the galaxy, the odds against our Sun being the only one with planets would be, quite literally, astronomical.

1% is within the margin of error given the relatively low sample size

I don’t know, I don’t think you can read that much into the survey results. The question is such that each person responding is answering based on their perceived views of what the specific labeled candidate would do. This skews the results because of ignorance of the meaning of the word “atheist”.

I think a better question would be:  “Would you be comfortable with a president who bases some decisions on the god of their specific faith and that god’s teachings in their holy scripture? For atheists, they would never base a decision on a god but always rely on rational thought and reason.”

Now this phrasing may seem to favor atheists. But the point is that atheists are the rational ones and would not let their personal faith get in the way. A good president who is a theist should also not let their faith get in the way but…

Ah the merits of remaining ambiguously christian. I have met a few folks in my town here in the Bible Belt who do an excellent job of remaining so. I know they are atheist for they confide in any atheist they meet, but they sustain an excellent facade to their theist friends and family. So well done that the theists seem to count them as christian.

So far, I can only seem to keep up such a facade for about two or three months. At some point, I get sick of it and break the news. Then a discussion of some sort ensues where I get all “atheist” on them and then we rarely talk thereafter.

I think what really happens is I hide my atheism at first in order to make friends and join in their activity but later I grow tired of their constant theistic comments or one of them figures out I’m atheist some other way (my Facebook page isn’t exactly hiding anything) and then they just *have* to inform me they are there for me and praying for me and it goes downhill from there.

(apologizes to regulars who have heard this before)
I plan to keep hammering my candidates with one question: “Do you think religious belief is a requirement for or guarantee of morality”.  That’s it.  And if I can get any of them to answer EITHER way, then I think I will have made progress.

I used to be a Green,  now a “Decline to State” since I don’t feel like giving anyone anything a priori.  The US party system is a joke anyways.  We’re one ‘party’ away from the Soviet Union.

I would have told him that I didn’t believe in gods but it’s OK if he does.  Also that Santa is another name for Nikolaos of Myra (now part of Turkey) who was known for his secret giving of gifts.

Knowledge is useful for filling the gap between the ears of people infested with religion.

Not if they claim God was required to make it happen.

Living in the US, I’m happy if they accept that chimps are more closely related to us than to gorillas.  They can think whatever they want about our ‘souls’.

Well, actually not, since they seem to think sperm have souls and that MM or FF soul sex is a sin.

Oh wait, I get it now. You’re comparing the suggestion that exoplanets are likely to the statements from UFO cults like Scientology that extraterrestrial intelligence has actually visited Earth. Well that’s a big difference indeed. It is a far cry from saying “exoplanets are likely to exist” to saying, “we know that these particular extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth and essentially seeded human life”. One of those is reasonable, the other is pure fantasy. 

It’s possible to believe that something is LIKELY, without having the conclusive evidence that’s usually necessary to warrant the belief that it exists.  We have the existence evidence of what OUR solar system is like, and there was no evidence that our sun and its system of planets were the ONLY ones of their kind.

The likelihood of exoplanets was very nearly a foregone conclusion (the fact that they WERE discovered shows that the people making that prediction were not very far off the mark).  There’s nothing about this idea that resembled science-fiction or faith claims.  The thought that other stars, like our sun, should have other planets, like our planets, seems perfectly reasonable to me.  It may not have been enough evidence to proclaim that we KNEW (before we actually did) that those planets existed, but it was hardly on a par with believing in resurrected dead people or pregnant virgins.

I would be comfortable with a new earth creationist leader, if they were able to keep their personal beliefs outside of their job.

That’s an interesting one, but I don’t know that I can say the same, at least in the case of politicians with power over scientific policy. Someone who is willing to affirm that they are a young earth creationist is showing one of two things:

a- A shocking ignorance of science that simply boggles the mind. I don’t want someone who doesn’t have at least a middle school level of biology/geology/physics to be making important policy decisions about things like, say, nuclear waste.

b- A total lack of respect for the sciences that enables them to pander to religious fundamentalism at the cost of scientific advancement. This one is worse than a sincere ignorance. I don’t want a person like this anywhere near a committee deciding on research funding.

I guess I don’t see how a young earth creationist could really keep their beliefs truly separate from their job, if that job touched science in some way. I guess if it’s someone who is simply lying to the voters to get elected and actually does believe in evolution it would be safe, but I have no real way of telling the difference.

 socially acceptable open bigotry towards nonbelievers is

 I’ll take it even a step further.  Not only socially acceptable, but in some areas, socially expected.

What about earth, and the other planets in our solar system? They are undeniably there. our sun is just another star. It is not a large jump at all to think that other stars also have planets.

The dragon in my garage claim has nothing at all to support it other than the word of the person making the claim. Do you not even trust your own experiences of being on earth, seeing the sun, moon, and stars?

The sample is small. Also, there is really no good way to tell what is lurking deep inside someone else’s mind.

 It is possibly worse (in some circles in our society) to be atheist than gay. And atheists (and gays) are continually propagandized against. I know a bunch of evangelicals for whom the words ‘godless atheist’ are the worst epithet they can hurl. And for the religiously inclined, they are the last 2 groups of people that they can openly hate. They invest a lot of effort and money in their religions and someone who is openly telling them that it is a silly waste has to be an object of scorn. Also, there is a cost for coming out against them – the atheist get shunned. I would be willing to bet there are a lot more atheists and agnostics out there than will fess up simply because of fear. Fear of shunning, loss of community, maybe loss of income, and even loss of family. It is going to take a few heroic national icons patiently admitting their unbelief to get people to start to look beyond the label.

But you’re wrong to point that out because it is not a valid argument.  Your argument would only be valid if Earth was the only planet in our solar system.  The simple fact that there are more planets than just Earth, and not only that, but dozens of bodies in the solar system when you count all the moons, many of which are close to planet sized, suggests that planets and other bodies aside from Earth can form.

Religious people don’t dislike atheists because they think we’re immoral. They dislike atheists because they know we think they are completely, not just partially, wrong. When people with different religions tolerate each other, they have a “gentleman’s” agreement where each can think the other has just made the wrong choice—is backing the wrong side—but they agree that one of the sides is right. But they can’t make that agreement with atheists, because not only do we refuse to pick a side, we think the entire competition is stupid! To drive this metaphor into the ground, football fans can argue about which team is better, but they’ll all turn against the person who says football is stupid! 

Tony Blair masked his deep religious convictions, he even waited until he ran away from office (To avoid being voted out.) before converting to Catholicism, he knew it wouldn’t have helped his chances if he spoke about his faith, as he did AFTER stepping down.

Yes, they can. They are very similar, and for some questions the Republicans do better than Democrats. The data really doesn’t fit with stereotypes. 

I haven’t crunched the numbers for that and I don’t know of anyone who has. But the GSS data is up and has a pretty easy interface so you can go check that yourself if you want to. I suspect that there will not be nearly as large a difference as would our stereotypes of such people.

We’re talking about americans here. Nuff said.
I live in the UK. For all I know the entire government may be made up of satanists. Unlike americans we don’t parade our religious beliefs for all to see and politicians (even the conservative ones) certainly don’t claim religious belief to grub for votes. Religion stays firmly where it belongs. In church.

They might realize this, but then again what’s the importance of the future of this planet or rather our continued existence on this planet when compared to the promised blissful eternity spent somewhere above it’s surface? I can’t crawl inside their heads of course (too alien an environment for me) but maybe even the liberally inclined might be able to relativize this prospect of pretending to be happy while smilingly looking down to their loved ones or perfect strangers, children among which and so forth being tormented, burned, impaled, disemboweled, raped and torn to pieces before being thrown in pools of boiling sulphur for some reason and stuff, provided it’s for a limited amount of time. (And on condition perhaps the harpsichords play a dreary tune.)

Or believing that a non-material bodiless, brainless, hormoneless entity has thoughts and feelings, is capable of acting on the physical world and did not get to this highly advanced position by the usual method of evolving from something much simpler over eons of time. All that science has revealed about how things work in the real world is completely against this notion and, in fact, puts the concept of an eternally existing non-evolved non-material Super Mind in the astronomically remote probability category.

So many educationally underpriviledged people believe that these things are absolutely certain that it seems to be a function of poor education.   Since the U.S. is no oddly religious among industrialized countries, one could be forgiven for believing the U.S. has a commercially driven educational system coupled with an ideology that assumes that parents with no teaching qualifications have the right to dictate what their children are taught.  Oh, wait, it does!

I would like to see the use of  “educational surveys” in the U.S.A.:  surveys that seek to educate the partipants under the guise of obtaining their opinions.  Happens in other countries.  Why not in the U.S., also?  It’s a subtle marketing strategy.  Atheists groups should seriously consider it. 

In my youth, the feminist movement in Australia was pushed off by a group of women known as the Women’s Electoral Lobby.  Prior to a federal election, they contacted every candidate and asked them a serious of questions that sought to educate both the candidates and the public about women’s rights, the people who fought for them and the politicians who were aware and supportive of these rights -as well as those who were not.  It had a huge impact.

You could add to that that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is also a declared atheist — although he does allow his Catholic wife to bring their children up in that faith.

If that’s the Mormon Marketing Department I doubt that any of us would get more than a whitewashed picture.  Interesting and useful start, of course, but it would need to be supplemented by material presented by those with a more critical approach to the subject, especially those who escaped from the immersion.  There is nothing like the revelations of an ex-Something to discover the skeletons in the cupboard that the indoctrinated either don’t know, don’t want to know or spend a lot energy trying to forget or defend. 

I guess that is the whole point of Hemet’s approach:  learn about religion from the inside as well as the outside to get enough of the picture to make an informed opinion.  The problem with the indoctrinated is that they have made their decisions on only the impassioned case for the defense.  It results in a cognitive mis-trail. 

  What happened to the constitution where it states “separation of church and state”.  I do not see the need of a president needing an imaginary friend to help make the decisions, decisions that should be based on facts instead.  I have tried to watch the Republican debates and watch them assassinate each other and listen to the same old self-serving rhetoric from these stuffed shirts until the topic of religion is brought into the debate.
  Why is this even allowed? This topic should not even be allowed to be brought up this is subject matter for them in the privacy of their homes not on T.V.
  I am an Atheist who believes problems can be solved without consulting an imaginary friend because I have been doing it my whole life.
  As it stands right now there is not a republican candidate I would allow to park my car, much less vote for to run this country.  
  All religion should be removed from the government and the decisions they make. 
I am not saying they can’t spend time with the imaginary friend but do it at home or on  Sundays with all of  their friends who have this same friend that for some reason needs their money.
  I believe they should keep it to THEMSELVES!
  I checked the poll out but could not give an answer I was comfortable with.