[Chron] Presidential First: Obama Meets with Atheist Group

of course they do, this is still largely a religous country

 

And religion, despite its fragmentations, has incredible power in politics. You don't have to look further than the words on our currency and the fervor with which those words are depended (and the fervor with which those words' critics are despised, ridiculed, seen-as-threat--atheists are treated as an "out"-group by a huge number of Americans: see the graph above about how few people would vote for a atheist president).

It would be very difficult to understate the influence of religion in government. Certainly nobody in this thread has approached that horizon. But there is one sector of the US Federal Government, in particular, that both exercises tremendous power and is dominated by religious institutions: the military. I'm not necessarily saying the military is steered, at the highest levels of strategery-making, by religious interests--though there is certainly a case to be made for that, considering our immediately preceding head-of-state. More that the corpus of officers and soldiers abides a highly sophisticated network of religious institutions. These were outlined in Jeff Sharlet outlined in his piece for Harper's, "Jesus Killed Mohammed"".

No matter how much the Commander in Chief can reign in those religious influences in the military that may contravene the interests of the American people, there's nothing stopping a more committed theocrat from reaching office: just look how close Sarah friggen' Palin got to the Oval Office in her bid for VP!

 

Yes, but...

According to a 2008 survey, 15% of the country identified themselves as "non-religious" [linky] . That's greater than the population of Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims in this country. In fact, since 1990, that number has almost doubled from 8.2% to 15%. It is roughly equal to the 15% of Hispanics or Latinos, and greater than the percentage of the African American population (12%) and the Asian American population (5%).

Now, think how many interest groups those other categories have. How many anti-defamation leagues, lobbyists, activists, etc. Can you imagine a politician speaking out against Jews? Against Lutherans? Against Methodists? Against African Americans? And yet, so many politicians are ready and willing to turn their backs on the atheist community. Atheism truly has been a silent minority for a very long time. This is a HUGE step for the White House, and govt in general.

 

See you're doing the same thing, you have no idea of their agenda, and you probably couldn't care less to learn. You have this uninformed idea of what atheists want/don't want and are judging the group based on it.

That's similar to racist/bigoted thinking isn't it?

 

For Rocket River:

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

The next time I see someone bomb an abortion clinic or fly an airplane into a building clutching a copy of "On the Origin of Species" and screaming "Praise Natural Selection!", I'll be sure to agree with you.

When I was a child I would worry about my father punishing me if I did something wrong. So I would act moral until I thought I could get away with it, and there was no voice of morality inside me. As an adult, I act morally not because I'm afraid of my father punishing me, but because I believe that the world is full of suffering and I empathize with and don't want to play a part in the unhappiness.

You don't need to be afraid of the great sky daddy giving you a spanking in order to believe in morality. The world and the life in it is much more precious when you don't get a "free do-over" after you die.

 

Like I always say, all religions should be outlawed.

 

As I alluded to earlier: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6882778.html

 

Yeah...

This is "proof" that he did it for atheism? If we apply the same standard to everybody that commits a crime and owns a Christian book, then Christianity is probably the single greatest source of evil in the history of mankind.

Edit:

It says he had books on demons. Belief in Christian demons requires belief in a Christian God to make them. Therefore demon books (assuming he read and believed them) ≠ atheist.

 

Bingo. That's probably just poor wording by the writer. To some, atheism goes hand in hand with "demonism" or "satanism."

 

I haven’t caught up on this thread yet, and probably won’t get a chance until tomorrow, but ... the Weather Underground, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and most of the communist terrorist groups around the world – i.e. in Nepal and various countries in South America - would by definition, be atheists. Also note that as it would be exceedingly difficult to justify terrorism from the Bible, anyone committing a terrorist act is most likely not a Christian, or at the very least he/she is not behaving in a Christian manner.

This kind of thing isn't helping your argument much either.

 

You know, I've read a whole bunch of first hand stuff from the Red Army Faction and the Weather Underground, and I've never seen a single mention of religion.

Perhaps you could provide me with some examples of their militant atheism?

[rquoter]
Contemporary communism, including contemporary Christian communism, owes much to Marxist thought - particularly Marxist economics. Not all communists are in full agreement with Marxism, but it is difficult to find any communists today who do not agree at least with the Marxist critique of capitalism. Marxism, however, includes a complex array of views that cover several different fields of human knowledge, and one may easily distinguish between Marxist philosophy, Marxist sociology and Marxist economics. Marxist sociology and Marxist economics have no connection to religious issues and make no assertions about such things.

[/rquoter]
(source)

If you think it is wrong, you are free to explain why. I have trouble seeing how anybody could argue with the architypical nature of the Christian God as daddy figure given all the "God the Father" in the Bible. And, Mother Theresa's entire theology was, "Revel in your suffering, because in the next world God will reward you for it!". Which seems like a pretty cruel joke if there is no next world.

But if you are just offended by the tone, the whole point was to offend people into thinking about places that are too reverential to tread, and so escape internal cognative audit. See Jyllands-Posten.

 

Wow. Where to start with this?

If it were so hard to kill in the name of God, Christians wouldn't have been doing it for the last thousand + years. Your argument that "terrorism isn't Christian, therefore those who commit terrorism aren't Christians" is so flawed as to be ridiculous. There have been multiple terrorist attacks done in the name of Jesus throughout the years. You don't get to write those off simply because the people weren't "behaving in a Christian manner". If only people who truly behaved in a Christian manner could call themselves Christians, there would be a lot of empty pews every Sunday morning.

As for the terrorist groups you mentioned: having an agenda separate from religion does not equal atheism. In fact, even being anti-religion does not equal atheism. Methinks you need to do more research on the nature of atheism.

 

What have you been reading?? They are both Marxist-Leninist groups, and that means that atheism is one of their core beliefs.

Communism was not a good word for me to use because there are Christian communist groups, and in fact there is even one in the Bible. Better terms to use here would be Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, and Maoist, all of which have atheism as a core belief. These aren’t passive atheists either, I should add. They typically believe in the eradication of religion. “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, is the famous quote from Marx.

Of course it’s wrong, and I don’t believe for a second that you think it isn’t. It misrepresents Christian beliefs and it's deliberately insulting. That doesn’t cause me to give any more weight to what you’ve said, and it's more likely to do the opposite. I don’t find the subject matter too reverential to address in any event.

 

I think you need to define more precisely who and what you’re talking about. If you’re not concerned with actual Christian actions and are instead considering all people who call themselves Christians to be Christians, then you’re including people like the guy on the corner downtown who thinks he’s Jesus, and what does that prove? You have some other logical problems here as well, but first I think you need to nail down what your issue is.

 

Not at all. And you can't demonstrate that it is. Find me a single document produced by the Weather Underground proclaiming their fight as a struggle for atheism. Please.

You are awfully keen to limit what qualifies as Christian, and at the same time exceptionally generous in broadening who you qualify as atheistic. If you stack the deck sufficiently, you can demonstrate that up is down, and black is white.

And yet you still haven't bothered to articulate anything beyond outrage. That doesn't lead me to give any more weight to anything you've said. Right now, all I've got is, "It's not accurate because its not accurate."

 

I think that your argument is not a fair one.

Can you describe to me what you would need to see in order to comfortably label an act of terror as "done in the name of atheism"?

Is your only criteria an explicit statement?

Would it be enough if someone said "i hate religion. i think it is a disease. it should be erased. we need to erase it from everything we do." followed by an act of violence directed towards a religious group?

As another example, if a person blows up all the barbershops somewhere and screams "in support of letting our beards grow!"... Would you then not immediately link beard-growing to a specific text in Muslim Hadith which requests that Muslims allow their beards to grow? Or do you chalk that one up to "well, we can't say he's doing it for Allah. All we can say is that he's doing it for a theory in a book which is strongly related to the Islamic faith"?

Keep in mind that an atheist terrorist would not have a sourcebook to refer to such as the Quran or Bible, etc.. An atheist also does not have (a) God to refer to. Logically, the absence of these things will hinder our ability to clearly observe a connection. Therefore you must have a fundamental set of criteria other than "explicit statement linking actions to God or Holy Book" which would equally apply to an atheist.

 

No kidding. Grizzled's arguments in here seem to be steadily detiriorating.

 

I don't understand why you think that would be true? What about being religious makes one more likely to effect change with respect to those issues?


Regardless, your post makes me re-think my initial reaction to Rocket River's earlier question about what an atheist platform would be. At first I thought about it and had to admit that I couldn't think of what type of platform specifically would apply to an atheist group, other than those issues relating specifically to religion. But then this post made me ask, what unifying ideal of Baptism, or Judaism, or Catholicism would apply to health care reform, or education reform, or foreign policy, that couldn't also exist with a group of non-believers? I can't think of any.

In fact, the only obvious policy position a religious organization might include in its platform would be one that directly relates to the laws and rules of that religion (e.g. Catholics and abortion). But in those cases I would think that atheists would similarly have a policy position specifically trying to remove the influence of religious dogma on the policy question.

So I'm back to wondering why an atheist political organization would be any less likely than a religious one to advocate for specific policy positions.