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?
Let’s see: 55% would vote for a homosexual and 45% would vote for an atheist. Therefore, a gay atheist could get 55% + 45% = 100% of the vote.
I’ll send this to the White House and scare the hell out of the president.
Zeno, pity you have to multiply the odds instead of adding them. Nice try though.
Probably the odds would be neither multiplied nor added. Many of the people that wouldn’t vote for a homosexual wouldn’t vote for an atheist, either.
Maybe you could consider reframing the argument. Having grown up on a farm in a large family I tend toward a organic, rather then mechanistic view of nature. As such I call myself a pantheist. As I see it, the problem with monotheism is that the absolute is basis, rather then apex, so the spiritual absolute is the source out of which we rise, not a being from which we fell. Good and bad are not a top down universal dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the basic, bottom up binary code of biological calculation.
Life has no meaning because meaning is static and reductionistic, while life is dynamic and holistic. It is the purpose of the individual to have a purpose, or else.
We are nodes in a network and we are conscious. Is it feasible to consider the network might be conscious?(The brain is a network and it is conscious.)
Obviously much of what physically connects us is not conscious, or even living, yet what is the larger nature of this reality? Physical reality, whether at the planetary or atomic level, is proportionally emptier then the space separating humans and yet forms unitary structures. Our separate identities are based on classic concepts of time and space which are the product of the limits of our perception. Just as our senses are limited in ways circumstances find useful, could the isolation of our individual awareness be a matter of practical necessity? As a small child, my head was full of voices I had to consciously quell. What is to say that some radio connectivity is relegated to the subconscious in order to function as individuals and is simply waiting for humanity to reach a stage where it could be effectively handled consciously? The problem with examining such possibilities is that the very process of examination is necessarily reductionistic and the more ethereal possibilities are the first dismissed.
I could continue on for pages, but in one last plug for a bottom up pantheism, I would say it is to democracy, what monotheism was to monarchy.
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I think Zeno was making a joke. About the White House? About somebody in the White House not knowing that the probabilities need to be multiplied?
Well in 2008 we will see which of members of these groups will get the most votes. There will at least be one Woman, one Mormon, one African American and perhaps a diversity of others.
The real difficulty is the “well qualified” since even if the public doesn’t object to a minority, minority candidates are highly unlikely to have attained the experience the public would deem requisite. Discrimination has a long shadow.
Old Hispanic godless lesbians can still get 10% — what a great country!
You know what has been boggling my mind? I have recenlt become athiest in the last year or so, while still in college. I am constantly surrounded by understanding people who are either also athiest or thoughtfull agnostics. I had no idea athiest where the most distrusted monirty, even getting kicked out of some communities. Thats rediculous. I’m kinda not excited to graduate
OMFSM. Americans are weird. Chile is a conservative and catholic country, where divorce is still a novelty and abortion a taboo word. And yet our last two presidents have been agnostics, without anyone making much fuss about it.
On the other hand, I guess that Gallup would get quite similar results if they asked the same question in my country. It’s just that, at the end of the day, for most people other factors will be more importante for deciding the vote (regardless of what they say when the question is formulated in isolation). And those that do decide mainly on the base of religion are die-hard red voters anyway.
Another worry is possible variation in the perception of a candidate as “well-qualified”. It may be that many voters claim that they would vote for an abstract well-qualified woman or minority, but in practice they might subconsciously set the bar unreasonably high. This reminds me of that recent study where the CV of a fake faculty candidate was given to a faculty search committee with a randomly-chosen male or female name. Professors claimed to be unbiased, but they rated the female version as less-qualified than the male version.
I’m sure there have been many atheist presidents. They were just very careful to make sure you didn’t know they were atheists.
Jeff — I certainly agree with you there. When I first read this post, my thought was not, “Wow, X% of people would vote for a Y candidate!” Rather, I was dismayed that in this day & age, Z% of people would *openly admit* that they would not vote for a Y candidate. And I know that this means there is a greater percentage of “No”s involved, which includes both respondents who know they wouldn’t vote for Y but feel they should keep that to themselves, as well as respondents who may honestly think they would vote for Y but would actually impose much more stringent requirements.
I also wonder, however, about the bias that pops up in asking this question once campaigns have been announced. Frankly, if this question were asked of me, I would (subconsciously) be responding to the question, “Would you vote for a woman if she were your party’s candidate?” as though I were asked, “Are you planning to vote for Hillary Clinton?”
I really don’t think it is possible, any longer, to truly have a “well-qualified” candidate for President of the US. The professed religion of the person is one of the most trivial of qualities that need to be assessed, whereas their views and understanding of the US Constitution need to be paramount. Given our current administration’s position of the “unitary executive” (highly dubious constitutional interpretation), we need to rigorously and fastiduously examine the ’08 choices long before we accept them as even somewhat qualified. President’s can, and in the past did, surround themselves with the best people to advise them. Choosing someone who represents a curious intellect willing to listen to counsel and advise (indeed crave advise) from those who have expertise and hopefully useful wisdom in different fields and disciplines seems to be much more important than whether they believe in dieties or not.
Any candidate that hasn’t endured a good radishing at the hands of their Skull and Bones society buddies is clearly unqualified for the office of President of the United States.
The reason that religion matters is that it gives some indication of the candidate’s ultimate source of values. Knowing this helps a voter better predict the candidate’s behavior in office, were she to be elected.
I’m an atheist. But if I had to choose between two candidates, knowing only that one is a Christian and the other an atheist, I would vote for the Christian without the slightest hesitation.
If, however, the atheist had declared himself a Buddhist or a Confucianist (both atheistic value systems), I would not necessarily vote for the Christian. [My vote would depend on a comparative study of the two competing systems of belief.]
I think that most people distrust atheists, because the atheist’s ultimate source of values is usually undeclared.
Sean, you’re not even holding the atheist vote, man.
That’s a false distinction – knowing that someone is Christian does not tell you their values. You don’t know if you’re getting Barack Obama or Pat Robertson.
Ok sure, the SOURCE of values in a Christian is declared (maybe), but that doesn’t make the values themselves any less of a crapshoot.
I wonder what percentage would not want to vote for a white male? Just wondering.
Perhaps the 56% of eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot? Not voter apathy, but a massive protest against another slate of white met at the top of the ticket.
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.
As modern Christians Obama and Robertson have extremely similar values, viewed from a more distant perspective. [They both agree with the equality of all (irrespective of wealth, race, or sex) in the eyes of God, the fundamentally sinful nature of humanity, the freedom of man to reject God, the importance of loving one’s neighbors, the immorality of: murder, theft, adultery, slavery, polygamy, sloth, gluttony, vanity, dishonesty, false testimony, covetousness, female genital mutilation, etc., etc.].
By contrast, someone who is merely known to be an atheist could believe in literally anything (except God).
Chile despite its conservatism has also elected a woman as President, which the US has not.
Sean, just be glad they didn’t ask what percentage of people would vote for a physicist for President. It would probably be even lower than for the atheist. Knowing a lot of physicists, one might not call this a bad thing.
I think a lot of people when they hear atheist think of some fictional person who goes around denouncing God on every streetcorner, like a caricature version of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. That said, it would be hard for someone to get elected to high office now without at least nominal gestures of faith.
It seems to me that, except for the potentially senile one, all the other rejected candidates are due to sex issues, or more precisely to sex commitment. A Mormon, a third married candidate and a homosexual have, in the popular lore, the label “promiscuity” stamped on his forehead. In a minor way (with family issues weighting against the prototype of latin lover) also the Hispanic kind fits in this criticism. Thus one could conjecture that the moral charge against the atheism is the same too. Note the usual assimilation between atheism, leftism and free love.