October 25, 2004
God Elect
From the Globe n' Mail - home of the horrible/URL/that/goes/on/forever/%20:
Erin Randolph cannot imagine voting for a U.S. presidential candidate who does not believe in God.
"That would be a scary thing," said Ms. Randolph, 22, who is studying to be a teacher. "I lead my life based on belief in a higher power to give me direction. Without a set of core beliefs, you can do whatever you want."
Where to start. While I don't want to necessarily pick on Erin, I think her rationale is shared by far too many people, who all hold to a discriminatory belief that the absence of a belief in God (I could say 'a god' but let's not kid ourselves about who Erin and her ilk have in mind) automatically equates to a lack of a substantive value system. It's difficult to know why this idea still festers in the absence of any evidence, but it probably comes from the fact that born-again Christians often see it as their mission to truck around to parochial high schools where they relate horrid personal stories to malleable captive audiences. These stories are all similar and basically attribute each person's drug-addled, alcoholic, wife-beating misery to an absence of God, rather than any specific failing of their own. Regardless of the source, many people have arrived at that same false dichotomy which currently pervades our national consciousness.
And it's this false dichotomy that results in de facto discrimination towards Athiests and Agnostics today, as pointed out recently by Michael Newdow in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow
QUESTION: Do we know --do we know what the vote was in Congress apropos of divisiveness to adopt the under God phrase?
MR.NEWDOW: In 1954?
QUESTION: Yes.
MR.NEWDOW: It was apparently unanimous.There was no objection.There's no count of the vote.
QUESTION: Well,that doesn't sound divisive.
(Laughter.)
MR.NEWDOW:It doesn't sound divisive if -- that's only because no atheist can get elected to public office. The studies show that 48 percent of the population cannot get elected.
(Applause.)
The greater irony to Erin's statement is, of course, that a religious beilef is far more likely to justify doing "whatever you want" if that means breaking the law than a 'non-belief', as Erin might term it. (References supplied upon request, but really - if you have to ask...)
Finally, self-identifying Athiests or Agnostics have given the matter of god's existence as much if not more thought as 'believers', and as such, their beliefs should be characterized as core beliefs, rather than non-beliefs. Use of the term "non-belief" is narcissistic and reflects a self-serving world view that leads to the discrimination.
posted by scott pilutik at October 25, 2004 01:12 PM
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