Imagine a president of the United States proclaiming in his or her inaugural address, “I do not believe in God. I do not believe in a hereafter…There is no hope, save in ourselves.” If something like that ever happens, writer Jeffrey Tayler’s dream will have come true.
Tayler, who routinely trashes religion for the liberal online magazine Salon, complained in a Sunday article that several recent announcements of presidential candidacies have brought about “a media carnival featuring, on both sides, an array of supposedly God-fearing clowns and faith-mongering nitwits groveling before Evangelicals and nattering on about their belief in the Almighty.” He called on the media not to let the candidates “get away with God talk without making them answer for it.”
Given the virtual certainty of several more devout aspirants joining the 2016 race, Tayler acknowledged that “rationalists can contemplate a depressing, even infuriating, 19-month run-up to the election.”
From Tayler’s piece (bolding added):
Professing belief in a fictitious celestial deity says a lot about the content of a person’s character, and what sort of policies he or she would likely favor. So, we should take a look at those who have announced so far…Rand Paul…is officially a “devout” Christian, but he has subtly hinted that he really does not believe...
With the dapper Florida Sen. Marco Rubio we move into the more disturbing category of Republicans we might charitably diagnose as “faith-deranged”…
[Rubio] convert[ed] from Roman Catholicism to Mormonism and then back again…[but] Rubio cheats on the Pope with a megachurch in Miami called Christ Fellowship. As religion and politics blogger Bruce Wilson points out, Christ Fellowship is a hotbed of “demonology and exorcism, Young Earth creationism, and denial of evolution”…
Yet of the Republicans, the most flagrant irrationalist is clearly Texas junior Sen. Ted Cruz…Cruz pandered fulsomely to the faith-deranged by choosing to announce at Liberty University, that bastion of darkness…Liberty promises a “World Class Christian education” and boasts that it has been “training champions for Christ since 1971” – grounds enough, in my view, to revoke the institution’s charter and subject it to immediate quarantine until sanity breaks out…
The sole Republican candidate unbound by religion’s “mind-forged manacles” appears to be the little-known [former IRS commissioner] Mark Everson…
And what of the (so far) sole Democratic contender for the White House?...The diversity of characters [in Hillary Clinton’s announcement video] bodes well, though, for the faith-averse; she could not get away with ranting about the Bible unless she wanted to alienate such folk.
Yet Hillary does believe. Not only that, she claims to have grown up in a family elbow-to-elbow with none other than the Almighty: “We talked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God”…
…[W]ith the ex-pastor Mike Huckabee and the Roman Catholic Jeb Bush…rationalists can contemplate a depressing, even infuriating, 19-month run-up to the election. Reporters should…not allow any of these potential commanders-in-chief to get away with God talk without making them answer for it…
Here are some questions journalists might ask...
So, if you accept the Bible in its totality, do you think sex workers should be burned alive (Leviticus 21:9) or that gays should be put to death (Leviticus 20:13)? Should women submit to their husbands, per Colossians 3:18?...Will you call on Congress to repeal the Thirteenth Amendment and reinstate slavery, since the Bible, in 1 Peter 2:18, de facto sanctions the horrific practice and demands that slaves submit to their “masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel?”…
Atheists…can dream of a candidate (and future president) who will, one day, say “I do not believe in God. I do not believe in a hereafter...We have to…realize that, barring interference from forces of nature beyond our control, everything we humans achieve, or fail to achieve, depends on us. There is no hope, save in ourselves.”
We need a president who will acknowledge that. And we should settle for nothing less.
