[geeks] Religion and the Presidency

[Anthony Ortenzi]

Phil Stracchino
> I have absolutely no problem with a President who holds sincere
> religious beliefs.  I do have a problem with a President who can't keep
> his religious beliefs separate from his job, and I have a MAJOR problem
> with a President who discards inconvenient facts and orders the
> suppression of scientific studies when making policy decisions because
> they conflict with his religious beliefs on the issue.

As a nontheist[0], one of my biggest problems with even the most innocuous,
subtle religions, is that (it appears to me that) adherents have chosen a
wholly unlikely answer instead of having the self-confidence to say, "I
don't know".

Authority and responsibility go hand in hand.  You could never fault someone
for doing what God wants, could you?

I remember watching a news conference a few years ago where Bush was asked
what mistakes he'd made, and he couldn't think of any.

The only way I could see anyone having the audacity to say something like
that is a complete disconnection from reality *or* having seen himself only
as a puppet and not having made decisions.  If the latter is true, is the
puppetmaster God, Cheney, or Rove?  I find none of those possibilities
acceptable.

-Anthony

[0] I chose nontheist over atheist as a label because while I cannot
definitively say that there isn't an entity with root access to the
universe, I think it's quite a bit less likely than most of the other
alternatives.  Each step past theism into religion seems even less likely,
and Occam's Razor comes into play in my head.