Just some data re: my post the other day, from Gallup, February 2007. Keep in mind the question here is “Would you vote for the person in your political party if they were of belief/orientation/gender/age X?” The difference from 100% represents the number of people that would either not vote at all or vote against their party if their party ran a candidate of this sort.

Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be …, would you vote for that person?

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The picture doesn’t get much better if you run on a liberal ticket — about 1/3 would still vote against party on the basis of atheism:

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I’m not really arguing anything here, this is just interesting to me. I’m always curious what theists think atheists would do in office that would be so different. “Well, seeing as there is no God, I think I will use my newfound power to start a White House harem! And after that I’ll force people to worship ME! Bwhahaha!”

People amuse me. There really is this insane belief out there that if people all of a sudden didn’t believe in God there would be riots in the street as everyone tried to steal TV sets and break into banks and have public sex. Because all that apparently stops people from being good is belief in God — so society would fall apart.

Here are some societies that are just falling apart because of atheism:

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I’m sure no one has alerted the Czech Republic yet that since they have no religion, they can basically do anything.

Incidentally, I was surprised to find out that Canada, a nation with 18% self-identifying as atheists and up to 30% identifying as nontheists has a really strong secular tradition. I had no idea.