We get a constant barrage of assertions almost daily during a campaign season that hold faith as a value.
While Michigan Atheists does not engage in promoting messages like those in the picture on the left, it's not difficult to understand why people make them. The incessant flood of "God bless America" and "one nation under God", the constant inclusion of "faith" and "people of faith" in political speeches, tends to alienate Atheists from the political process; they're not talking about us, after all, and we don't seem to matter to them. If someone calls them on how their faith boils down to some of us, they should not be surprised.
Videos like the one below demonstrate how some religious people--not just Christians--sound when they try to convert us:
As noted above, this sort of response to proselytization is understandable, and even amusing, but when it comes to fighting for separation of state and church, it makes our allies who believe that religion is a matter of private conscience, that religious displays in the public square trivialize their religion by making it generic, think that all we want to do is rid the world of religion altogether, rather than live and let live.
What we have here are two major problems: the religious people in politics (or the politicians pandering to the religious voters, as the case may be) push faith as a value, while alienating those of us who do not hold faith to be a value at all, and we have nonreligious people lashing out at religion in retaliation.
What we do not have enough of are politicians who happen to be religious (never mind the fact that nonreligious politicians barely exist at all!) making a point to reach out to their nonreligious contituents, and nonreligous people promoting the ideas that have made us choose to be free from religion in our personal lives.
To the faithmongers, I say: faith itself is not a value. People with faith have been on every side of every issue throughout recorded history, and most likely from the time faith became a part of the human condition. People of faith were abolitionists and slaveowners. They have been on both sides of every war--and before Dinesh D'Souza or one of his surrogates jumps in with a Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot reference (or, amazingly, Hitler), I want to clarify that I am not limiting my definition of faith to deicentric (if that's not a word, it ought to be) religions, but to ideologies based on untested assertions of any sort.
Both Democrats and Republicans seize on faith as a value--and yet their values, at the grassroots, are vastly different.
No, faith is not a value in and of itself, because faith is a generic term that simply means belief without (or, sometimes, in spite of) evidence.
So, religious politicians (or panderers), please stop referring to faith as a value. Refer instead to your values themselves, as they relate to the issues. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and all other religions have their own sects that are subsets of the major labels--and there are thousands of each, all with varying value systems. They do not think on a unified front, and have often been at odds with each other, sometimes for centuries.
The Constitution prohibits religious tests for any office under the United States in Article VI, so appealing to faith during a political campaign, while not technically a violation of that article, is tantamount to thumbing your nose at it. You are supposed to be running for offices that uphold the Constitution, not pandering to religioius people in spite of it. Inclusion of nonreligious people is not exclusion of religious people. Besides, only about thirty-seven percent of the United States is religious; religion is only somewhat important or completely unimportant to the remainder of the population.
As for the other issue I mentioned--too many negative responses to religion and not enough positive ones--I call on my fellow Atheists to come up with positive messages that define who we are. We're a diverse group; we have only one thing in common, and that is our rejection of gods (and superstition in general) as myth. Michigan Atheists organize to fight for separation of state and church and for the civil rights of Atheists, so if you're here, you probably have that much more in common, as well.
What guides your life? Critical thinking? Science? How has it worked out for you? Do you take things as they come, plan ahead? Why is separation of state and church important to you?
Send your articles, videos, one-liners...if something you've read sums up how you feel, pass it along. Carl Sagan talked about his awe of the universe. Robert Ingersoll talked about the benefits science brought humankind, as does Dawkins today. What's it like to live a religion-free life?
Also welcome are your examples of how you have not been treated as an equal citizen. While these submissions will most likely not be positive, they are our reality, and people--especially the faithmongers--need to know about them.
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