CU Professor Agrees With Romney - An Atheist Shouldn't Be President

I posted on this as well, here.
I'm going to follow up by emailing Herr Campos.

The only response a genuine atheist would have to that fact is, so what?

So what? So WHAT???!!!

...
Motherfucker. Don't put words in my mouth.

When I read this, I fired off an e-mail to him and the paper which printed it. I post it below for your comments, and I will post any reply I get.

Mr. Campos,

First of all, there are many, many more atheists in this world than you would care to admit. For the most part, most atheists keep their opinions to themselves for fear of being confronted with an ignorant and bigoted person like yourself. In fact, there are some studies that indicate that most people on this planet are already atheists, they just do not openly admit it. They follow their religion out of fear and habit, nothing more.

Second, a theist is going to be biased towards his own religion. This will make him biased against other religions. Atheists, on the other hand, believe more than most in free expression, freedom of religion and freedom of choice. As such, an atheist President would be more balanced and not allow any religions to influence the government. In addition, all religions would have equal right to exist. You are implying that atheists don't have a right to participate in the governance of our country. I say, look at the theist centric government we have now and the huge messes it has dragged us into.

Your argument regarding the word 'ought' is equally ridiculous. Everyone makes ought statements; 'there ought to be a law', 'someone ought to fix this', etc, etc, etc. How is the use of the word a valid argument against atheism? You make this blanket statement, yet provide no valid or logical explanation for it. This is the typical theistic approach to an argument.

The most he irritating and incorrect part of your piece is how you claim people have to 'be' atheists. You do not have to 'be' an atheist - atheism is not a religion (we don't even capitalize it). It is not an organization, it is not a group. It has no founding members, no charter; no nothing. The word atheist describes the fact that a person or persons do not believe in God. Nothing more, nothing less. Is there a formal organization for people who do not believe in the Easter Bunny? I also do not believe in the flying spaghetti monster or invisible pink unicorns. Please tell me how you would turn that lack of belief into a formal organization. Atheism is lack of belief, nothing more.

Finally, how dare you assume that you could have the slightest understanding of how an atheist would respond to a question. Your understanding of atheism is rooted in bigotry and ignorance, and you have no idea at all what the true feelings or thoughts of an atheist are (and there could be many different views, because we don't memorize our beliefs from one fictional book). All you have are your own opinions on the matter, which mean nothing in the real world.

For your information, someone who is an atheist understands more clearly than anyone else that what we do today affects everyone and everything. Because death is an end, it has far more significance to me than to someone who thinks they will live forever.

We ought to preserve biological diversity because that diversity is, in no small degree, responsible for all life on this planet. When you look at all the systems on this earth and how they are interrelated, you cannot help but know that the damage we are inflicting will cause the planet to become unstable, and could eventually make it uninhabitable to humans. This affects future generations of people, and I hope that atheists and theists could work together to solve the problem. Instead, theists spend all their time and effort trying to debunk the truth and use the press to make critical problems seem to go away instead of trying to fix them.

So where are all the atheists since you can't seem to find them? We are too busy studying science and trying to fix the real problems of the world to bother with such nonsensical things as religion. But I guarantee you that myself and every other atheists that I know would go to war to defend freedom of religion in this country. Suppressing any belief is a surefire way to make sure that it propagates. I believe that by holding religion up to scientific scrutiny it will eventually disappear, much like the Easter Bunny did for me when I was young.

In closing, our founding fathers would be aghast at the state of our nation today. What do Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton have in common? They all took part in the building of our Constitution, and they are all atheists. Separation of church and state was clearly defined in our Constitution, and our founding fathers knew what would happen if we let religion back into government. In fact, being religious in early elections was considered a detriment to a presidential campaign. This country never was a Christian nation, regardless of how people want to rewrite history.

As a final note, you should look and see how many of our presidents were atheist or had atheistic tendencies. I think you will be surprised.

Eric Lorson

when one presses a purported atheist, one almost always finds that the person believes in various propositions that simply don't make sense without a belief in some source of an ultimate moral order, i.e., what most people would call "God." For instance, almost everyone who claims to be an atheist still makes lots of "ought" statements, as in "we ought to preserve biological diversity," or what have you.

I'm amazed that people who are nominally learned continue to blindly wander into this argument. I think it is fundamentally flawed in several ways.

1. It portrays all "real" atheists as blind anarchists. I suspect that these kind of atheists are indeed quite rare. If any of them existed, they'd probably view their own lives so meaningless they would just wander out into the street in front of a bus and cease being an effective political voice.
2. It makes it seem that if you want to be an atheist, you have no right to participate in politics or public discourse at all by saying how society "ought" to work. The clear implication is that without an absolute moral authority, you have none of your own. I find this silly, and presumptuous: if an absolute moral authority exists, you still have to demonstrate that a) you know what that authority says and b) you speak for that authority. In this respect, religion can simply be the means of attaching greater weight to your own beliefs, be they noble or simple bigotry.
3. Campos also makes the claim that the differences between believers and non-believers is more significant than differences among believers. This means that he thinks there is less difference between (say) Presbyterians and Islamic suicide bombers than between the same Presbyterians and atheists. I don't feel I need to explain why that characterization is insulting (to both Presbyterians and atheists).

This is about belief in belief. The idea that you can't be moral without some belief system involving a "higher power", reward and punishment. This is a totally unfounded assertion and it is the cornerstone of authoritarian ideology. There is little evidence linking ehtics to belief, but it is a concept held fiercely by most on the authoritarian right and not a few on the left.
After the fall of the soviet empire, former well connected communist party members started attending church in very public ostentatious ways, dressed in their finest. So were they still good commies? Or was this about networking? Are they "better" people now?
Regards,
Griff

Figment, figment, la di da di da daa! OK, I haven't embarrassed myself out of existance. I find it funny that this guy equates "wishing to preserve biodiversity" with "believing in a higher power." Although I do believe in trying to preserve biodiversity it doesn't really have anything to do with something some god said.

*Shudders* Majority Rule brought to mind the one episode of Kino's Journey. In this episode it's a democracy where one of the laws is that in any given vote the minority will be executed. Finally only 3 people are left in the village. One petitions for a law saying that people may leave the village, but is overruled and executed. In the end one of the two remaining survivors dies of a common cold (because no doctors are left to treat her) and the other goes mad.

After all, the human race has existed for an eye-blink of cosmological time and will certainly cease to exist in another eye-blink or two.

So? Is there a reason I should want humanity around for all eternity? If humanity has existed for an eyeblink's worth of time, than Christianity is sort of like one frame in The Lord of the Rings, you wouldn't even know it's there.

I have had occasion to read some of Campos’ previous writings and consequently I was quite surprised at the assertions he put forth in this article. Not in that he doesn’t have a notable theistic worldview, he does (http://lawweb.colorado.edu/profiles/pubpdfs/campos/CamposCLR.pdf), but that he makes his current statements without any evidence. This is something he has railed against judges for, in that in their own effort to define justice, they ignore their own failings of expertise on a particular subject (no citation here, the articles are many just google “judges” “expertise” and “Campos”). Yet, in this article, Campos provides no evidence for his inklings about orthodox religionists or atheists (good counselor, I must object! You are presenting as fact that which is not in evidence). I then pondered how a professor of American Law had no conception of social contract theory. In the original position (a theoretical condition), a group of people, in a state of nature, encounter each other and decide whether or not they will come together in a society. Their answer is based on, "Will the society be of benefit to all?" This principle is a key element of the philosophies of Locke and Rousseau and was the foundation of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. How could Campos not know this? It is a totally humanistic view of government. It is also a normative (ought means should) ethical system. It is normative with or without the belief in a deity. It is a classic “Do onto others…” ethical system.

Well that is when the epiphany struck me. “Do on to others?” That’s the golden rule. It is also a theist’s “golden rule”. But it is totally secular humanist in nature. “Do on to others as you would want done on to you.” It’s not, “Do on to others as Yahweh, Muhammad or Jesus commands.” It is “Do on to others as another human would want.”

As I was patting myself on the back for this discovery, I realized I should have made this connection long before and kicked myself several times for being so slow.

In summary, Campos is a hypocrite, and I’m slow but trainable.

Yup, I do still exist. Whew, the good Perfessor had me worried for a moment there.

What I don't believe exists are intelligent, thinking people who really believe in the Sky Daddy, with all the absurd and contradictory demands that He and his Shamen place on the faithful. At the very least, they must be actually very rare. To paraphrase the good Perfessor: After all, when one presses a purported theist, one almost always finds that the person believes in various propositions that simply don't make sense.

Oh, welcome back, Brent! We look forward to tales of the Great Javalina Hunt of 2007.

Jim Downey

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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.

Hard to believe this is the same guy who did a great takedown of Glenn Reynolds just last week. Guess he's trying to show range.