10
Reasons Why
Atheists
Should
Still Vote for Obama
even though he has been Christianing it up
9/27/08
As
tough
as it usually is to
get atheists to agree on
anything, you would still think that, after the last eight years, we
would at
least
all be able to agree on the urgent need to get the Republicans the hell
out of
the White House. But
alas, it is not
so. Over the last
couple of months,
there have been rumblings in the atheist blogosphere from certain of us
who
think that Democratic candidate Barack Obama is too
Christian — or, at least, has
started making too much use of Christian rhetoric — and have
been threatening to
stay home on November 4th.
I
understand your feelings, and I understand the need of any bloc of
voters not
to feel as if they are being taken for granted…
But I’m afraid I
really must insist that
you vote for Obama anyway. I
realize your blogotime is precious, so as
a gesture of good faith — er, good science — I’ve managed
to rein in my
all-consuming need to hear myself type, and marshaled my arguments in
the form of a brief
and efficient Top Ten List, in lieu of one of my trademark exhaustive
TLDR-fests. Enjoy,
and please
forward/link/Stumbleupon/Digg or whatever you need to do to bring this
to the attention of atheists you think might be contemplating sitting
this one out.
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1.
The Whole Reason
He Had to Christian It Up Is Because of That Stupid Shit Where Rednecks
Try and
Say He’s Muslim. Really,
this should
have been obvious to people who are as smart as we are.
If
there were a rumor that you were, say,
really sexist, you would probably make more of an effort to say
feminist things
whenever gender issues came up. You
wouldn’t necessarily lie and say stuff you don’t
really believe; you’d just be
more likely to go out of your way to emphasize certain aspects of your
worldview, whereas under different circumstances, you might not have
gone out
of your way to emphasize them. Because
there are a ton of morons (12% of the country at last count, to be
exact) who
think Obama is Muslim — because they’re, you know, racist — he
has had to go
“Hey, by the way, have I mentioned I’m
Christian lately?” more times than he otherwise would have. If
you are pissed that he
has had to do this,
blame the moron racists, not Obama himself.
2.
By Staying Home, We
Would Be Doing the Same Exact Thing as Women Who Are Pissed That
It’s Not
Hillary.
Remember
how, throughout the
whole primary, we always followed up our cheers for Obama with frank
stipulations that we would personally track down and tar-and-feather
any and
all women who didn’t vote because it wasn’t Hillary?
Well,
then why is it okay
for us to suddenly
talk about not voting just because the candidate isn’t a
member of our little
group either? He’s
still the candidate
who represents our interests. Suppose
Black
people had not voted for JFK in 1960 because he wasn’t Black. Nixon
would have won, and
then there would
have been no Civil Rights Act. You
vote
for the person who is going to make
things better for your group,
even if he/she is not a member. Us
being pissed that
Obama
is not an atheist
would be just as stupid as women being pissed that he’s not a
woman. In
fact, it would be even stupider
if
we did it, because women at
least came really close
this year,
so
it’s not like their hopes were unrealistic.
On
the other hand, since there’s obviously
no way that an avowed
atheist — or even an enthusiastic secularist — could
possibly be elected president
anytime soon, us taking our ball and going home this year would be more
like if
women had not voted because no candidate was a woman in, say, 1924.
3.
We Have to Accept
a Division between What Our Pundits Can Say and What Our Politicians
Can Say.
One
thing
the Right seems to have grasped a
bit better than we have is the whole “division of rhetorical
labor” thing. You
never have the people who are actually running
for stuff say the real hardcore
shit. For example,
the Right doesn’t
have George W. Bush actually get up there and say
“fag” — they have Ann Coulter
say “fag” to rev up the base, and then Bush says
something that looks moderate
by comparison. That
way, he benefits
from what the nut-jobs say but can’t get blamed for it.
Similarly,
we cannot
expect Liberal
politicians to actually get up there and say “the Bible is a
crock of shit, you
dumbasses.” We
say that, and then they
say something moderate. That’s
how it
works… you dumbasses.
4.
There’s a Very
Good Chance That This Meme Was Started by Christian/Republican Trolls,
and If
It Works They Will Laugh at Us. To
return to the Hillary-supporters analogy, you know how, when there are
people
in comment threads who claim to be Liberal women who aren’t
voting, we instantly
go
“Oh, whatever, that’s
obviously a DeceptiCon troll?” Well,
what makes you think that a lot of these supposed atheists
who aren’t voting aren’t the same thing?
You
know at least some
of them are — which means
that, if McCain wins, and the next day
there is even one
atheist blog on
the whole
internet saying
“I didn’t vote
for Obama because he talked about Jeebus too much,” the
Religious Right will
copy/link it to holy hell and laugh their asses off at us. If
that should happen,
then I am going to
blame some of the people in this room, and then I do not forgive.
5.
Oh, and You Know
How We Have Such a Boner for Pointing Out Logical Fallacies?
Well, It Turns Out that
an
argument saying you
should decline to support a solution that is clearly better
just because it’s not perfect
is, in fact, a logical fallacy. It’s
called the Perfect-Solution Fallacy,
or Nirvana Fallacy.
This
doesn’t
mean that there’s never
a
good reason to abstain from
voting — it is certainly possible for circumstances to arise in
which both
candidates are ethically/philosophically intolerable to
us — but clearly Obama is
not intolerable. He
supports all the
same shit we do; we just think it would be even awesomer if he made fun
of
religion. But he
doesn’t. Deal.
6.
Isn’t Our Position
Supposed to Be That You Can Believe Whatever You Want, as Long as You
Keep It
Away from the Law? Yes,
I know, privately,
for ourselves,
our position is that religion
is unjustifiable in all
circumstances, even if someone is only religious under their bed with
all the
lights off. I am
not saying we should
not believe this. It
does, however, seem
to me like a good public
policy
would
be for us to say that, as long as you can avoid forcing your religion
on
people, we will somehow manage to restrain ourselves from driving up
your ass
about it. Does
Barack Obama actually
believe that Jesus of Nazareth literally rose from the dead after three
days
and walked around nodding ’sup to people?
Maybe. Maybe
not. Who gives a
shit? As long as
Obama doesn’t want stuff to this
effect to be taught in school, doesn’t hold positions that
require faith in
stuff to this effect to agree with or understand, and doesn’t
think that people
who believe stuff to this effect are better than people who
don’t — which he
clearly doesn’t — then you might as well be arguing
that you shouldn’t vote for
someone because he has shitty taste in movies.
You
may very well be right
about him having shitty taste in movies, but you know what
else — who cares? Our
prescription that The President Is Not a
Religious Official needs to cut both ways.
That’s
right, it’s Mixed
Metaphor Day, and prescriptions cut things now.
7.
If You Have to
Think of It as Voting Against Sarah
Palin, Fine.
Self-explanatory.
When
this meme started,
the Religious Right
had no dog in the fight, and now they do.
If
McCain/Palin takes it, the fundies will be
dancing around yelling “We
won! We won!” (well, the ones who are allowed to dance,
anyway). On
election night, either James Dobson, Pat
Buchanan, and Jack Chick will be happy, or they will be sad. I
choose to try and make
them sad. If you
choose to make them happy, I don’t see
where you get off thinking that you are more of an atheist than I am.
8.
You Can’t Be
“Progressive” If You Never, Ever Win, Ever. I
seem to see the most
bitching about
Obama’s professions of Christian
faith coming from the type of Liberals who like to use the word
“Progressive”
instead of “Liberal.” But
there’s a
difference between “selling out” and simply
“declining to fuck yourself directly
in the ass.” Yes,
it is just as annoying
to me as it is to you that the Democrats have to keep spouting rhetoric
about
being “people of faith.” And
yes, in a
sense, taking a harder line on religion would make them a more
“Progressive”
party. In another, more
accurate sense,
however, it would make them an “always lose 538 electoral
votes to 0”
party. You might as
well vote for Nader
if you’re going to argue stuff like this.
And
by “vote for Nader,” I mean
“come to my house so I can kill you.”
9.
Aw, Come On, It’s
a Black Thing, Just Leave It Alone. Am
I
saying that you should vote for Obama just because he’s Black? Of
course not. Am I
saying that the
fact
that he’s Black
should make you less pissed about the Christianity?
Yes,
actually, I totally am. It
is a more-than-fair
point that the
African-American Christian tradition is a different organism altogether
from
the type of Christianity that pisses us off.
It
is inextricably tied up with the Civil Rights
Movement, and it is
largely thanks to the continued influence of African-American
Christians that
people in this country are aware that it’s even possible
to believe in God and be a
Liberal at the same time. Despite
being more authentically pious than
just about everybody else, Black Christians still somehow manage to
refrain
from blowing up abortion clinics, picketing gay funerals, and waging
loony
juntas against local school boards over sex education and evolution. Having
this type of
Christian as the nation’s
most prominent Christian could go a long way to making a lot of the
other
Christians chill out a little. Would
it
be even better if they stopped believing in God altogether? Sure.
But
between “chilling out” and
“nothing,” I’ll take chilling
out — and if
you wouldn’t, then this kind of belies the alleged concern
for people that
supposedly informs your distaste for religion.
Yes,
Obama’s rhetorical style is very
deliberately and conspicuously
informed by the rhythms of Black American gospel tradition. You
know what else? This
is a big part of why he's such an enthralling speaker. Yes,
when Obama wins, the celebrations in
many Black communities will very pointedly include a lot of explicitly
Christian
rejoicing and whatnot. But
you know
what? They have had
to deal with so much
bullshit over the years, I say let them have it.
I’m
not going to look an African-American
in
the eye and say “Sure, I could
have
voted for your guy, and he could
have
won, but I said screw it because you’re not ditching
Christianity fast enough” — not
because I’m scared, but simply because even I
am not that
big of an asshole. Religious
communities
that
have been fucked
with beyond all comprehension in the recent past are a tricky
issue — you know
how we, um, kind of tend to go easy on Jewish people?
Same
thing.
10.
As Smart People,
We Have a Responsibility to Protect Everyone Else. Being
an atheist means
more than just
bursting into comment wars bellowing “Ha, ha! I’m
smarter than you!” (not that
doing this is not awesome, but still). As
the only people who see the world as it really is, we have a
responsibility to
that world. We
simply do not have the
right to sulk in our tent while the ships burn, just as adults who are
responsible for children do not have the right to act like those
children, no
matter how much they might want to, even if the children do it first. Barack
Obama becoming
President of the United
States
would be better for
the world than
John McCain (and, quite possibly, subsequently Sarah Palin) becoming
President
of the United
States.
It
would mean more
widespread social justice,
less unnecessary suffering, and greater happiness for a greater number,
both in America
and the
broader world. We
are the teachers of
the rest of humanity whether we want the job or not, and whether it
takes another
hundred years to teach them or another thousand, we have to teach them
either
way. To punish them
for not learning
fast enough would be not only senselessly cruel, but counterproductive
even
from a self-centered point of view, since the ignorance, poverty, and
misery
that would be tolerated and increased by continued Republican control
of the United
States
would serve both to extend and
intensify the religiosity of the human race.
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In conclusion, don’t
freaking not vote for Obama just
because he says Christian stuff now and then, dumbass. This
would not make you
more principled, or
more atheist, than the rest of us — you will simply be the one
asshole who
screwed it up for everybody, and every other atheist/secularist will
hate you
for the rest of your life. Now,
the risk
when dealing with atheists, as usual, is that we tend to enjoy being
different so
much that the prospect
of being
singled out this way is very likely an inducement
to some of us… But
you know what? Let’s
let that shit go for once. Let’s
just win for a change. Ideally,
yes, “win” would mean an atheist
president. But I
don’t see an atheist
running. All I see
is someone that the
Religious Right wants to win, and someone that the Religious Right
doesn’t want
to win. The guy
they don’t want to win
is Barack Obama. Case
closed.
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