WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by Deckard

Out of interest, when you say God, are you including the individual beliefs of the religion?

What about a president - of either party - who had faith in Gog and Magog? I'm not being facetious, but would that not make you feel uncomfortable?

And if so, then what about a president who believes that a man was born to a virgin, performed miracles, and was resurrected?

It honestly would not make me feel uncomfortable, and I'll tell you why.

Your question used the word "believe" which is epistemologically weak compared to "know" or existing in a consciousness of knowing. And that's the point I'm trying to make. I'd rather have a president who believes in burning bushes and noah's ark, than an atheist president who *knows* or thinks they know that global communism achieved by murder and imperialism will usher in a golden age of the working man, or that global capitalism achieved by murder and imperialism will usher in a golden age of freedom.

now if you were to ask me if I would feel uncomfortable with a president who unquestioningly accepts the truth of the bible and acts accordingly then yes. I would have a problem with that.

i'm trying to argue the usage of the word religion to be abstracted from mystical, esp. judeo christian elements and more describe a method of thought, whose opposite is not atheism, but more specifically the scientific method.

edit: just to preemptively defend this. I know religion stricken from anything mystical sounds bizarre. Its only because mystical things, like all unproven things, tend to fertilize in the minds of the religious. Ivan Lenin's tomb is a great example. Here are all these supposed atheists IE anti-religious, who call christianity a tool for the bourgoise, embalming lenin and putting him on display like a fucking pharaoh. The idea is to create a sense of immortality, and eternal existence, which is decidedly "religious" in the sense we take it to mean conventionally. But this shows that religion preceeds mysticism, not the other way around.