Romney’s Religion Speech, Atheists and Agnostics, etc.

Fitness notes I donated red blood cells today; it was an interesting process. They take out your blood, run it through a centrifuge, then put your plasma (which looks kind of like sweat or pale urine) back into you with some IV solution to make up for your blood cell volume. I was told that the effect on my athletics would be GREATER than it would have been had I just given whole blood as I have lost twice the number of blood cells. Nevertheless, this is a good time to do it as I have nothing coming up for a while.

Politcs Mitt Romeny gave his much anticipated religion speech.

Clearly, it was aimed at those who might have balked at backing him because he is a Mormon; this was not aimed at the Bourbon wing of the party (which mostly cares about money)

Personally, I take the view that Cosmic Variance does:

Although I find any such religious faith bizarre, it is true that there have been presidents whose beliefs do not seem to have been driving their decisions, and I can certainly live with that. But in Romney’s case, the situation is starkly different. [...]
But the most important part of all this seems to me that Romney should be losing the votes of rational Americans by having brought these issues to the fore himself. That he is one of the many Americans – the religious – who believe in a particular set of supernatural fairy tales should be a strike against him. But that he explicitly seeks to make these irrational beliefs part of his governing philosophy and thereby impose them on others is far, far worse, and should make them fair game. I’d love to see journalists stepping up and doing their part to interrogate Romney and any other candidate on their superstitions whenever one of them decides that those beliefs have a place in the political sphere. Right now that group includes Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee, Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and almost everyone else I can think of.

In short, I am bothered that only a religious type can get elected, and to me, one set of superstitions isn’t all that different from another. What he did say here did bother me though:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

That is BS, pure and simple. More on that later; let’s just say that there are many free counties in Europe where the skepticism there is much higher than here.

More on that later.

Romney went on to mouth standard right wing revisionist history:

“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the founders — in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from ‘the God who gave us liberty.’”

Interestingly enough, on a recent trip home, we listened to an abridged version of the book Benjamin Franklin; An American Life by Walter Isaacson. Franklin himself was at most a Deist (believed in a deity that did not alter human affairs) and found prayer as mostly a “centering device”. He did not believe in the deity of Jesus. Still, during the constitutional convention he suggested taking prayer breaks; the others found these to be wholly unnecessary and therefore rejected these suggestions.

The founders wouldn’t have been considered to be religious people by modern US fundie standards.

How did his speech go over?

Since I have very little in common with Republican Party primary voters (to our mutual relief), I honestly wouldn’t know. I’ll have to check at RedState.com and at Townhall and Newsmax tomorrow morning. It should be interesting.

Of course the hard core Christian fundies weren’t impressed, but that isn’t a surprise.

A former Mormon says former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was clearly not talking about the Jesus of the Bible when he went on national television earlier today to talk about his faith. [...]

Tricia Erickson is a Christian writer, consultant, and businesswoman who spent her childhood growing up in a Mormon home. According to Erickson, the Mormon Church’s beliefs about Christ are completely different than what is found in the Bible. [...]
Erickson argues that if Romney cannot discern that Mormonism is a false religion, he has neither the “discernment [nor] the judgment to be able to adequately and objectively run our country.”

Now, what about those atheists and agnostics?

One hears lots of claims about what percentage of what population is atheistic or agnostic.

Here are a couple of resources where poll results are compiled:

Freethoughtpedia

2007, Pew Research Values Study: Percentage of people identifying themselves as atheist, agnostic or “no religion” by year of birth:[1]

* Date of birth <1946 : 5%
* 1946-1964: 11%
* 1965-1976: 14%
* 1977+: 19%
* It’s worth noting this study was conducted between Dec. 12, 2006 and Jan. 9, 2007, over the course of the most religious time of the year (Christmas, Hanukkah, Qwanza, etc.) – This seems the absolute worst possible time to poll for average religious affiliation and not receive exaggerated results! If during Christmas time, almost 20% of people under the age of 21 don’t believe in God, can you imagine how much larger the percentage may likely be normally, when all of society isn’t celebrating a religious season? –Pile 12:13, 2 September 2007 (CDT)

Wikipedia

A study has shown atheism to be particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God” (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%.[9] (See also The relationship between religion and science.)

In other words, I am “normal” for someone in my profession.

Now what about this “liberty requires religion” claim?

A 2006 survey in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten (on February 17), saw 1,006 inhabitants of Norway answering the question “What do you believe in?”. 29% answered “I believe in a god or deity”, 23% answered “I believe in a higher power without being certain of what”, 26% answered “I don’t believe in God or higher powers”, and 22% answered “I am in doubt”. Depending on the definition of atheism, Norway thus has between 26% and 71% atheists.

I don’t see Norwegians suffering as a result.

Other topics. About that NIE that says that Iran quit working on nukes in 2003. Why did they release this finding when they did (note that this finding completely contradicted what the President was saying). A former intelligence official weighs in:

On Monday, the Intelligence Community, known in Washington-ese as the “IC,” issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been dormant since 2003. Its findings are both unexpected and welcome. While the political fallout from the NIE will develop over the next several days, now is an excellent time to discuss the internal machinations of the IC and its decision to make public this surprising revelation.

The dissemination of this NIE carries a significant risk for the IC. Most notably, it is an astonishing reversal of a 2005 NIE that had declared with a high degree of confidence that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure.”

A reversal of this magnitude undoubtedly required a significant body of information, derived from a substantial number of human intelligence sources. The NIE, now available to anyone in Tehran, clearly signals to the Iranian regime that there are American spies in its midst. In all likelihood, the Iranians are now carefully re-vetting anyone with access to knowledge of their nuclear program. Some sources will be uncovered. They will be imprisoned or executed, and their information will no longer flow to the U.S.

In light of this fact, why did the IC release the document? In short, it did so to assert its independence from the administration. Tired of being the scapegoat for the Iraq invasion, the community may have wanted to get ahead of the game and state its position on Iran very clearly as the rhetoric heated up during the primary season. [...]