Everyone knows that Barack Obama is an atheist.
“And non-believers” may be a small fish in the UK, but in the US even such a small mention is worth something. Not to mention his support of stem cell research and gay rights. So chances are he’s just Christian because you could never get elected president of the United States without being one. If this is the case, it is no suprise he hides his atheism so well – he is smart enough to get himself elected president of the US after all.
This got me thinking – what is George Bush is an atheist? I mean, he got himself elected as president of the United States. Which seemes to leave us with three possibilities:
- George Bush is really smart, smart enough to be an atheist and smart enough to know that if he wants to be president of the United States he needs to pretend to be Christian.
- It is possible to be both smart and a Christian, and George Bush is one of these people.
- You don’t know to be that smart to get yourself elected president of the United States – just lucky and have the right people supporting you.
All three of these I would consider valid possibilities.
It is possible for people to be both smart and a Christian. For them to be scientists and yet when it comes to spiritual matters for them to turn off the logical part of their brain.
It is possible to be president of the United States without being that clever, perhaps. The main reason for thinking this is that George Bush seems to be such an idiot. But also consider how many utter blondes attended your red brick university with you. You think to yourself, “these girls are just so ditzy and blonde, how did they get in here?” Yet they did, and go on to graduate most of the time as well! There are some people who are just naturally really good at something, even academics, or maybe politics, that aren’t overall that smart.
Finally, it could all be an act. This would seem unlikely in George Bush’s case because he on the whole did take a conservative Christian approach when it cames to policy which suggests he did actually want to push these policies through. After all, what would be the point of ataining office only to push the pretence so far as to actually push through all the things you didn’t believe in?
However, if it was anything short of this, I would probably ask the question as to whether George Bush could have been an atheist. It’s no great leap to think that someone could act dumb for his public image when they are actually very clever – take a look at the bumbling Boris Johnson who has now planted himself as mayor of London.
Mulling this over though, it will hopefully make you wonder who else could have potentially been simply religious for political reasons – much like it was suspected that many of the founding fathers of the US were deists because this is as far as they could push it at the time.
Of course, Tony Blair’s secret raging Catholicism adds a whole new dimension to the debate…
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Tags: barack obama, george bush, united states
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Religion & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.