Oh great..an open atheist is running for US Congress

I long for the good old days when being an atheist automatically excluded excluded one from even bothering to seek a high office in the US. In all seriousness it has always bothered me that a person that suffers from harboring one less god-belief than others was excluded from holding office in many states. As a demogrsaphic, atheists have exceedingly low rates of the kinds of social ailments that plague theists. Not believing in anything that does not pass muster in the realm of scientific scrutiny should be lauded. Thankfully, there are less theocratic societies where this is indeed the case.

I fail to see the need to label one a non-believer in any realm where science has said: "Well mebbe, but there ain't no evidence for such a belief."

All labels do is divide us at an absolutely critical time in history when we must be united in order to move forward on leaving the planet habitable for future generations of humans.

One will see that I squarely place science deniers into the 'magical thinking' camp. I have yet to meet a denier of scientific findings that is not biased by fore-determined conclusions. I always ask them the quantify their unbeleif in the findings of science, and I have never gotten even one equation out of any of them--and their numbers are not small. Living in New Hampshire with out 'first in the nation presidential primary' gives me terrific opportunities every four years to grill candidates and their surrogates regarding science literacy. In the past it was worse than I could imagine, but now I have resigned science literacy to the level of simply awful.

It really is nonsense that people that likely hold less magical thinking are pretty much excluded from being elected to high office. Oh well.