Sam Harris: Donald Trump would be our first atheist president
Republican Donald Trump could become the first atheist president of the United States, according to neuroscience author Sam Harris.
“The one thing that is surprising and actually hopeful in Trump’s candidacy is the fact that he has dissected out the religious, social conservative component of the Republican Party,” Harris said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“Evangelicals, for the most part, were going for Trump over Cruz when it was pretty clear to them that Trump was just pretending to be religious.”
Harris, who is associated with the “New Atheism” movement, mocked Trump for referring to “Second Corinthians” as “Corinthians Two” during a speech at the evangelical Liberty University.
“It is clear to them that he is just miming the language or impersonating a person of faith, but they don’t care really, as long as he does it,” he explained. “And that — if you look for a silver lining to this – it shows they just want a space where their religious convictions are not under attack. They don’t really care that the person in charge share them. If you pretend to share them, that’s good enough.”
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“He might be our first atheist president.”
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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/sam-harris-donald-trump-would-be-our-first-atheist-president/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And he kneels at the Alter of the Holy Gun.
Donald Trump is No True Atheist.
True Atheists don't worship at the Church of the Golden Calf, and we don't kneel at the Alter of the Holy Gun.
Or one who thinks that he's already achieved it!
autolatry (ɔːˈtɒlətrɪ
n
the worship of oneself
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
And, as I explained in a post above, his Idolatry is a little hard to reconcile with atheism, regardless of any claims that he might make in that regard.
Should he claim to be an atheist, or a Christian, or a decent human being, or whatever, one could attempt to measure his truthfulness with a polygraph, I suppose, although I'm not sure how well polygraphs work on pathological liars like Trump.
For those of us who don't have access to a polygraph machine, or who lack the power to compel Trump to be hooked up to one, there are other methods for judging the truthfulness of Presidential candidates.
One such method that I've heard is thru the use of internet memes.
If one can find an internet meme that would prove one way or the other that Trump is either lying or telling the truth, then that meme would function as an internet polygraph machine.
I've seen the No True Scotsman internet meme applied in this manner to determine truthfulness.
This method is said to logically prove that Trump is truthful.
Some call it science, but others call it pseudoscience.
I ran into a couple of Corinthians in a bar the other day, and they both considered this application of the NTS meme as a polygraph to be pseudoscience rather than science.
Of course, they were both drunk at the time, so who knows?
Those two Corinthians told me that the only way to scientifically prove that Trump is telling the truth is to put him in a bus with Billy Bush and observe him saying it then.
They told me that the internet meme was pseudoscience.
I was pointing out that such an application of that internet meme to distinguish between truth telling vs lying is pseudoscience, not science.
Your conclusion is correct, however, despite the pseudoscientific reasoning employed to derive it, due to the reasons that I outlined regarding his Idolatry.
Idolatry is not atheism, and idolaters are not atheists.
Like a broken clock, sometimes pseudoscience can lead to the correct answer, I suppose.
But let's face reality.
Billy Bush functions much better as a polygraph machine than the No True Scotsman internet meme ever did.
Pseudoscience can be difficult to defend when confronted directly.