nope, not an issue at all.
It wouldn’t be a barrier to being a PM. It certainly didn’t stop Winston Churchill or Clement Attlee. The current labour leader doesn’t follow any faith and of the many reasons he attracts criticism his lack of faith is not one.
…hmmm.
New Zealand gets dinged for its anti-blasphemy law: a law where only one prosecution ever happened, back in 1922, which resulted in a “not guilty.” The summary appears to be some sort of “cut and paste”:
We don’t have a written constitution, but we have laws on the book that go against "the letter of the constitution. Yeah okay. And as an atheist, this:
has never ever made me think: “this discriminates against me!”
The problem is one of definition. The article in the OP describes the survey as “BELGIUM, THE NETHERLANDS and Taiwan are the best countries in the world to be an atheist, according to a new report.” But that isn’t what the report is all about. Its a significant mis-characterization. From the general summary:
And when looked at from this lens the report starts to make a bit more sense. Unfortunately we also find out why the report is fundamentally flawed. It relies on an examination of laws on the books, a country’s constitution (or lack of) as metrics to determine how “atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, or are otherwise just simply not religious—are treated because of their lack of religion or absence of belief in a god.”
But examining the laws on the book don’t tell you “how people are treated.” They tell you what the laws on the books say. A report on “how people are treated” that never once asks the question “hey, how are you treated?” is never going to give you an good idea on how people are treated. I think the report has value and I think the people behind it have good intentions. But the report doesn’t actually measure what it purports to measure.
Essentially every attempt to inflict intelligent design on students has been defeated in the courts. As much of a problem as the ID movement seemed a decade or so ago, it’s basically been a failure. The US Constitution has done its job in this regard.
Worth noting that the Irish have been making up for lost time recently, with referenda on overturning bans on gay marriage and abortion and on getting rid of blasphemy laws passing by popular vote. The current PM is openly gay. Religion is still a huge factor there but the previously-unshakable influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland has taken a lot of shaking in the last couple of years.
Home of the DUrP, Theresa May’s odd bedfellows and the folks who thought the Reduced Shakespeare Company were too blasphemous to be allowed to perform. With abortion and gay marriage now legal in the rest of the UK and RoI, the DUrPers are suddenly finding themselves without a legal leg to stand on with regard to their own faith-based positions on those subjects. My heart bleeds for them, it truly does.
Cultural ones - people react quite poorly whenever a person acts obviously not-religious, even in inoffensive ways. I’ve tended to notice the ones that effect me personally, of course - there was a large familial tiff when I decided I didn’t want to join in with group prayers (after a while they relented enough to allow me to leave the room, which was initially forbidden), and I’ve had two romantic relationships die quite abruptly with my atheism explicitly stated as being the sole reason - in both case with me being declared to be quite literally the devil.
But as I was getting mobile this morning it occurred to me that atheism isn’t really the direct target of hostility as much as it used to be - it now is more the indirect target. Christianity in America is something that can be directed by its leaders like a weapon, resulting in hostility and abuse towards the target. For quite a while atheists were an overt target, since we were considered to be amoral and/or demon-worshippers. Nowadays other targets have risen to the fore though: science, muslims, and gay people. Gay people were always a target but they weren’t overt enough to draw much direct opposition before, and of course the new targets are politically driven. Of course atheists are likely to chafe under the attacks against society as much as anybody, and some of the attacks on muslims and gay people sound a bit too familiar for comfort, but it remains the case that such attacks aren’t aimed directly at atheists, at least not to the degree they used to be.
I’ve always felt like people in the US either don’t care and figure your religion is your business, or if they do care, it’s along one of two main lines:
Not believing in God is fundamentally weird, and you’re out there with people of other faiths in their view. Possibly weirder if you’re native born, because you don’t have the excuse of being a heathen foreigner.
They assume that you don’t have any system of morals or ethics because you don’t espouse a religion. Apparently they live in constant fear of God’s wrath for whatever it is that they aren’t doing, and without that threat, they’d do all these things. The idea that atheists don’t do that stuff because it’s not right independent of religious beliefs is incomprehensible to them. I think in a lot of ways, it’s a fear of the unknown- not believing in God is a huge unknown to them.
Disclaimer- IANA atheist, but one of my best friends is one, so we’ve had a lot of discussions about it.
After reading the rankings article, I wonder how much is atheist-specific, or just not the predominant religion-unfriendly. For example, I sort of doubt that being a follower of the Norse pantheon would be any more acceptable in many places ranked as particularly unfriendly versus being an atheist.
Under this law, is there a legal difference between an atheist mocking Islam, and an atheist calmly trying to state/argue that Allah does not exist?
Wait a minute, hold the phones…C of E Bishops are theists? 
‘Acts of worship’ I remember in the school, as in, what they did in assembly, included a random a capella choir where the lyrics consisted of the word ‘Doo’, a teacher telling us about how he screwed the system to illegally marry a black woman in apartheid South Africa, talks from visitors, including, yes, people of multiple different religions (the one talk I actually remember from the vicar involved potted pelargoniums and had the message ‘it’s not what skills you’re born with, it’s what you do with them that matters’- a message in Harry Potter, but I don’t recall it in the bible). No regular prayer. It was a ‘thought for the day’ occasionally with a possibly religious overtone. More ambiguous glurge than anything overtly Christian.
Maybe my school was unusual, but they really stretched the ‘worship’ to or past the definition limit.
Parable of the Talents, actually. The bad servant gets punished, not for originally having less talents than the other servants (which isn’t his fault), but for having done shitfuck with what he was given (which he really is responsible for).
I forgot, it’s the Bible, there’s probably something in there about not eating cheese on Tuesdays if you look hard enough…
My point was, it was the speechy version of the stuff your tedious Aunt would email you over a picture of a cross-eyed kitten with a sparkly background. Inoffensive motivational pap.
Absolutely. The text of the law says that in order to fall foul of it you have to “incite hatred or contempt” and makes an explicit exemption for public debates on factual matters, and private conversations not intended to be made public.
So:
“I believe there is no such being as Allah because <reasons>” - perfectly fine
"Let me tell you how dumb all those Muslims are! They actually believe … " - prosecutable
Leaning over your neighbors fence with “F’in towelhead, go back where you came from” - I hesitate to say ‘perfectly fine’ here, but actually not illegal under the Act (as I read it).
I think European countries are going to go down the list next year. The European Court of human rights has upheld the conviction of a person in Austria who likened prophet Mohamed marrying a 6-year-old girl to pedophilia, for “disparaging religious doctrine”.
Idiotic.
If those claims are held to be true then that is exactly what it is. If you are uncomfortable with fact that your prophet married a 6 year-old then perhaps you should worry about the original text rather than the person that points out the problem.
If I point out that Leda and Zeus were into bestiality is that a problem also?