No it’s not. It’s defined as a belief in a God (or gods). These entities may or may not be personal. Article on Personal God. You can also be religious by believing in the Force, or by believing in Universal Intelligence, or some such.
George Washington seldom went to church and refused to pray even when he did. His friends and intimates say they never saw him pray in private either. Religion was something he just never discussed.
I’ve never seen any of my friends pray in private, either. Except for when we were little kids and still knelt beside the bed, I’ve never seen my siblings pray, either. People tend to do this when alone, and not always in obvious ways, so I don’t know if that proves anything about Washington one way or the other.
It’s interesting that here in the States, people would get so upset they wouldn’t vote for an agnostic or atheist, but let a man SAY he belongs to a church, and we don’t particularly care if he attends or not, especially once he’s in office. Of course, that’s supposing he (or she) is professing to be a Christian. Until 1960, a presidential candidate not only had to be a Christian but a Protestant Christian, at least nominally. How far we have come! :rolleyes:
Yeah. Pete Stark is currently cited as the first openly atheist member of Congress. I believe he got away with it because he’s been incumbent long enough to be effectively superglued to the seat, and because he’s a member of the Unitarian Church. There’s probably a section of the electorate that says “Well, maybe the Unitarians are a little weird, but at least he goes to church.”. The fact that the Unitarians pointedly have no dogmatic beliefs, and can accommodate atheism, doesn’t matter - they have church buildings with ministers in them and hold services on Sunday.
Anybody practicing American politics knows that it’s in their interest to PROFESS acceptable religious belief. For someone who has no actual religion, nor a fanatical adherence to the principal of atheism, it’s probably a slightly distasteful, but not overly onerous, concession they must make for the purpose of their careers.
Regardless of what you think of Stephen Harper, I’ve never noticed him beat the drum of religion very much. He’s assumed to be some flavour of Protestant, probably conservative or evangelical, but I’ve never seen him mention God in his speeches or claim that he’s doing the will of God.
Stockwell Day, OTOH, is known to be a Pentecostal, but I don’t remember if that’s because he said it when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance, or because his adversaries wanted to paint him as a dangerous religious extremist.
If you make this guess, you’re as likely to be wrong as otherwise. A francophone politician is not very likely to be Protestant, but may well be agnostic or atheist, or nominally Catholic but very much unreligious.
If by “here” you mean Canada, that’s not the reason. It’s because W’s foreign policy had a very unilateral nature to it, and he was seen as a warmongerer. His “good-ole-boy” façade and his ostentatious religiosity didn’t help him being taken seriously, but they’re not the reason why he was detested. Obama’s best attribute is to not be W or from his party (cf. Palin), and he’s also seen as someone who’ll be a better listener to the concerns of other countries. I think he could emphasize religion more and still be liked by most Canadians.
A theistic god is a personal god. There is no other kind of theistic god. We aren’t talking about religion, we’re talking about theism, which is a specific kind of religion.
I didn’t say it proved anything, but it’s interesting that he refused to pray even in church.
Actually, we’re talking about atheism, which doesn’t necessarily just mean “not a theist.”
One thing that makes issues like this thread’s hard to resolve is that different people use the same words to mean different things. For instance, not everyone means the same thing by the term “personal God.”
And not everyone means the same thing by the word “atheist.” But I’ve seen too many threads devolve into nitpicky discussions of the definition of “atheist”; I don’t want that to happen here.
(By the way, in regard to Lincoln, it’s worth noting that the Wikipedia article I linked to earlier quotes an explicit denial by Mary Todd Lincoln of Herndon’s claims about Lincoln’s religious views (or lack thereof)—though Mrs. Lincoln is hardly a reliable and unbiased source.)
Well he represents a district near San Francisco.
Governor Culbert Olson of California (1939-1943) also was an atheist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culbert_Olson
Must be nice
(The generic) You can “prove” Washington was just about anything by selective quote-mining from material by (letters, speeches, etc.) and about him. I had a book lying about our house in the past by a right-wing evangelical that carefully demonstrated that Washington was really a fervent evangelical Christian.
Though in view of my own beliefs it could be seen as special pleading, I think the best evidence suggests he was an Anglican->Episcopalian with typical Enlightenment period views, a very private man who had little to say about his personal beliefs and a lot to say about duty, phrased in the language of the time.
He was for most of his later life, including his Presidency, a member of his local church’s vestry (parish governing board). He did not take communion and disdained to observe the pious customs of the time in regard to prayer. But he did at times express a confidence in a Higher Power and avoided adroitly getting nailed down by anyone wanting his (even then profoundly influential) support in favor of their own views. (In the absence of testimony from a reliable telepath, we cannot say whether or not he prayed – he merely didn’t adopt “socially correct prayerful postures.”) On the whole I’d read him as a Deist who found it comfortable and socially expedient to be a part of broad-church Anglicanism as it existed at the time. But in the absence of “smoking gun” correspondence in which he speaks frankly of his beliefs being discovered (fat chance!), I’d say we will never know precisely what he actually believed.
I cannot find it in google, but I remember seeing a quote that the benefits of organized religion accrue mainly to the organizers. It is an error to confuse church attendance with belief in god. Neither implies the other. I had a friend who attended church regularly (and presumably threw something into the collection box) until the day the minister decreed that every member must tithe. He quit the church immediately and never went to another service till the day of his death.
A rabbi once tried to convince me to come to services (my parents were members of his congregation, although they had no religious beliefs either but treated it as a social club) and when I mentioned that I didn’t believe in god, he admitted that neither did he. Further questioning elicited the fact that he saw being a rabbi as a being a kind of social worker.
In Canada, a public person’s religion or lack thereof is simply not under discussion. Prince Edward Islanders had a premier, Joe Ghiz (birth name Atallah Joseph Ghiz) whose father was Lebanese, but Wiki gives no hint as to whether he was Maranite or Muslim, or, for that matter, raised as a Christian by his mother. Presumably Islanders know, but it is just not considered important.
To be accurate, they were going to Bethlehem to be counted in a census, and that’s the story only in the book of Luke. The other nativity story we have is in Matthew, where Joseph and Mary apparently simply lived in Bethlehem.
They are both trying to provide an explanation for how Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem, because there’s an Old Testament prophecy about the messiah being born in the city of David, and reconcile that with the fact that everyone knew Jesus was from Nazareth. Luke made up a story about an implausible census forcing everyone to go to the city of their ancient ancestors 1000 years before, Matthew made up the story of Herod ordering the infants to be slaughtered (taken from the story of Moses which Matthew’s Jewish audience would be familiar with), so that Mary and Joseph had to skee-daddle from their hometown after Jesus was born.
Sitting in a Church,synogog, or Mosque doesn’t make one religious, any more than swimming in the ocean makes you a fish! Professing a religion, and living a good life can be two different things. Even Jesus pointed that out to the Pharisee’s of His time. They wore their religion on their sleeves but he called them hypocrites,white washed tombs, and son’s of satan!
I have no interest in the actual question here, but I want to ask what the OP was intending to ask with the construction “People Who May/May Have Been”. That makes no sense as written. “People Who May Be/May Have Been” would work, but I don’t know if that was a mistake or what.
The current Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, Nick Clegg, has openly stated that he does not believe in God (although his wife is Roman Catholic). There was a brief flurry of punditry in the British press about it at the time and then the electorate went back to not caring.
You obviously don’t follow Tennessee politics, where every ad for the governer’s race primary made sure to mention that the candidate attends church weekly with his family where he has taught Sunday School for twenty years.
Eisenhower and Nixon both had ample reason to be uneasy with religion given their family backgrounds. Ike was raised as a Jehovahs Witness, but had renounced its tenets substantially by his late teens as evidenced by his enrollment at West Point. AFAIK, Eisenhower was a member of the Disciples of Christ church for much of his adult life. Nixon was raised a Quaker and continued to profess membership in that creed, but his civic beliefs in the utility of war contradicted the teachings of that religion, leading to an awkwardness when assessing his spirituality. He held prayer services in the Oval Office, however; I’m not comfortable calling him an atheist.
Obama is probably a similiar case, raised by an atheist/agnostic mother and not joining a church until adulthood.
I’m thinking that all three presidents you mention have a break in continuity with the faith of their childhood that was not followed by fervent membership in a subsequent religion, making their religious identification problematic if you care about that sort of thing.
That said, I’ve always had the impression that Obama is as dedicated a church member as most American Christians, and I’m not sure he belongs in this group.
Missed the edit window; Eisenhower was a Presbyterian. Sorry.
And I suspect that even in the UK the proportion of atheist politicians is probably much greater than those that would be happy to talk about it with the press. While british culture is far less religious than america’s, atheism is still misunderstood and perceived to be closed-minded.
(There was a poster campaign, aimed at countering a series of religious poster campaigns, that headlined with: “There probably is no God”. After the fact a number of TV pundits came out saying “How can they be so arrogant as to claim to KNOW there is no God?!”)
Yes, but that was back when no-one cared who the lib-dems had. I remember an episode of Pointless[sup]1[/sup] where they had to name any of the leaders in the history of the lib-dems, and one of the teams came out with,
Personally, I think he’s secretly a Catholic but pretends to be an Atheist for the press attention 
[sup]1[/sup]UK gameshow where you aim to give the most obscure, yet correct, answer to the question. The best answer is one which none of the 100 people surveyed gave (hence “pointless”).