I firmly believe everyone has the right to vote or not vote for a candidate based on whatever they want. If you consider the shade of a candidates teeth or his accent or his taste in underwear important then vote based on that. This is obvious. I believe that a candidate saying that noone should vote against them is the same logic as someone saying that an elected official should not let his religious beliefs affect his decisions in office. Obviously neither of these are possible much less logical.

line 6 vote against them based on their religious beliefs.

or just recognize that atheism, agnosticism, secularism and all other beliefs that are relevant to the origin and nature of the universe (material and otherwise), existence, absence, or nature of transcendence, and meaning/meaninglessness of existence, particularly life, are religious beliefs and that categories of such beliefs that are compatible constitute religions.

"and that categories of such beliefs that are compatible constitute religions."

Only with about 1000 times the verifiable evidence of the others....

The lack of belief in something is not itself a belief. Too many religious people like to try to use that "argument" to attack those who simply don't believe.

Exactly right. Lack of belief in something is NOT in itself a belief. I also don't consider it a position I have to vigorously defend.

The only way I've ever been able to shut up people who try to proselytize me is to say "look, I just don't feel it. Whatever you feel, it's not there for me. I seem to be missing the god gene."

Absence of evidence doesn't give you support for your belief in absence. Besides, nobody I have ever met has no belief about life's meaning, for example.

I have no idea what the meaning of life is. There, you met someone who has no belief about the meaning of life.

"Absence of evidence doesn't give you support for your belief in absence."

Yes. Yes it DOES. That's how evidence works. Body on the ground? Big hole in it's forehead? No history of heart disease. Probably not a heart attack.

Complete absence of rational proof of the divine? Just a big mystery we can't solve and a perfectly rational explanation for why a bunch of people choose to delude themselves in myriad ways about their "faiths"? Not rushing to the confessional, my friend.

Glad you're not a scientist. You demonstrate a failure to understand logic.

What -- ran out of meaningless catch-phrases to argue with?

Make your case BenK. By your logic, choosing not to believe in the Easter Bunny is a "religion."

Grow up.

First, my case has been made for me; nobody (but perhaps yourself) is willing to argue that an absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence. The step to absence requires ... actual evidence.

Further, simply because you base your belief on evidence doesn't mean that you aren't religious. Christians pointed to the empty tomb as evidence. You may believe in other hypotheses that explain the empty tomb, but both parties are pointing to the same evidence.

Perhaps you may make the claim based on the motion of the stars being described by classical mechanics that there is a purely mechanistic explanation for what previously was considered the realm of astrology. Your evidence is how the stars motions predictably fit with simple theories. You claim that simple mechanisms leading to obvious results is not compatible with the notion of an intricate and somehow responsive connection to human affairs. You both point to saturn being in the house of the sun on the 5th day of the 5th month ... and you claim one interpretation for this, that you could predict this all with math. Your interpretation of this says that there is no point to human life, that it is a finite span of biochemical dynamic equilibria, and that it means very little to anything but your own consciousness, or perhaps to those other conscious beings who see you and have complex biochemical reactions to your motility.

Fine. A very nice religion, with its own evidence, its own claims of meaning/non-meaning, a theological import for all sorts of observations, and a place/no place for transcendence and deity.

You believe that this has more merit than other religions because it adheres more closely to Occam's razor, based on assumptions you have already made about what is probable and improbable, such that you choose the least improbable assumption to fit your observations... great, good for you. Other people judge their own religions by other standards, including respect for authorities whose judgment they trust, or what seems to them to promote the most virtue, or even other gauges of Occam's razor based on different assumptions about what is unlikely.

Where I don't wish you luck is in your attempt to tyrannically impose your particular religion on the public space, and later the (steadily eroding) private space, of all Americans.

A pretty speech, but ultimately devoid of any real content.

"First, my case has been made for me; nobody (but perhaps yourself) is willing to argue that an absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence. The step to absence requires ... actual evidence."

Again, sorry, but you're way off base. You're confusing the openness of scientific inquiry to receipt of new evidence with unending doubt and some bizarre definition of "faith." I don't need evidence to "know" there is no tooth fairy. I don't need evidence to know the government hasn't implanted microchips in everyone's brain (yet) and that Kennedy wasn't killed by a cabal of aliens working with the United Order of Freemasons. (kidding btw) Just because someone can dream up a scenario based on nothing but the flimsiest of imaginary materials and then claim that I can't DIS-prove it, doesn't make me "religious" for ignoring it. It just makes me a very healthy skeptic (you should try it). Which in turn is shorthand for saying that I trust that which CAN be proven, examine the rest critically, and live quite comfortably with the ambiguity that some questions have yet to be answered and don't feel the need to see bogeymen in every bush to help give me a "meaning of life."

The rule you propose would leave us hostage to every paranoid's worst fantasy and every dreamer's nonsensical ramblings. To establish a scientific truth I need (and with apologies to Kuhn and far better theorists than I) a workable consistent hypothesis that makes real testable predictions about the world, and a set of ever-growing empirical results that are consistent with those predictions. Most religious beliefs, to be frank, fail pretty miserably on these fronts. Which is fine, by the way. Religion need not be science and science is certainly NOT a religion. There is no god, no prime mover, no willingness to take things on faith, no parables about how one should or should not live one's life. It is only a very useful way of examining the world and understanding how it works. Its' value is not in that it tells us how to live. Its' value is in the fact that a bridge once built, will stand. A medicine administered will treat a disease. A key turned will in fact reliably start my car. In short, it's not the what, but the how.

The proposition that I can't disprove the existence of God in the absence of any compelling evidence that such a being might exist in the first place is a solution in search of a problem. Just because many people believe is absolutely useless as a proposition -- people observably believe in lots of crazy things both God- and non-God-related, and beleivers in one religion routinely ridicule those of another. Your reference to Occam's razor is apt -- in the absence of any affirmative evidence, and with plenty of proven explanations for existing phenomena, we need not resort to needlessly contrived and fanciful explanations.

As to your "public square" and your home comment, please knock off the victimization nonsense. Couldn't care less what you believe or where you believe it. No one is trying to tell you what to believe or practice "in your home." The fact that atheists such as myself or that people who are of minority faiths get pissed off when you try to get OUR government (yours, mine, theirs) to represent and favor your point of view is pretty natural. Stop trying to evangelize using my tax dollars and you'll hear no further objections from me.

The Meaning of Life

I'm not claiming that nothing can be proven or that everything must be disproven in every possible way. People need to believe things and act on those things with, or without, enough evidence to make the case watertight. Hunches are the foundation for most of what we do.

But proof of absence is a very different thing than a hunch, guess, or belief based on faith. For evidence of absence, you take a belief, posit a necessary result that is testable, and then test it. Usually the problem is in the 'necessary result' part because various variations on a hypothesis can get really ... difficult to manage.

Chips in people's brains: you'd think that would show up on X-ray machines. Ok, so the conspiracy theorist suggests that the machines are designed to filter out that evidence. Use an older machine. The conspiracy theorist will keep elaborating reasons why detection won't work. But the evidence of absence has started to develop.

Admittedly, the 'rational tests of God's existence' has gone round and round by now. I'm not saying it will reach a fruitful goal. What I am saying is that simply not having evidence of microchips in a brain is good grounds for a hunch that they aren't there, but it does not provide 'evidence' of their absence.

Failing to acknowlege the value of hunches/faith and then going on to use them for everything is the tar pit many positivists (and atheists) fall into commonly, when they attempt to malign people of other religions.

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Regarding the victimization - despite assurances of religious freedom, there really is quite a degree of restriction on 'private practice' - largely because no practices are truly private. The problem with the growing de jure intrusion on a national level is that it extinguishes real diversity, the sorts of diversity that can only be sustained by diverse communities, and diverse families, as opposed to some 'individual level' diversity where everyone is shoehorned into a cookie cutter community.