An Admission

(Via Evan)

I am atheist.

Okay, so I know this comes as no surprise whatsoever to any of my friends. The point is, I've not said it before in a public forum. The reason is that I have hopes of running for political office at some point down the road but conventional wisdom holds that openly non-religious people cannot get elected to major office in the USA.

Doubtless there are atheist people in political office right now (with ~14% nonreligious in the country, and a higher proportion of atheist among the educated, statistics insist that some have even made it to Congress at some point), but they either lie about their beliefs or avoid talking about it.

At some point recently I decided that if I can't be honest and run, I'm not going to. So I felt like making a clear statement and getting it out of my system. Is that weird?

Anyway, there you have it: I limit my beliefs to those things that can be convincingly demonstrated through evidence and reason. In my opinion, the supernatural entities of all religions I am aware of (past and present) fail those tests. Therefore I believe them to be fictional and will retain that belief unless the weight of evidence and logic manages to convince me otherwise.

I'm not the sort of person who will put down others for their faith, but I also don't have much patience for people condescendingly telling me I am wrong, or that I am going to hell. My standards of evidence and reason are quite strong, and you are welcome to try to use them to convince me of my error. People have managed to convince me to switch beliefs before on other matters, so it's not even impossible.