ADDENDUM: Please help us get answers from the campaigns! Let them know that these questions are important to you and that atheists are a constituency that needs to be answered and courted. A list of contact phone numbers can be found here.
As Sam and I mentioned on the last episode of our show, we’re tossing our two cents into the political process.
No, we haven’t decided to start endorsing candidates or parties for political office, but we’ve decided that it’s time that atheist, skeptics and non-believers start asking the people who want to govern us the sorts of questions that matter to us. The sorts of questions that are seldom asked and almost never answered.
So we’ve decided to sent the following statements to the people running for President of the United States, and to the candidates running for U.S. Congress and statewide office in our home, Washington state.
If you like these questions, please feel free to share them or send them out yourselves or on behalf of your local atheist organization. The more of us that assert ourselves as voters, the more responsive our candidates will have to be to our concerns.
We’re asking candidates to tell us if they Agree, Disagree or are Undecided on the following statements:
- The planet Earth is closer to 4.7 billion years than it is to 6,000 years old.
- The diversity of life on Earth is best explained through biological evolution by natural selection.
- The United States government did not orchestrate the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
- Vaccinations are not responsible for childhood autism.
- Deckard was a Replicant.
- It is very unlikely that the United States government is hiding flying saucers or alien bodies at Area 51.
- Atheists and agnostics are just as capable of living happy, rewarding, and moral lives as religious believers.
- A well-qualified candidate’s atheism would not prevent me from voting for or endorsing their candidacy.
- I believe that a strong separation between church and the state is the best way to preserve religious liberty.
- I believe that the United States of America is not officially a Christian nation.
- I would support legislation that would remove “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance and restore it to its pre-1954 version.
- George Lucas was mistaken to make prequels to his “Star Wars” trilogy
- President Barack Obama has provided enough evidence to prove that he is a natural born U.S. Citizen.
We get into greater detail about the individual questions on the episode, but we’d be happy to get your feedback as well. When we get responses from the campaigns, we’ll share the results with you on this site and on our show itself.
