why doesn't someone set up an atheist government in Europe or in the U.S?

Question

Obviously I couldn't do it, I'm only 14.

Haggis B: Adolf Hitler did it and look what happened.

He dreamed of noone worshipping a god / idol, but worshipping the country (and as head of the country, him too).

In addition, governments have to be elected, so you are looking for someone to set up an atheist party seeking election.

These individuals do exist - but they never gert elected (fortunately)
Hitler was a christian, look it up on Wiki. He was not an atheist. In many of his speeches he did it in the name of god.

Can I point out that I never said religioin would be banned. However instead of a bible in every hotel room there would be an atheist book i.e the god delusion. You can't disagree with that since all the previous governments put bibles there.

Answer 1

Well to be honest i think it would cause outrage amongst the religious sectors of this world, thats not to say i dont agree but catholic and the like would have a say in it.

Answer 2

I doubt it'll be an 'atheist government'. After all, it's not as though atheists have anything intrinsically in common apart from not believing in fairy tales.

What'll happen is that at some stage there will be a leader who's an atheist, and no-one will pay much attention to it. In fact, it's quite possible that this has already happened in places like Scandinavia where the atheism level is high.

Here in the UK some years back, Niel Kinnock came close to being elected as head on the Labour Party, and he was an atheist. I only ever heard the subject come up once during the election, and I doubt that most people were interested: it's not considered a very important issue.

Unfortunately for us, we currently have Tony Blair, who's a Catholic. A fairly mild one, admittedly, but his government has shown favouritism to 'faith' schools and even tolerance of schools teaching bleedin' Creationism. The general public is not pleased about this, and it's one of the reasons he's out of favour at present. At the next election, we'll probably have Gordon Brown (taking over from Blair) versus David Cameron. Brown is supposed to be Church of Scotland, and his father was a CoS minister. Cameron doesn't appear to have a stated religious affiliation I can find, but he's patron of a Catholic church, and is sending his kids to a 'Faith School', so draw your own conclusions. These might be stunts to block his religiosity coming up as an issue - weirder things have happened.

One day...

CD

Answer 3

The US government already is atheist, in principle. The first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the legislature (i.e. Congress) from making laws that will establish a state religion. The founding fathers were for the most part rational men of the Enlightenment, most of whom didn't believe in Christian doctrine and some of whom (Jefferson for example) probably didn't believe in god at all.

However, because of religious revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is now probably impossible to get elected to pretty much any public office in the US if you say you're an atheist. So the reason nobody sets up an explicitly atheistic government in the US, at any rate, is that they wouldn't get enough votes.

As for Europe - I can't speak for most European countries but the UK has an established church for historical reasons, and given that 90% of irish people still count themselves as Catholic, the Irish government has a pretty strong Catholic influence (although the Irish consitution no longer contains a clause that 'recognises the special position' of the Catholic Church).

So, why? Because it's political suicide. Not a bad idea, though, in principle. As long as religion weren't actually made illegal. (I'm an atheist myself but I don't believe in forbidding people from worshipping whatever wacky fairy stories they like, as long as they don't think it gives them the right to harm other people.)

Incidentally, I personally didn't arrive at this position by peer pressure. I went to an experimental multi-denominational school where everybody got religious education appropriate to their creed. I arrived at this position by reading books and using my brain. It's funny how some religious people never perceive that there are mental processes in the world other than faith.

Answer 4

Well, technically america is an athiest government. Or, rahte an agnostic one. They allow the beleifs of all other religions, even satinism, but the majority of people in this country are christian. Although, being christian has become a fad in the youth. They tend to only go to church because they don't wanna dissapoint there family, or they wanna hang with there friends. I believe that instead of an athiest government, an agnostic one. Someone who is indifferent to every religion and race. This country is a rather patriotic one, so that would be almost impossible to find. And also, there are more christian churches in this country, than ANY other kind in the United States. Just a little info you should know.

Answer 5

Adolf Hitler did it and look what happened.

He dreamed of noone worshipping a god / idol, but worshipping the country (and as head of the country, him too).

In addition, governments have to be elected, so you are looking for someone to set up an atheist party seeking election.

These individuals do exist - but they never gert elected (fortunately)

Answer 6

You say Hitler was a christian.. he may of claimed to be, but that doesn't mean he was. HE may of just been smart, and lied to the german people, who were largely christain in religion. Also, he got most of his ideas from Nietzsche, a german philosopher, who was also an athiest. It just goes to show you what happens when things are taken the wrong way.

Hitler thought he was an Ubersmensch, and also believed in producing a race of Ubersmensch (or supermen) by eliminating "inferior" races; hence the genocide of the Jews.

A practicing Christian would most likely not kill Jewish people, because without them killing Jesus, we would not even have a Christian religion. For this reason, it suprises me that anti-Christian atheists (not saying you are one) don't hate Jews as well.

Why don't we set up an athiest government in the U.S? Look at the last few presidents, none of them were athiest that I know of.

Added

Instead of? So we should replace Christianity? I understand you seeking equality, but attempting to replace a religion will definitely lose you support from the mainstream.

Answer 7

Because athiesm is just a lack of belife in God, it isn't really be a suitable basis for a goverment. You could have a goverment which embraces athiesm, but it would be a bit like having a goverment which embraces a lack of belife in unicorns, they may well be right but why bother declaring it.

Personally I would prefer a secular goverment which would avoid giving any religon a priority (athiesm can become religous, look at some of the blogs out there.) and would therefore promote greater liberty.

Answer 8

Do you mean that atheism should be institutionalized as the state religion? Lenin did that.
___Admittedly, fundamentalists make religion look unattractive. But if you take some of that "critical thinking" they teach in school, and apply it to something other than the "usual suspects", you might see that atheism has as many holes in it as religion. The secular humanism of which atheism is a part is a worldview within which the very consciousness we experience everyday is an anomaly, unless you consider the lame, reductionist, square-peg-in-round-hole theories of the physicalists as adequately explaining it. This is sloppy and doctrinaire empiricism.
___Don't be a sheep. Not all the sheep are fundamentalists. And at least the fundamentalists are willing to consider themselves sheep, and aren't deluded about it. The delusional sheep are the secular humanists who think of their positions as arrived at by critical thinking, and ignore the effects of peer-pressure in the educational system. Baa! Baa! Critical thinking doesn't amount to squat when it's directed at already-overturned assumptions. Hey! Here's a stick! Help me beat this dead horse! We'll call it radicalism!
___The traditions that fundamentalists hold onto may be older (2000 years), but the traditions of modernity are just as conventional, traditional, and conformist after 600 years.
___Think for yourself.
___Edit: In re-reading this, I can see I was in a grumpy mood when I wrote it. I agree that an anthropomorphized notion of God can lead to a lot of mischief when pushed too far, but it serves as a helpful metaphor for many. But in considering helpful metaphors as a sign of weakness, give some thought to this: gravity is a helpful metaphor. Since we think in linear terms, we have to string our subjects and predicates together in a line, and this, among other things, means that we can't consider the ways in which everything is connected to everything else without paradox. Even Newton considered gravity a property of matter, and Einstein suggested that it might be vice-versa. But if gravity and matter are so intimately linked, then with respect to this "property", all material objects occupy the same space, that is, they occupy the entire universe, though at different "densities" at different locations. Such a universe is unintelligible. So Newton devised a helpful metaphor, an "invisible force", to make both material objects and their mutual attraction intelligible and mathematizable.
___Newton's metaphor has measurable verifications, but keep in mind that it took thousands of years of human civilization for this discovery to occur. And it only covers phenomena at a certain scale and from a certain perspective, when one considers quantum physics and relativity.
___Whether or not some form of something like "intelligence" is to be found as an attribute of reality cannot be dismissed at this time, and if such an attribute were to be found, it would provide a basis for the helpful metaphor that the notion "God" is.

Answer 9

They can't.
Religion is a part of society, right or wrong, it is part of the ultimate makeup of the world. Atheism, does not, and will most likely never have a substantial enough following to be able to win popular support anywhere. The best you can hope for is to win a few seats in some proportionally elected parliament somewhere.

Answer 10

If this world was run by athiests, we'd all be rednecks, you know like the rednecks that live in the boondocks, with two teeth sticking out and going, "hea hea hea" no really. If there was an athiest government it would conflict with christian givernment. We all know that the government is really run by religious overbroad freaks, so why put even much more pressure by having an athiest governent running our country? Take for example the man that sued the U.S. for having the word "god" spoken in the U.S. anthem said in schools. He caused so much trouble, and pissed alot of people off. Imagine what the athiest government would cause. hmmm. Everyone has their own beliefs and everyone should accept it, there should be no reason to segregate two massive "cults" and cause disorderly. It's better left alone.

Answer 11

I go to school and work with people from Europe, and they said that most of the people in western Europe are atheist already, thus making an explicitly atheist government unnecessary. In the US, I suppose we couldn't have an atheist government because we could no longer use our religion as justification for our world domination and imperialism. If you've never heard of manifest destiny, google it. Biggest crock of **** of I've heard in a history course.