Is President Obama secretly an atheist, who fakes being a Christian for political reasons?

[LostOne4Ever]

33. Haven't been here that long

But so far I have never seen anyone say "President Obama is much too smart to believe in invisible sky monsters, OBVIOUSLY he is actually an atheist, but since an atheist could never win election he pretends to be a Christian."

I have seen some DU posters imply that hes a closet republican though, that he hates left wingers, that hes authoritarian, etc.

Okay lets be logical about this. Nobody knows President Barack Obama's beliefs better than himself. So when we exam the evidence it overwhelmingly supports the conclusion he is a theist, and more specifically a Christian. There is little to no evidence otherwise to support him being an atheist.

So mostly likely he is a Christian.

Now could he be LYING about it? Certainly, but that argument could be made about every single person you ever meet. As with the god question itself, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. So where is the evidence? There is none. However, we have his testimony, his wife's testimony, his preacher's testimoney, fact that he has a prayer app or something on his phone, etc to show that hes sincere.

The preponderance of the evidence shows him to be both Christian and sincere about it. Its possible that it is all just a ruse, but its also possible an invisible pink unicorn is flying around the moon as well by that logic.

Now onto the real question: Is it possible that at some point in time that we had an atheist president and they pretended to be a theist to get elected? Absolutely.

We know for a fact that some politicians will lie about being part of unpopular groups in order to get elected. If this were not true we would not have antigay republicans getting caught in gay sex scandals

So what are the odds that we had an Atheist President at some point? Well the Atheist population is a rather controversial subject varying depending upon definition, where the calculation was done, who did the poll, and so forth. I tend to believe its between 10-20% myself. But im going to say that for the history of the entire US (remember that we did not make up as large a percentage back in 1800 as we do now) it averages out to around 2%. If you have any evidence to suggest a better number post it and ill update my post.

So back to my point what are the odds of us having an atheist president? Well we just take the odds of us having 44 theist presidents and subtract it from 1.

1-(0.98)^44=.589

So we have a 58.9% chance that at LEAST ONE PRESIDENT was a closet atheist.

If you increase the atheist population to 5% it becomes a 90% chance of having at least 1 atheist president.

If you increase that to 10% of the population it becomes 99.1% chance

If you increase it to 20% (the projected total of all atheists, agnostics, and nones in the US today) it becomes 99.995% chance.


I like these odds.