Scott Adams Blog: Non-Believerdar 01/23/2012

Non-Believerdar

Jan 23, 2012 General Nonsense | Notify

It's starting to look as if Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee. If so, this might be the first time two non-believers ran against each other for President of the United States.

What?

Oh, that's right: You still think Gingrich and Obama believe what's written in the Christian Bible. I understand why you think that. After all, both men say they believe in god, and they do churchy things. The trouble is that Gingrich and Obama both set off my non-believerdar. (That's like gaydar for non-believers.)

I'll bet if you did a test in which you showed volunteers pictures of believers and non-believers, the volunteers could do better than chance in picking out the non-believers. That hypothesis isn't too wild. There have been studies in which volunteers tried to identify political conservatives by photographs, and the volunteers beat chance. And at least one study says women can identify gay men just by looking at them.

You could also walk into a room and pick out the person who is most likely to be good at math. You wouldn't be right every time, but if you saw a guy who looked like Dilbert, and a guy who looked like David Beckham, which one do you think could help you with your computer problem?

There's a hypothesis that the ability to believe in God has a genetic basis. That hypothesis is far from proven, but the smart money says there is some truth to it because most mental capacities have a genetic component. There's probably even a genetic basis for why my favorite color is green.

The skeptic in me takes with a grain of salt any study that purports to demonstrate the existence of gaydar or conservativedar or any other form of human radar. It's hard to design a test involving humans that doesn't have some leakage. And the people designing the tests might have agendas. So the strongest claim I can make about my non-believerdar is that it feels to me as if I can identify non-believers with an accuracy that is better than chance. But it's just a feeling.

Based on what feels like the power of non-believerdar, my assumption is that both Gingrich and Obama believe in the utility of belief while remaining skeptical of the details, up to and including the existence of a supreme being. In other words, I see them as pragmatists. If you plan to be a politician in America, you need to pretend you believe. Everything about Gingrich and Obama tells me they look for solutions that make sense within the context of what is proven and practical.

What does your non-believerdar tell you about Gingrich and Obama? Do you think they believe in the supernatural, or do they pretend they believe for practical reasons?

Votes: +57

Comments

jdg

Feb 10, 2012

Does it take one to know one? You set off my non-believerdar when you first drew Phil from Heck (and yes, I am an atheist).

Kingdinosaur

-1

Jan 30, 2012

I think they both might have a belief in the supernatural, but I can't be sure it's their primary religion. IMO I think at least one of them puts politics in front of religion in terms of what set of beliefs he acts on. Therefor, at least for one of them, politics his is primary religion and not the supernatural.

To paraphrase what Chesterson said, if you get rid of the Big God, you'll end up getting lots of little gods.

leahxraexcar

Jan 26, 2012

(non)Believerdar. What a wonderful concept.

rationale

Jan 26, 2012

@delius1967

Itâ€™s reassuring that god thinks a few points on a scorecard will make up for all the war, famine plague and pestilence that we can see around the globe.

Maybe that's why we have the 1%, to balance out the vast numbers of nasty things. All in god's plan.

ghosttie

Jan 25, 2012

I am concurrent - I concur.

marcoklaue

Jan 24, 2012

Scott, could you maybe get a "Scott Adams for President" website? Or could one of your blog readers and supporters create one? I wanna support your bid (I'm not American so I can't vote, but I can tell all my American friends to vote for you), but it's sort of tedious to find the relevant parts of your blog to link people to when they're wondering who this candidate is. Just a single page should be enough, updated as you get new ideas or review old ones. And maybe links to the blog entries that are relevant to your presidential bid.

Raskolnikov

Jan 24, 2012

He's lucky he wasn't reared by the Catholics

Phantom II

-10

Jan 24, 2012

Sounds like projection to me. You're an atheist, so you see atheists wherever you turn.

As far as Obama goes, I have no idea what, if any, religion he believes in. He was first reared as a Muslim, and then further reared by his maternal grandmother, who was a Christian. Then he went through a latent period until he joined Rev. Wright's Black Liberation Theology church.

Black Liberation Theology as practiced by Reverend Wright is a Marxist-based separatist activist organization. Many feel it fits nicely into President Obama's world view. I disagree with others here who posted that then-community organizer Obama wasn't in the church very much; reports have said that he was there almost every Sunday, and he heard everything Rev. Wright had to say. Whether he agreed with it or not is something we don't know for sure.

So rather than an atheist, it's likely that he is more of a deist or a theist. But again, it's difficult to know for sure what a man who, on the one hand, says the most beautiful sound in the world is the Muslim call to prayer, and on the other says that Reverend Wright led him to accept Jesus Christ as his savior.

As far as Newt Gingrich goes, I think you're flat-out wrong. Speaker Gingrich converted to Catholicism in 2009. If he were faking it, as you believe, there are a lot of religions he could have chosen that are easier to become a part of. Converting to the Catholic faith takes a lot of work and a lot of training. As opposed to, say, Islam, which only takes the reciting of a single sentence to convert. There is still prejudice against Catholics in politics, so he didn't help himself there, either.

So while God only knows what Obama's religious views are, I'm pretty sure that Newt really believes. You'd better get the Klystron on your non-believerdar tweaked up.

Drowlord

Jan 24, 2012

In my experience, the majority of "believers" are faking it... Not that they are explicitly and intentionally lying, but I've met shockingly few Christians that know anything about their own religion, let alone what differentiates one from another. If it's not a simplified variant of the Christmas story or a dozen or so fun stories you'd hear as a child -- like Noah's Ark, The Garden of Eden, or Daniel and the Lion's Den -- the majority of Christians don't know anything about their religion. I understand that Jews tend to know a bit more about their faith and Muslims tend to know less about theirs. But it would seem hard to defend the label "believers" when in reality they haven't bothered to so much as catalog the things they claim to support.

Reminds me of the congressmen backing the SOPA & PIPA legislation.

Raskolnikov

Jan 24, 2012

Our leaders' religious beliefs are not always benign. George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bibleâ€™s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Mormon men believe that if they are good, they'll each get their own planet to populate and rule over in the afterlife. Scientologists believe that our ancestors arrived in spaceships from another planet.

Maybe it would be good to have a Mormon president just to shine a light on how ridiculous all religion is. Or, it might be good for the NASA budget, anyway.

mazarlarry

Jan 24, 2012

I agree with the generalization about Presidents and believers, with Bush W being the exception. I don't doubt his belief in divine guidance, but I doubt he got the message right.

Dalebert7

Jan 24, 2012

I agree with byzcath that politics is way too dirty for any true Christian. Especially at the presidential level. You might get elected dogcatcher by turning the other cheek - if no one was running against you.

DNA

Jan 24, 2012

Scott,

I wonder if the voters in US are given an opportunity to compare the contestant's ability to be a world leader. Specially given the curious fact that a substantial chunk of the US treasury is owned by non-americans.

Drowlord

Jan 24, 2012

I was reading up on Obama's "community organizer" experience, since that phrase doesn't mean anything to me. One interesting bit from those stories was that Obama was initially really ineffective because he didn't go to church. He avoided participating in a religion for a long time before realizing that he had to belong to a church in order to work with the pastors who were an important force in community organization. I always thought it was weird that he didn't seem to know anything about Wright's sermons when it came to light how anti-American and racist the reverend was, but now it makes more sense. In my mind, there's nothing wrong with making lifestyle changes that are necessary for your career/goals.

Sadly, I agree about Gingrich and raise you: He seems like a sociopath to me. I hope he doesn't win the Republican nomination. I'm pretty conservative and I've never voted for a Democrat, but I'd vote Barack over Newt without much further thought. Obama seems to be a pretty good guy, and Gingrich does not.

mhoff1387

Jan 24, 2012

I'm glad I wasn't alone in pegging Obama as an atheist (or at the very least a diest), even as the media was having a field day over his Christian/Muslim upbringing. In fact, I'm betting that the vast majority of congress is at most diest, and either claim to be Christian out of ignorance of their own beliefs, or political expedience.

rbgos

Jan 24, 2012

Funny how this is very different in the UK. While Tony Blair was PM, he was "nominally" a Christian, but kept God well out of his politics; it was only after he left office that he "came out" as a fully-fledged bible-thumper. He knew we didn't want a bible-thumper running the country.

Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat leader, and deputy PM in the current coalition government) is a declared atheist. No-one in this country gives a stuff.

Although, I must admit, if someone was some religion other than Christian or Atheist, that might affect their vote-ability. There must be a few Muslims in parliament by now, but none is going to make it to PM any decade soon.

froginthewell

-2

Jan 23, 2012

Militant atheists are not going to like your post. You are questioning their claim to intellectual supremacy, by suggesting that the only difference between them and a certain bunch of theists is that the latter are more pragmatic.

veti

Jan 23, 2012

In all the commentary I've seen on the Repub primaries, this is the first time I've seen Gingrich being accused of "looking for solutions that make sense within the context of what is proven and practical."

This is the man who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "To Fight the Flu, Change How Government Works". Gingrich has yet to see a problem that didn't make him think "better tear that down and rebuild from the ground up". How he got a reputation as "conservative" I will never understand, he's the most radical candidate I've seen in 20 years.

TheShadowNose

-1

Jan 23, 2012

OK, I don't think radars are very effective if you can't create face to face interaction. Politicians are pathological liars AND deliberate liars most of the time. You can't separate the two if you don't control the conditions of the test. Worse, not knowing enough about the person usually means you're telling us more about yourself than the person you are evaluating.

All that really is testable about the two types is their consistency in how they to respond to situations. Too many fence sitting scenarios means you've got a deliberate liar. Too many ideological diatribes means you've got a pathological liar. When it's a politician, you never get real information anyway. That's how you identify a political climber from a genuine religious zealot. The Zealot often substitutes Holy Book references for facts but their ambitions are personal so they will fight for them. Politicians ALWAYS try to get someone else to fight for them.

OK, on the subject of green:

My interpretation is that it's a "forest" color. It conjures a three dimensional sense of awareness and camouflage. (A psychological twist to this political discussion, Scott?) A modern man might express favor of the color if they tend to orient their motor control responses in groups of 3 or 5, three being a simple fight of flight motor control pattern, five being the obfuscation of the same. The cerebral synaptic algorithms of the individual passively process information while most observable behavior would be based on long term memory and not readily observable by "radar" if the individual was not already focused on the subject being tested for. ...There will be a quiz on this later in the course!

Dingbat

+10

Jan 23, 2012

Certainly neither qualifies as "sold out" born again" totally committed" - or any of the other terms for a believer who actively puts his or her faith and commitment to God ahead of any other consideration.

Thank YouKnowWho, for that!

The safest place for a politician is on the edge of faith. The bloodiest battles in the Middle East are not between people of different faiths, but people of the same faith but divergent doctrine.

To the faithful, the uncommitted is a potential convert. A true believer of the wrong doctrine is a threat. This is a reasonable position because when you share a belief in God with another person, you agree together about what matters most in life, your status before God and man, how you should live, treat others, etc. and where you stand after death. An atheist or person outside your faith is simply ignorant. They have not yet encountered God. Their doctrine (if any) can be dismissed as lies and the non-believer can be pitied because he/she is missing out on the blessings of true faith.

A person who lacks your level of commitment, but shares your faith - is simply on a journey. If the person is open to the truth, he/she may still find it. Hypocrisy is not tolerable because it means professing total commitment but not living it out. A person can't someday become a true, sold-out believer if he believes himself to be one already - in spite of living in a way that proves otherwise.

As long as you don't overplay your hand, a peripheral commitment is safest.

I've said all along that Romney is unelectable because of his Mormon faith. Faith-motivated Christian voters will not accept someone who actively lives out the "wrong" faith. They won't say so very often outside of church because most know how petty the grievances sound when aired in public - but the animosity and distrust is far more powerful than folks outside the church seem to realize.

Mormonism is particularly galling to evangelicals because it comes close to "the truth", but then veers off and opens the door to new revelations. The shared sense of destiny and values is upended - because a human prophet can declare new revelations and outline new requirements for salvation - requirements outside the control of the Christian faithful. This is far worse than non-belief. It does not matter if Romney is a good man. If true, that is just an accident of fate. He has actively chosen to be yoked to the wrong God.

Witness the success of Gingrich over Romney among evangelicals. Evangelicals would rather elect a self-declared christian with suspect values (the man proposed a polygamous relationship with his second-wife!), than a Mormon with an updatable faith. Romney's wife may be able to trust him, but if the man believes God is still giving out new revelations, Christians won't.

Gingrich and Obama would be on a level-playing field, faith-wise. Gringrich would have an edge with Evangelicals, however, because he is a much savvier player.

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