The USA is founded on the Constitution, which does not mention the Bible or Christianity, and prohibits an official religion (First Amendment) or religious tests for political office (Article 6, paragraph 3).

The proportion of Americans who self-identify as Christian is now below 70% and decreasing rapidly.

The Bible treats women as inferior and subject to the authority of men, and so did Christian societies until the rise of secular modernity weakened the influence of Christianity.

The Bible accepts slavery and provides guidelines for how to treat slaves. Jesus lived in a society where slavery was common and he never condemned it. Pagan Japan abolished slavery in the sixteenth century, long before any Christian country did. Slavery in the Christian US and Latin America was justified using the Bible. It was not abolished there until the rise of secular modernity.

I have never heard any atheist say that Christianity should be illegal. We just don't want it to be a dominant influence or have official status.

Trial by jury existed in pagan ancient Macedonia when the Bible was unknown in the West. The Bible is full of rule by kings and priests and does not mention representative government. Democracy originated with the pagan ancient Greeks and representative government originated with the pagan ancient Romans.

The Bible is a jumble of ancient barbaric nonsense which has nothing to do with the modern Western world and its institutions.

It might interest you to know that you've been quoted at Gateway Pundit, one of the most flaming-nutball far-right-wing "news" sites out there. Be prepared for a flood of loonies.

Rather than saying Christians are disliked, I think it would be more accurate to say that obnoxious people are disliked because they are obnoxious, and certain forms of Christianity have the effect of making their adherents obnoxious. Even the more secular types of Christians dislike the fanatics who insist on ranting at everybody.

There's no "secular community", and can't be, and shouldn't be. What would be the "community" of all those who don't believe the Earth is flat, or the "community" of all those who don't believe in flying saucers? The simple fact of not believing some specific form of nonsense doesn't create any common interest or belief among people.

Also, all these terms like "atheists, secular humanists, agnostics, freethinkers" mean very different things. Most secular people aren't atheists. "Atheist" and "agnostic" in the strict sense are mutually exclusive.

Certainly people who have common interests can work together. Atheists who vote Democratic and atheists who support Trump can work together to preserve church-state separation. Atheists who support gun rights and Christians who support the same can work together to support that. Humanists and Mormons who support the same political candidate can both volunteer for his campaign. The possible combinations are endless. None of those commonalities implies any other common interests, much less creates a "community".

This is why I no longer use the word "atheist" to describe myself, preferring "non-religious" or "anti-religious". Using a label ending in "-ist" these days creates the impression of adhering to some larger belief system or being a member of a group bearing that label. I'm not. I just don't believe in one particular form of popular nonsense. That's all.

It's an interesting and complex question. I think the key to it is that the word "believe" is far from unambiguous here.

My go-to response to the claim that believers are happier and more optimistic and therefore it's better to be a believer, is to say "If I believed I had a million dollars in the bank, I would be happier for a while, but if I truly believed that, I would start behaving in ways (spending money I didn't really have) that would soon get me in trouble."

If someone who is obviously not wealthy claimed to believe himself wealthy, but did not spend or otherwise behave like a wealthy person, we'd soon realize that he didn't really believe it in the literal sense that a normal person believes that 2+2=4 or that the Earth is round. There would be something more complex going on.

In many ways, most Christians don't behave as a person who truly believed Christian teachings in that literal sense would behave. Such a believer would never be sad when a co-believer he loved died, for example, since he would believe that person had gone to Heaven. He probably would have little or no fear of death. He would strictly adhere to Biblical taboos and ordinances on sexual behavior, giving away possessions to the poor, nonviolence even under extreme provocation, etc, since he would believe that God could see everything he was doing, even if other humans could not, and the eternal reward of Heaven would far outweigh any satisfactions of the moment. Needless to say, very few Christians behave like that.

I don't think most of them believe those dogmas in the bald sense that people believe 2+2=4. They may "believe" in a different sense, one which should probably have a different word to refer to it -- "believing that they believe", and committing to declaring that belief to others, while not acting on the "belief" in any situation where it would result in serious inconvenience -- and being so used to this that they feel no sense of hypocrisy about it.

That kind of quasi-belief may be attainable by an act of will. Most of us will never know since we have no reason to try to achieve it.

But I'm quite sure real, literal belief is not. I couldn't make myself believe that 2+2=5. It would be impossible because I simply know that it's not true, and no act of will could change that.

I'm sure there are some religionists who actually do have full, literal belief in their religion's teachings. I'm willing to believe the 9/11 hijackers did, for example, because their behavior reflected that. But I think this is pretty rare -- and brought about by thorough indoctrination, not by an act of will to believe.

Expecting evangelicals to turn against Trump because of his obvious criminality means assuming that they will modify their beliefs in response to real-world objective evidence. If they were capable of doing that, they wouldn't still be evangelicals.

What is it about evangelical Christians on the right that make them so susceptible to this sort of manipulation? It seems like a clever politician can get them to abandon their claimed values without much effort. Why is that?

They aren't supporting Trump because they believe he lives and believes in accordance with their ideals. They're supporting him because he offers them the opportunity to feel powerful and dominant over their opponents -- what their more secular fellow Trumpanzees call "owning the libs". It's that primate dominance urge thing again.

To justify their support of the obviously not-very-Christian Trump, evangelicals are fond of comparing him to Cyrus the Great, the founder of the first Persian Empire, who is described in the Bible as chosen by God because his policies benefited the Jews even though he himself was not Jewish. The comparison is nonsensical (can you imagine Trump saying anything like the quote at the end?), but to evangelicals who know nothing about Cyrus the Great except what is in the Old Testament, it's a convenient justification for supporting a man who is so far from embodying their "claimed values".

It's not about Trump manipulating the evangelicals. It's about the evangelicals' own carefully self-curated credulity, which embraces Trump because he offers what they truly want.

Oddly enough, the Bible itself provides a rationale that could be used to justify such bullying, but modern Christians never use it. The Old Testament is full of cases where God destroyed a whole town or tribe (or, in the case of the flood of Noah, the whole world) because "sin" was becoming widespread. If you believe that God will destroy your entire city once the number of red cars being driven there exceeds a certain hard-to-define level, you might indeed be justified in banning them for everybody, to save the whole city. But again, Christians today never seem to bring up this point.

They do sometimes argue that their taboo system represents objective morality, and that saying "if you don't want to drive a red car, don't drive one, but don't stop me from driving one" is just the same as saying "if you don't want to commit murder, don't do it, but don't stop me from doing it". But this is a bad argument since it merely highlights the difference between taboo and morality -- murder causes objectively-verifiable harm to someone other than the perpetrator, whereas driving a red car does not.

In reality, of course, the true reasons for behavior are often different from the stated ones. An obsession with dominance and status, and asserting dominance over others, is characteristic of members (especially males) of almost all primate species, and humans are just one more primate species. We can see this throughout human history, as conquerors or socially dominant groups have told subjugated groups, you must salute our flag instead of your own, you must speak our language instead of your own, you must worship our gods instead of your own. It's a way of feeling dominant by forcing others to explicitly express their submission. As a dominant group in the West for centuries, Christians have been accustomed to behaving this way without getting any push-back. Now that they are losing that dominance with the rise of secular government and the spread of non-belief, they feel the same kind of agitation, distress, and anger as a dominant chimpanzee who feels his status within the group eroding. Hence the growing desire to force non-Christians to perform symbolic expressions of submission by making us submit to their taboos -- the more arbitrary the better, since there are reasons for banning murder that have nothing to do with religion, but forcing non-Christians to submit to the taboo on, say, abortion clearly means they are being subordinated to Christian dogma specifically.

Christians are not the only people who do this, of course. The outbursts of rage and violence by Muslims against non-Muslims drawing cartoons of Muhammad reflect their alarm at realizing the unquestioned dominance Islam has long held in the Islamic world does not apply everywhere or to everyone. The unbelievers must be forced to express submission by conforming to the Islamic taboo.

This doesn't describe the majority of Americans. It describes those whose lives are dominated by ideology (political or religious), the activists, the people who are convinced that anyone whose beliefs are opposite to theirs is a menace to the country. It describes those occupying the outer 20% or so at each end of the political spectrum. These are the people Robert Anton Wilson described as so blinded by their own ideology that they cannot see the flesh-and-blood victim of the ideology bleeding in front of them -- they lack empathy because their convictions have bludgeoned it unconscious within them. They get their answers from a memorized rule book instead of by thinking.

These people make the most noise. They're the most likely to have strident blogs and strident social media accounts. But they aren't the majority of Americans. Most of us fully recognize the toxicity of their mind-set and try to avoid dealing with it as much as possible.

And this type of anger mistaken for strength, and the lack of empathy that goes with strident ideology, is not limited to the US. Islamist fanatics in the Middle East have the same mentality. It seems to be spreading in Russia as frustration rises with the Ukraine war. And in those places, too, such people are in the minority, even if the noise they make causes them to appear typical to the distant observer.

What does it mean to be an American? I would once have said a basic loyalty to the ideals of the Constitution, but even that is now lacking among some of the extremists (see leftists' disdain for the plain meaning of the Second Amendment, rightists' enmity toward separation of church and state). I doubt there is any near-universal commonality any more. There's probably no answer to the question other than the bald fact of legal citizenship.

Absolutely. If anything, I resent how much time and energy I did dedicate to the drudgery of some mindless job over the years simply because I needed the money. Almost nobody would work at a regular job if they didn't need the money. The brainwashing to treat work for its own sake as a virtue reminds me of the brainwashing under Mao to dedicate yourself to serving the Communist party instead of to your own personal needs and interests -- except it's more effective.

I called it "inept PR" because of the fact that Ron Reagan is not such a well-known figure today (as the post noted), which blunts the impact of the ad.