Godless Wednesday: Americans' Discomfort With Atheist President

The Friendly Atheist has a great post up today discussing the new poll results from the Public Religion Research Institute which demonstrate that Americans would be more uncomfortable with an atheist President than a Mormon President or a Muslim President!

Friendly Atheist takes a closer look at the graphic above and provides the following analysis:

67% of all voters would feel somewhat or very uncomfortable with an atheist president.80% of all Republicans, 70% of Democrats, and 56% of all Independents feel the same.So Democrats would be more uncomfortable with an atheist president than a Muslim president.
Republicans — not surprisingly, a higher proportion of them than Democrats — would be equally uncomfortable with both an atheist president and a Muslim president.
Overall, though, a non-theistic presidential candidate has a bigger hurdle to overcome than a person of any faith at all. It’s unbelievable that in this day and age, America still has this much of a hangup over a leader who would put more weight in evidence and logical thinking than in an imaginary god and ancient books.

Hear, hear! Friendly Atheist also notes that 31% of Americans would be somewhat or very comfortable with an atheist president while 33% of Americans would be somewhat or very comfortable with a Muslim president.

His suggestion to change these numbers is to encourage more people (and people who run for office) to come clean about their lack of faith and their belief in free-thinking instead of wishful thinking.

This is my first post in what is hopefully going to be a weekly series focusing on atheism and agnosticism and the foibles and failures of faith. I'd love to hear feedback from readers about Godless Wednesdays. Suggestions for a better title would be welcomed!