An Atheist Should Not be President of the United States

To start off I would like to say that my opponent never fully specified what he meant by the resolution, leaving it open to interpretation. It's very easy to think that by saying "an atheist shouldn't become president" is equivalent to Ben Carson saying "a muslim shouldn't become president," and then he continued to say, on a later date, that he meant muslim candidates should be required to reject certain parts of their religion. It's very easy to interpret the resolution differently, and I am allowed to do so as my opponent hadn't given any real specifications. He isn't allowed to suddenly re-clarify the resolution in the last round. After that my opponent pretty much dropped all my arguments relating to the constitution. In his final round my opponent says two different things, first he rejects my statement that he believes that "simply because the American founding fathers were religious, we are now allowed to discriminate based on religion. But then he goes on to say the declaration of independence is important because "it's significant that our founding fathers believe in God given rights. " My opponent basically discredits himself here, he doesn't try to defend why he thinks it matters that the founding fathers were religious, and in fact denies that he said this. But then in the very next paragraph he goes on to say the same thing, again, without explaining what this has to do with the topic at hand. This entire argument is useless because my opponent hasn't explained why it matters. He says this… "…that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (God given rights), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…" Now what does this have to do with the prospect of an atheist president? Nothing. My opponent even ends his paragraph with… "When you read the constitution of a right that people have, the founding fathers believed that the right came from God. " Again, he doesn't explain why the personal religious beliefs of our founding fathers has any impact on our elections, and he hasn't done so throughout the entire debate, thereby making this argument void. After this my opponent says that the constitution is secular, simply because it mentions God. However he hasn't quoted any significant sections of the constitution to back up his claim. The only section he quoted was a line telling us the date of independence, nothing really that significant that affects us today. He then makes the absurd claim that a secular document wouldn't have given people religious freedoms. Why is this so? He doesn't explain this. The definition of secular is - Not connected with religious or spiritual matters. - It is a secular constitution that is most likely to not restrict people's religious freedoms by subscribing to one religion only. This claim by my opponent is false, and he has failed to show that the constitution isn't a secular document. In the last paragraph of part one my opponent basically restates his claim that it would be a bad idea to have an atheistic president because our founders were religious. He says that they created the constitution to tell people they had these "god given" rights. This is wrong, they created the constitution, the supreme law of the land, to enforce the rights that were agreed upon by Americans at the time. They created the constitution to be the objective document that ensures we have our rights. My opponent also makes the false claim that atheists believe rights are subjective. This is wrong. I never said this once in the debate. Atheists believe that morals are subjective, however this doesn’t mean that they will go ahead and break laws every time they feel like it. My opponent keeps saying that atheists believe rights are subjective, but he hasn't proven that any atheist thinks this way. While religious people use religion as their objective measure of rights, atheists use the constitution and the fundamental human rights that have been agreed upon globally. My opponent does not really prove that morals are objective. In fact, he even states that "most people agree on what is moral and what is immoral. " Then he thinks that this is proof that morals are objective. The majority getting together and deciding that one thing is correct doesn't make it objectively correct. Most people agreed with Hitler and his Nazi party in Germany, does that mean they were the most morally correct people in Germany? For my last statement, a main thing that I would like to point out is that my opponent has said over and over again that "god decides" and "god gave us our rights," however he is assuming that god actually exists. He hasn't given any evidence of this. He does briefly try to refute this by saying that there are Cosmological, teleological, ontological, moral, biblical, mathematical, etc. arguments for god. This statement is useless and contributes nothing to the debate as my opponent couldn't even find one specific piece of evidence for god. The reason that this matters is he says we shouldn't have a president who doesn't believe that god gave us our rights. However he can't even prove that god did give us our rights, which renders almost his entire argument useless. I say that it is far worse to have a president who blindly believes that there is a god, without having any evidence to support his claim. And with that I'll conclude this debate. I'd like to congratulate my opponent on doing a great job on what appears to be one of his first debates on DDO, and would like to welcome him to the site. Thank you for instigating and putting in the time to debate this topic.