Atheism and American Elections

American atheists should be delighted that this flapping mess of an advertisement is being widely trounced throughout the American media, calling it the "scummiest ad of this campaign" and other such well-deserved titles. There continues to be a kind of loathing for any kind of skepticism when it comes to the existence of god throughout the election campaign. It makes me wonder whether the bigoted America far-right would actually rather Obama be a Muslim than an atheist. After denouncing the recent preachings of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, which I was wont to cover during its time, Obama has had to re-prove that he's a religious person in order not to alienate the reportedly mobile, and assumed undecided Christian voters. There's nothing wrong in appealing to the values and beliefs of a religious group, but why should the general ideology be constructed to eliminate the atheist population? Almost 20% of Americans now profess no specific faith, which infers that they don't attend a church. Indeed, atheists tend to think along similar lines anyway, and we don't need to meet in a grand hall every week to sing and chant about what we believe in some sort of attempt to remind ourselves of convictions we should maintain regardless. As an aside, isn't it strange that members of a congressional flock always vote the same way? Isn't that a direct encapsulation of the fickleness and unthinking of huge swathes of the American religious population? Whatever will become of election campaigns in the future? Perhaps at last, it is conceivable that candidates will wish to appeal to the atheist masses. Obviously, should the atheist population take up a greater role in the public sphere, any political electee will focus their policies or speeches around issues that concern unbelievers. However, it's depressing to hear of Obama or McCain reaching out to "swing voters" through the conduit of faith even though they may only enclose a very small number of the overall electorate, particularly in comparison to the number of atheists. Maybe I'm being pessimistic. Its quite possible that the candidates at present are merely ignorant of this fact and whomever comes to realise as such will benefit in ways never before thought possible by the promulgators of the sickening self-aggrandizing propaganda campaigns such as this one.