re: Would you vote for an open atheist for national political office?

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...haven't learned that I evolved better than they did...yet.

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An opposable thumb

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but I know that he will always choose the ice cream.

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No, you don't. You have RELATIVE certainty, not ABSOLUTE certainty. You are 99% sure they will pick the ice cream, God saw them pick the ice cream before he asked the question.

This I think illustrates the irreconcilable gulf between us: I will never be able to convey the paradox adequately to you because you have a fundamentally different (and I would say flawed) idea of what TRUE omniscience entails. You are not grasping the true scale of inevitability involved in that idea.

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Trump in mass numbers during the primaries.

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Very true.

Overlooked for the sake of the Presidential election is that there were several opponents of Trump in the primaries, and the Republicans didn't want any of them... Religion be damned, apparently.

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That's the beautiful thing about science and logic, they aren't dependent on your beliefs or mine. The objectively and impartially show us what can and cannot be true, and the longer we're around the more we discover and the more holes are filled.

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You're correct as it relates to the natural world. Assuming the superatural world exists (as it should in most religious worldviews), such a thing would not apply. The best you could hope for is to challenge supernatural evidences using naturalism, but even then, you couldn't fully disprove the supernatural using science.

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I find this interesting given that most Christians, even the most devout, would bend over backwards to dispute your stance here. Yours would still be the most logically consistent, but clearly the supposed act of regeneration does not change minds so much so that the idea of severely handicapped children Hell is no longer detestable.

The logically consistent view is that all dead babies, mentally handicapped individuals and people throughout history that never heard of Jesus are in hell. That's the only Jesus' death is meaningful. I assert that if that were part of orthodox Christian teaching, the number of Christians would dwindle by a couple orders of magnitude overnight.

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Regeneration is an act of the Holy Spirit, not an "enlightenment" brought on by an individual during their own reflection and study or experience. Therefore, the mind especially is changed to understand and accept the truth about our relationship with God in a way in which we can handle even hard truths that may prick us in the heart. You can use the example of a disabled child but it could be any child that dies early in life, or late in life (doesn't hurt less for a parent) or any loved one that is lost.

I wouldn't disagree with your assessment that if the truth of the scriptures were preached and understood as it was in the past that more and more people would walk away from Christianity. There are a lot of people who believe false doctrines (or don't spend any time thinking about doctrine at all) and are only "in it" because of tradition, or because they have a sense of belonging, or because they like singing, or any number of superficial reasons.

In the early years of Christianity, there were people who willingly died in horrible ways because they believed the truths of the scriptures. There are a lot of people today who would not willingly become martyrs over the Bible or Jesus. I have no doubt that people who were taught the truth about God would spit in their Bible and throw it at the preacher and never step foot in a church again. I believe that says more about the "Christians" than it does about the Christ proclaimed in the Bible.

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There's a place for everything and nothing is without context.

I might care where the IT guy goes to church if I know he goes to church of the left-handed-bandit that believes in bilking customers out of more money to give to the bandit that teaches him out to steal... in thine mercy.

Yeah, that's farcical, but if I know that Islam teaches that you can lie to infidels, I might be wary of someone who says they are Muslim treating me fairly. I probably have more to worry about a Muslim President than I do a Muslim IT guy, though. The stakes are a lot bigger as President.

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While true, to be fair I've been to enough Christian organizations to know what some of them teach (and not all of it are things Jesus would agree with). Should I hold all Christians accountable for those people? Should I not hire you as a supervisor because there's the possibility that you might have been part of the same group, the moment you tell me you're Christian?

There's a reason we have anti-discrimination laws in this country. It's so that misguided assumptions won't be placed upon the entirety of a group of people, and then APPLIED to individuals.

Our founding fathers wanted us to have the freedom to practice whatever religion we wanted. There's no asterisk next to the First Amendment.

I think individuals should be able to discriminate if they want to. I'm in favor of freedom of association and if someone doesn't want to do business with Christians, then so be it. Encouraging competition can help that.

With that said, I don't think people should discriminate unless they are going to violate their conscience by not doing so. The Christian thing would be to treat everyone fairly and equally.

Going back to the topic at hand, though. We are talking about the POTUS, someone who will not only represent the US to the world but also make major decisions about policy, appointments, and legislation that could drastically impact the future of the country. I think knowing a person's beliefs and core values is important, even more important than what they say on the stump about specific policy stances, because politicians can and do change their minds on individual issues a lot but rarely change their core values which influence those issues.

Why would a specific poster seem to feel use of "logic" is OK for the science community but not for a Christian?

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If I "know" (even just 99% sure) that my kid will choose the ice cream and he chooses it, does the fact that I was 99% sure instead of 100% sure change the outcome?

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Yes.

If you are 100% sure (as God is), then there cannot be free will. If you're 99% sure, there is wiggle room for free will.

An omniscient God is 100% sure. Ergo, we as humans have no freewill. Ergo, our salvation or damnation are predestined and we have no say in the matter. Ergo, the idea of God as a all loving creator who wants desperately for us to choose to follow him out of reverence is flawed. We have no such choice.

20 pages!