Religion has been all over this election in the most schizophrenic of ways. Of course, this is no surprise given the schizophrenic nature of religious belief itself. (God created everything, but nothing created God.)

Barack Obama is still the victim of a whisper campaign that he is a secret Muslim, even though that is the punchline of a stupid joke, and even if it were true, this is supposedly a nation of religious freedom and there’s nothing in the constitution that says a Muslim cannot be president. Although there is also nothing in the constitution that says a black man or a woman cannot be President, and yet here we are talking about the first people to fit those descriptions coming close to the presidency after a long and contentious 232 years since our founding.

But then Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s decidedly Christian church, came along and drew all of the attention he did, even though he helped show, in his unique way, that in fact Barack Obama was a Christian. But then many of those same people who were worried about Obama being a Muslim decided that it was now his particular brand of Christianity that really bothered them.

And then someone in the Catholic church tried to do to Joe Biden what was done to John Kerry four years ago, namely deny him the sacrament of the Eucharist (because he was pro-choice) in an attempt to draw media attention. For the most part, that didn’t really work.

I’ve already spoken about the Democrats’ overtly Christian convention in Denver. The daily opening and closing Christian prayers, the CEO of the convention itself being a Christian minister, their ‘values’ forums and so forth. For this they received complaints from non-theists like me, and then they were also mocked by the likes of Fox News for trying too hard.

So, if you’re a Democrat, when it comes to Christianity, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Or, from the Republicans’ point of view, you’re just damned.

On the other side, John McCain has been seen by the Christian right as not being Christian enough, to the point where even James Dobson said he wouldn’t vote for a McCain presidency, even though McCain has courted the approval and endorsement of Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. Hagee drew some muted attention after McCain actively sought his endorsement. Hagee’s views about Israel, the apocalypse, gay people and life in general are all pretty scary, but in fact, are pretty standard in many southern churches. And McCain has rightly defended himself by saying that those were Hagee’s views, not his own, even though that defense didn’t work so well for Obama.

A sad lesson here is that the corporate media really do have a right-leaning bias in their coverage of religion and culture, as the views of McCain’s several religious surrogates are largely treated as ‘normal’ while the views of Obama’s single religious surrogate are acutely and repeatedly scrutinized.

And then there is Sarah Palin. Yes, she likes to kill innocent animals for fun. Yes, the Republican delegates hooted and cheered when Fred Thompson said that she “knows how to properly field dress a moose” (funny, I don’t remember killing animals being a constitutional requirement for the presidency, either). But, if you really want to get to know her, you’ll watch this video. Okay, really, you don’t have to watch the video, I’ll just give you the highlights. In these off-the-cuff remarks recorded at her church, she espouses a belief that Yahweh (she says “god,” but we know who she’s talking about) wants a gas pipeline through Alaska, and that invading Iraq was part of Yahweh’s grand universal plan, and that she is governor because her pastor prayed for her to be. (For fun, her pastor throws in his belief that Alaska is going to be a place where refugees go after the apocalypse. Won’t that be nice for them?)

Now, until this point, when talking about religion in this election, we were almost always referring to either the religious beliefs of surrogates, or to the perception of the candidates’ religious beliefs. In fact, outside of the infamous Rick Warren forum, neither candidate has gone much beyond the sound bite when it comes to speaking about their actual beliefs. And actually, of the two candidates, Obama has spoken much more openly in the past about his religion than McCain ever has.

But now we have, at a public event, on the record, the actual religious beliefs of a candidate herself.

It’s one thing for John Hagee to spout nonsense from the guise of the pulpit, but it’d be another thing entirely if he ever actually ran for public office. But in the person of Sarah Palin, we now have the equivalent of a John Hagee or a James Dobson actually running for the highest elected office in the land; albeit, she’s actually running to be the runner-up to that position. But still, when the lead candidate is in his seventies, the potential duties of the runner-up position begin to look a lot more like those George H.W. Bush had under Ronald Reagan. Sure, Dick Cheney might be pulling the strings of the current President, but George H.W. Bush was actually handed the keys to the country many more times under Reagan (because of Reagan’s age and failing health) than Cheney has ever been.

I will now ask a stupid question. Will the right-leaning corporate media endlessly replay and parse these remarks made by the actual candidate the same way they did those of Jeremiah Wright? It’s doubtful.

However, if I was to wear only my atheist hat (to continue the Daily Show meme) and simply dismiss these off-the-cuff remarks as religious nonsense, then I would also be dismissing the larger point about religion in this and every election.

If a candidate wears their religion on their sleeve as a reason to vote for them, then we must, as voters, begin comparing and judging the candidates’ religious beliefs as well as their other qualifications when we consider choosing them.

Whereas, when we judge someone’s competency to perform most tasks, we usually look at the total combination of their education, skills and experience in some objective, measurable way. At least, that’s what we should be doing. But in fact, we also judge people very subjectively on things like their personality or ‘likeability’ (something I know very well from my problems finding a job recently).

But when we are placed in the position of having to judge their religious beliefs, what objective, measurable criteria do we use? Do we rate them on how well they know their scripture? Do we rate them on how many times they pray, or how many Jesus fishes they have on their various cars? In fact, there is no objective measurement of a person’s ‘religiosity,’ and so all we are left with is the subjective. And for most people, the subjective boils down to simply this: how much is whatever I’m judging like me?

So, when ‘judging’ the religiosity of the candidates, most people in this country are simply asking how closely the beliefs of the candidates match their own, and so the election serves not so much to choose the next President as it does to divide America into sectarian groups. And then those same religious people laughably talk about the need for unity. When it is your own insistence upon making the subjective judgement of a person’s religion a key factor in deciding if you’ll vote for them, you simply have no right to turn around in the next sentence and stupidly wonder why our nation seems to be so divided.

As an atheist, I have only ever voted for Christians. This is why I always react angrily when Rick Warren or someone like him comes along and says that they’d never vote for an atheist, and that, in fact, no one should. Such people would never be caught in public saying that Americans shouldn’t vote for a Jew or for a black man (although they might think it), because such remarks would be dismissed as callous bigotry, and would make their public lives much more difficult. In fact, I could never get away with saying that you should not vote for a Christian, even though I wouldn’t say that and don’t believe it.

So why then, do I continue to vote for Christians, even though they are outside of my group? Well, what an absurd question. The real question is, why shouldn’t I vote for a Christian? In fact, the real questions of this election are all shouldn’t questions. Why shouldn’t we all vote for a black man? Why shouldn’t we all vote for a woman?

The real reason, then, to be in favor of the separation of church and state, is the same reason we are in favor of the separation of gender and state, or ethnicity and state.

Most of us have long since decided that using skin color or gender as reasons to either automatically include or exclude someone amounts to bigotry. Religion remains, therefore, the last criteria for automatic inclusion or exclusion that, in the minds of the Christian (or otherwise religious) public, does not amount to bigotry. In fact, for them, it amounts to a sacred right to be able to judge people based solely upon religion, or to be able to decide elections based upon how closely the religious beliefs of the candidates match their own.

But if I thought like that, then I could never vote for the black man or two women in the race, since they are outside my group. And I would most certainly never vote for a Christian ever again.

Also, that would make me an insane narcissist and a bigot.

So, the factor of religion in this and all elections is just another excuse for people to vote for someone just like themselves. It is the open acceptance of closed intolerance, the last forthright refuge of the bigoted and the insanely self-centered.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin, who believes that the Almighty Creator Of Existence wanted her to be the governor of Alaska (and also, presumably, the Vice-President). If I were to judge the Governor based upon the criteria of group membership which she and her ilk use to judge others, then I could never vote for her. Fortunately, there are all kinds of objective, secular reasons not to hand her the keys to the country, and so I don’t have to resort to bigotry to vote for her opponent.

Isn’t that an ironic statement?

I’m still waiting, then, for that same courtesy, the courtesy of using objective criteria, the courtesy of not being a bigot, to be applied to me and all Americans who are outside the Christian group; not just in elections and politics and law, but in everyday life.

I suspect I’ll be waiting a long time.