Are You a Closeted Atheist, or an Open Atheist? I mean, do you fake it sometimes?

[NNadir]

19. I suspect that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. I also believe, although he clearly was changed by the Civil War...

...that Lincoln was at least agnostic for parts of his life. He was not a regular church goer at any point in his life. His intellectual power came from reading, and it is certainly the case that in his youth, one of the only books available to him was the Bible. His mind was certainly powerful enough to understand that nonsense was nonsense.

His beautiful second inaugural speech of course, contained clear, overt, religious references, but I don't think up until the war was well on that he adopted a religion and it seems to me, that it was possibly metaphoric. He was, up to his death, a deeply troubled man, and it is normal, to my mind, for many people to embrace religion as a crutch in moments of extreme anxiety. People seem to need that suffering has some deeper meaning. I don't believe it does, but I understand people who do so need that crutch.

The orange pedophile is clearly an atheist to my mind, which is not to say that his atheism reflects on the rest of us, who can be ethical without reference to a god. There is no evidence that he ever seriously believed in any god other than money, despite what the MAGA Christian right cultists - who his managers use quite well - think.