I will leave aside the question of whether there really was a historical Jesus. As I have stated many times (much to the dismay of those who think find my atheism suspect on this ground), I think the available evidence suggests that there was a charismatic preacher named Jesus--a human being, not the son of God--in the first century in Judea. Whether that presumably historical Jesus bore any resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospel stories is another question altogether--and one that cannot be answered.

But let us assume--just for the sake of argument, my fellow atheists--that the preacher named Jesus did espouse many of the principles articulated in the Gospels. It is still utterly ridiculous to speculate about what any inhabitant of the earth in the first century would have thought about contemporary political issues. Would Jesus have been in favor of gay marriage? Well, those who see the twelve apostles as a band of happy gay brothers might think so. Would Jesus have opposed the war in Iraq? Well, Iraq was called Babylon in ancient times and Jesus's Jewish contemporaries were well aware of their ancestors' sufferings in the two periods of Babylonian exile. So perhaps Jesus would have liked to keep Babylon a.k.a. Iraq in the past and at a distance. And of course we can't know what Jesus would have thought about Islam, since Islam lay centuries in the future. And what about capital punishment? Jesus the man certainly couldn't have enjoyed being crucified, so perhaps he would be against the death penalty. On the other hand, the entire Christian story of salvation rests on this particular enaction of the death penalty.

This is all nonsensical speculation. One might as well ask what the Emperor Augustus would have thought about American foreign policy--and we certainly know more about Augustus, the historical figure, than we do about Jesus.

These kinds of hypothetical questions offer no useful solutions to contemporary problems that neither an itinerant Jewish prophet nor the ruler of the Roman empire could have imagined. Indeed, such questions are of dubious value when applied to indisputably historical figures, such as the framers of the Constitution, who are much closer, in time and knowledge, to our own era. The right-wing legal philosophy of judicial "originalism," in which judges like Antonin Scalia channel the original intent of the framers, is the secular equivalent of attempting to claim Jesus's sanction for 21st century public policy.

Enough with this silly speculation about what Jesus would have done. I am interested in what Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain would do as president of the United States. And I am certain of one thing: none of these candidates is the reincarnation of Jesus.