I agree with you, Airman Doors. I’ve been an atheist all my life. Bible readings at school didn’t bother me. I don’t mind public prayer. There are lots of other public ceremonies don’t mean anything to me. Public prayer is just one more. It’s just part of life in the big world. WE should be able to get along with people even if they disagree with us about some key issues.
I add my opinion to december’s here - I said as much in this thread.
I suppose that if a specific denomination is honored at something that’s symbolic of an entire multicultural nation, then it’s a bit inappropriate, but generally if religious people want to do it, why not let 'em? Ain’t going to harm me.
This is more answering a different aspect of the title rather than relating to the quote in the OP. Maybe someone can explain this, but for some reason some people tend to feel the need to correct others as they see it, and rally people behind their view. My WAG is that it’s a psychological issue - convincing other people to believe the way you believe may give you more confidence in your belief, may confirm that you’re right. I agree I can be hypocritical - I’m atheist and I would hate it if someone made fun of me because I was atheist, but I like pointing out to Christians different reasons why I see their belief as stupid, and I don’t really know why I do. For some reason I feel the need to spread my view, although when I sit down and think about it, if they believe that way, why does it matter as long as it doesn’t affect me? It doesn’t matter, but for some reason I, and many others, are just naturally argumentative.
Also, I think another reason people argue their religion is to figure it out more. If you can validate your own claims while arguing, even if the other person isn’t “converted”, you at least understand and develop your beliefs more. I’m sorry this post is pretty jumbled and rambling, but it was just something I needed to type as I thought aloud.
jjimm, I do not think anybody is trying to prevent anybody in the military from exercising their religion on their own time. I think what some have a problem with is the government endorsing and supporting the exercise of a religion. If that were civil life it would be ruled unconstitutional in a heartbeat but the military has more leeway.
I also resent the small but lethal percentage of religious people who go about blowing people up in the name of whichever gods they worship. Stop it, OK? It’s annoying.
Well I guess the presence of military chaplains is largely historic. How about some form of humanist/atheist pastoral care was offered in conjunction with all the religious ones?
That’ll happen right around the time witches are added to the military payroll.
As an agnostic, I see atheists as more of an organized tilting-at-the-windmills bunch. Actively protesting religious influence and promoting lack of evidence for religious beliefs does not equate to participating in a religion. If such behavior constituted “worship”, then we’d suddenly have a slew of new religions.
One more minor annoying facet of post 9/11-life in the U.S.: a number of major league baseball teams started having renditions of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. It seems like everyone else but me is standing up during the song (I don’t because it is not my national anthem and I consider it religious-oriented) and I wouldn’t be surprised if some bozo took offense at my “lack of respect”. Hasn’t happened yet though.
And it won’t happen at a Cleveland Indians game (they’re still sticking with “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” and “Y.M.C.A.” 
Yeah, it’s refreshing to see completely non-religious songs like YMCA at the Indians games 
Speaking as an accidental deist… the product of a Catholic father and Jewish mother, I was raised without church or temple visits except for weddings and funerals.
The only thing I can say here is that I feel not entirely unlike a vampire when forced through social custom to enter such a place: that it is somewhere I should not be, that it is not somewhere I am welcome. It’s not about religion, or about priests, it’s about the massive weight of the institution.
That’s really about the size of it, for me, at least… being in the presence of someone who is actively praying for me, or a church, or some other similar activity, is not entirely unlike one of those dreams where you show up for school/work completely naked. Just very, very uncomfortable.
There’s nothing wrong with prayer. It’s just not something I grew up with as a normal event. It’s not so much as I don’t believe, it’s that it makes me feel excluded… or, alternatively, bored and annoyed, not unlike being stuck in a corner of a party with someone rambling on about the finer parts of rugby.
I’m aware of rugby. I’ve had friends that played it, I know how it works. It’s ugly and brutal at points, and I have a personal aversion thanks to this one guy at college who would come back to the dorms drunker than hell and try to tackle me at about 3 AM as I watched the telly in the common room. Bugger outweighed me by about a hundred and fifty pounds, too.
So maybe I don’t want to be involved in rugby conversations, maybe I don’t want to pay for rugby stuff. Not that there’s anything specifically wrong with it as it’s normally played, and it has a rich tradition of history behind it, and, in fact, is the ancestor of a sport I quite like to play, soccer.
Just… well… it’s there, I’m here, and I’m not really interested in a pick-up game.
I consider myself an atheist, but I do none of the above. I just don’t believe in anything ‘occult’ (in its widest sense of the word). Maybe it’s because I’m from a place where atheism is in the ascendant and rarely gets irked by religion.
Nitpick: descendant, not ancestor.
As an atheist, an a former obnoxious asshole atheist who did have a problem with religion, I may be able to shed some light on the hand-stabbing atheists.
Part of it is a persecution complex. Part of it is feeling superiority to all of you foolish believers. But you remember how you felt when you found out there was no Santa Clause? Take that feeling, and multiply it by lots. Many atheists exist in a state of permanent pissed-offedness due to the failure of the universe to be as bright and beautiful as they were told it was.
Well sure, in theory. In reality there can be a great deal of pressure to conform, though. And in many instances there is a certain condescention, a shame in not believing. And often enough, there very real political, social, and even violent pressure to believe. Atheists who “just go along” tend to maker harder on everyone else.
I’ve heard this said a trillion times, but never before by an atheist, and I’ll never understand it if I live to be a trillion years old.
I live in a world where sunlight turns into wine.
I live in a world where man has walked on the moon.
I live in a world where I can see stars the way they were thousands of years ago.
I live in a world where we know what quarks are up to.
I live in a world where humans replicate the mechanisms of the stars themselves.
I live in a world where my eyes work, where bats “see” through sound, where squids change colour in the blink of an eye, where eels can emit electric shocks, where fish shine in the dark, where whales can dive three kilometres holding their breath for ninety minutes, where turtles breathe with their butts… and all of this just happened.
If that isn’t bright and beautiful, I don’t know what is. The universe is an amazing, beautiful, fascinating, indescribable, unfathomable, extraordinary place, and I emphatically do not need to invent some imaginary father figure to make it so.
I’m not in the military-never have been-so I don’t know if my opinion will count for anything, but anyway;
I’m a Christian, and I have no problem with their being a preacher in the military, as long as it’s not required to go to his service. By the same standard, I think that their should be an equivilant to a preacher for all the other religions present in the military.
The way I view it is this: I don’t think it’s right for the military to promote one religion over another, yet if I were involved in a war I’d want a man of the cloth to go to.
Does that make sense?
Along with everything listed above, one if my biggest problems with organized religion is the extreme hypocracy of it all. The military chaplain service is especially bad in this regard. In the US Navy, a recent report said that a significant percentage, something like 20-30%, of the chaplains have been disciplilned for sexual harassment, downloading pron, etc. The Catholic priests and nuns I remember from childhood were usually interested more in money than anything else, despite their vow of poverty.
In a perverse sort of way, I have to thank the Jesuits for my strong religious training in high school. They gave me the thinking skills to see that Christianity has as much validity as the old Roman gods.
Nitpick the nitpick: I think he knows what he is trying to say and I think he said it right: Rugby is the ancestor of soccer. (I am not saying it is so, as I don’t know, I am saying that is what he is trying to say.)
That’s it right there. In exchange for having the opportunity to be shot for your country a whole separate society is built within the larger whole. You have a separate justice system (to an extent), police force, housing, traditions etc. Why not also address the spiritual needs of that community? The people making up the military are no more different than those that do not. Why should their spiritual needs not be addressed? Besides I can’t imagine the US military not having rabbis, ministers, priests, nondenominational preachers etc.
As an aside are these prayer services mandatory?
Nitpick the nitpicked nitpick: Inbred cousin: http://www.quakerugby.org/history.shtml
Well, maybe descendant, but it all got codified at the same time. I was thinking about the oblong ball being more similar to the traditional pig’s bladder after you kicked it around a bit. Or person’s head, whichever.
On chaplains in the military - (just another opinion)
Many soldiers get a psychological benefit from having a chaplain in their unit. As long as the chaplain’s presence increases the net moral of the soldiers in a cost effective way (something difficult to measure) then I see no reason to stop the practice. However, If the chaplain is pestering those who have made it clear they don’t subscribe to his religious mumbo-jumbo, then that chaplain should be replaced.