Onward Atheist Soldiers just doesn't have the same ring to it.Tell that to Christopher Hitchens, who once said some bullshit about how the US Millitary (Specifically the 82nd airborne, for whatever reason) was the greatest force for atheism in the world. This was at a round table with some other atheists (including Dawkins, maybe Sam Harris) who just kind of sat there like -- wut? Which was kind of funny.
I would think that it would be nice for a non-religious soldier to have the availability of an adviser who will not push things in a religious direction and who will not carry the stigma (in one's record or otherwise) of having been treated by a mental health professional.Maybe the military should try to destigmatize people getting psychological counseling.
No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. - GHW BushAmong many many many many many other examples.
Awesome. I can't wait to see rightwing heads explode over "atheists = satan in human form" vs "soldiers can do no wrong".Right wingers have no problem throwing soldiers under the bus when those soldiers fail to conform to their expectations; this is nothing new. Witness John Kerry, a genuine war hero against whom they ran a multimillion dollar smear campaign specifically to call his medals fake and him a traitor and so forth. Or witness the booing of the guy at a recent Republican presidential debate who, in his question for the candidates, mentioned that he is both a veteran and gay. Or witness the frequency with which chickenhawks who did their best to avoid military service attack Markos Moulitsas, an actual veteran, as being anti-military and anti-American. Or witness a hundred other such things.
Evening prayer over the 1MC, as well as other prayers offered from medical to the brig, to flight deck control, punctuate life at sea for many who serve aboard George Washington.posted by Jahaza at 1:36 PM on November 16, 2011
Now, it has always struck me that the broader Humanist movement has little interest in the private sphere. Humanists certainly talk about ethics. They argue that ethics derives not from supernatural sources, but from the cooperative efforts of human beings over millennia. They see such naturalistic ethics as a hallmark of their philosophy. But this is ethics in the abstract, not in the concrete. Think of the difference between understanding and explaining the phenomenon of love, and actually loving someone. They are very different. Believing in naturalistic ethics is not the same as a commitment to behaving ethically.I would like hear other Humanists' views on whether this is a fair assessment (he does cite some evidence later on), but in light of the confusion that seems to exist about what role an atheist community should have in the morals of its members' private lives I think it's interesting that there is a movement that has made it a point of its own existence to deal with this explicitly.
Suspecting that ethics in the private sphere is not one of Humanism’s key concerns, I wanted to see whether my hunch was correct. I chose a period, 1990 to 1999, and reviewed every issue of the Humanist, the magazine of the American Humanist Association. During this period, the magazine had more than one editor, so any findings would not be the result of a single editor’s idiosyncrasies, but would more likely be a result of the AHA’s moral and intellectual predilections.Once again, I'd like to hear about whether that's a fair assessment.
I found almost no articles about ethics in the private realm. There were articles about freedom of choice, animal rights, euthanasia, environmentalism, issues not without implications for individuals; yet they were presented always as social issues about which one needs to take a stand, rather that issues that speak to our private lives. There were a few minor exceptions, of course. By and large, however, one can read this magazine and wonder whether its readers have a personal life. Don’t humanists have children they worry about? parents that they must care for? Why doesn’t their concern for ethics, so persuasively claimed to have naturalistic roots, apply to private matters? In one of the very last issues of the magazine that I looked at, I did find an article that struck me as close to the heart of Ethical Culture. It was a discursive essay entitled “Compassion as a Means to Freedom.” There were plenty of articles that claimed that we should see the compassionate side of a given issue, but only this article on the importance of compassion itself. Why?
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posted by DU at 10:53 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]