The Best Argument For Atheist Chaplains Is… Christian Chaplains

From the US Army Chaplain Corps website:

Mission Statement:
The U.S. Army Chaplain Corps provides religious support to America’s Army while assisting commanders in ensuring the right of free exercise of religion for all Soldiers. In short, we nurture the living, care for the wounded, and honor the fallen.

Source.

We nurture the living
We care for the wounded
We honor the fallen. That’s all.
Our mission is not
To convert unbelievers,
Or promote Christianity’s call.
To those who will claim
That the godless are different
And somehow, we can’t get along…
It’s not that you’re spouting
A different opinion—
The God’s honest truth is, you’re wrong.

I have former students in the military. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are atheists. One calls me his “atheist friend”. (I hate phones. I loathe phones. I avoid phones. I have this man’s number on my phone, and keep in touch. He’s that important.) Some, I am well aware, have been under fire. None of my own students have been killed. Others at Cuttlefish U. have not been so fortunate.

Think of the people you know who are in the military. Whether you agree with their religious views or not, whether you agree with their mission or not, my goodness, you care about them. With that in mind… please watch this:

The caller, identified as a “former Navy Chaplain” (we have reason to suspect callers), is an utter ass. (update–apparently, he is identified by name, and is in fact who he says he is, and remains an utter ass.)

They don’t have spiritual needs the way that religious sailors do. I was a Navy Chaplain and chaplains, by definition, are people of faith. They cater to the spiritual needs, they cater to the beliefs, or the religious needs… if you don’t have a religion, then you don’t have religious needs, so you don’t need the services of a chaplain.
If you need counseling, you can go to a secular psychologist in the military — that’s free of charge and that’s confidential*, so what would the duties of an atheist chaplain be?

The chaplains themselves (quoted up at the top) say that they “nurture the living”. Atheists certainly might need that, now and again. Perhaps quite often, if they happen to be in a stressful situation, like… oh, I don’t know… combat. Chaplains “care for the wounded”. I suspect that wounded atheists need every bit as much care as any others. Different context, but Shakespeare would probably have asked “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” (oops–sorry, Jewish chaplains are allowed.) Chaplains “honor the fallen”. Anyone who thinks atheists do not honor and mourn is a sociopath.

The caller, apparently Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, is exhibit number one as to why Christian chaplains are inadequate. I have no doubt that there are other christian chaplains who are competent. Who can look beyond the “atheist” on the tag and see a human being who needs help. And be willing to help. But as long as there are Klingenschmitts in the Chaplains Corp, there is a serious need for atheist chaplains.

Oh, and as an aside (it doesn’t deserve more attention than an aside), Solomon’s quip about atheists encouraging suicide is one of the more offensive things I have seen this year (and as you know, I intentionally read comment threads on the internet). I could, of course, direct his attention to the good people at Rapture Ready (no, I will not link there–search at your own risk, or just think about what the title implies), and consider that I could make a claim (with considerably more backing than his) that it is evangelical christians who would advocate self-slaughter. But really, a truly good person would be above that. Guess I’m just all right.

*this Klingenschmitt bearing false witness. Visits to the psychologist are part of your permanent record.

The Christian Post Just Doesn’t Understand

I have to keep praying
Keep constantly praying
My soul is at stake if I pause
Each moment of silence
Or prayer I’m not saying
Is grist for the devil, because
Each time when we eat
And we don’t pray at dinner
Thank god, we’re about to be fed
It’s promoting the views
Of the wrong sort of sinner
An atheist message, instead!
Each moment god’s glory
Is not being touted
Is one where it’s being opposed!
So if prayer can’t be spoken
Or whispered, or shouted,
Then neither can silence! Case Closed!

In an editorial at the Christian Post, Wallace Henley illustrates the myopia of privilege.

The House of Representatives voted July 23 against proposals for atheist chaplains in the U.S. military. The vote was an overwhelming defeat for the idea. Only two Republicans and 171 Democrats voted for atheist chaplains.
Contrary to what you may be reading, Christians should be disappointed and atheists should be glad.
Why? Because allowing atheist chaplains recognizes atheism as a religion and would make atheists subject to the same legal restrictions they have gleefully placed on every other religion.

Which, of course, is already the case. As the ACLU and others make clear in every first amendment case they take on. Which Dave Silverman makes clear in every interview.

In the contemporary environment it is easier to speak against God than for God in the public square. An officially sanctioned military chaplaincy for atheists could actually weaken the atheists’ grip on public religious expression.

Feel free to insert your own video montage of lawmakers in DC and across the country concluding their speeches with “and may God bless the United States of America”, and of Congress on the capitol steps singing “God Bless America”, of the same lawmakers reciting the pledge of allegiance and practically shouting “under God!”. Compare the amount of religious broadcasting to the handful of local atheist radio shows. Henley is clearly delusional here.

Think about the inferences.

He means “implications”.

Now, every time a non-theist squeaks opposition to prayer at a school ballgame, or before a city council meeting, or most any other public event, powerful movements mobilize. The mere lifting of a potentially litigating eyebrow shuts down what many consider freedom of speech and expression.

Mind you, this is what happens now. See Cranston, or Jackson, or dozens of others. The reeling back of privileged position is not the same as an attack. Henley’s position is analogous to the commenter who spoke of “invisible statues of atheism“.

Atheism’s well-financed institutions often base their arguments on the allegation that taxpayer money is being used to advocate a particular religion. But if atheism is seen for what it is, a religion, then theists might be able to claim their tax money is now used to advocate the atheist position of no prayer.

Wait, can atheists claim a tax-exempt status under this view? Maybe I spoke too soon… And for the record, “no prayer” is not “the atheist position”–it has long been the case (it may still) that establishment clause cases are brought by religious believers (but not members of the majority), rather than by atheists. “No prayer” is a level playing field. If you want an atheist, anti-theist prayer, I would be happy to provide you with one.

So if atheism is recognized as a religion, might it be possible that theists could have new standing? They might even be able to argue that authorities are unconstitutionally favoring the religion of atheism by restricting prayer to a deity?
The Founders, we are reminded, opposed a state religion. But today secular humanism is most definitely the American state religion in the eyes of some courts. Atheists use their religion to regularly win orders for the removal of crosses and other religious symbols, the abolition of prayer in certain public institutions, and the prohibition of teaching that might imply advocacy of any religion in public schools except atheism.
This atheist chaplain thing could get messy for the atheists. If they are recognized as religionists they may be under the same Big Brother search lamp, legal threats and harassment theistic religions face every day throughout the nation.

Ok, fine. You want an anti-god invocation?

If you could please join me, before we eat…

God is fiction
God is fake
Thank the farmers for this steak (or cake, or shake… depending on the situation)
There is no heaven
There is no hell
It’s time to ring the dinner bell
Let’s Eat!

There–that’s an anti-god, pro-atheist invocation.

Do you see the difference between that and silence?

Presupposing Zeus

Is there really any reason
We should not believe in Zeus?
Or at least to say he possibly existed?
A professor of philosophy
Believes there’s no excuse,
Though his writing seems, to me, a bit ham-fisted.

If we presuppose existence
Of the Father of the Gods
Or of anything at all, for what it’s worth
Then we find we can’t disprove it,
Though it’s way against the odds,
You can’t kill it, once you presuppose its birth.

So an atheist’s denial,
The philosopher asserts,
Should be traded for a pure agnostic stance
But logic is supposed to help
In this case, logic hurts,
As we watch him make his suppositions dance

And it isn’t quite pragmatic
Just believing something true
Till it’s false beyond the shadow of a doubt
We have vast imaginations;
Our ideas will accrue
Since we never have the leave to weed them out.

A very strange thing, in the NYTimes Opinionator today–Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, writes “Did Zeus Exist?” He notes, first off, that the ancient Greeks certainly seemed to believe Zeus existed:

The standard line of thought seems to be that we have no evidence at all for his existence and so have every right to deny it. Perhaps there is no current evidence of his existence — certainly no reports of avenging thunderbolts or of attempted seductions, no sightings around Mount Olympus. But back in the day (say, 500-400 B.C.), there would seem to have been considerable evidence, enough in any case to make his reality unquestioned among most members of a rapidly advancing Greek civilization.

Further, as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. Socrates and Plato criticized certain poetic treatments, which showed Zeus and the gods in an unworthy light. But they never questioned the very existence of the gods, and Socrates regularly followed the dictates of his daimon, a personal divine guide. There were many questions about the true nature of the divine, but few about its existence.

Rather than being skeptical about the existence of a supernatural being, Gutting seems to turn Descartes on his head, refusing to doubt anything that there is the slightest possibility of being true, or even having once been true.

Most of us do not find our world so filled with the divine, and we may be inclined to dismiss the Greeks’ “experiences” as over-interpretations. But how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do? What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life? If we cannot eliminate this as a real possibility, shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?

If we can’t be 100% bulletproof, bet your children’s lives certain (and we can’t), we need to accept the possibility of, in this case, Zeus.

He then considers some objections, which you’ll have to see there. It’s a very brief piece, so I am perhaps expecting too much, but they really come down to “since we cannot unequivocally prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond any possibility… then it just might be true”. Mind, he’s not claiming it is true, but rather that we should keep our minds open.

On reflection, then, I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded. There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks. We have no reason to make this assumption. Further, supposing that Zeus did exist in ancient times, do we really have evidence that he has ceased to exist? He may, for all we know, just be in hiding (as Heine’s delightful “Gods in Exile” suggests), now that other gods have won humankind’s allegiance. Or it may be that we have lost the ability to perceive the divine. In any case, to the question, “May we properly remain agnostic about whether Zeus ever existed?” the answer is “Yes, we may.”

Two things, then. One, I’m surprised that a philosophy prof is conflating ideas of belief with ideas of knowledge. Disbelief in Zeus is absolutely grounded. Without convincing evidence (this is where “knowledge” comes in, and where his objections actually matter), Zeus has not passed the threshold for my belief. I have no obligation to believe in something that has no positive evidence for it, just because there is no evidence against it.

Which leads to my second thing. Presuppositional arguments may be logically airtight, but this example shows why good logic can lead to bad conclusions. It is absolutely true that science has to presuppose that there are no supernatural entities intervening, in order to examine the natural world. And we, therefore, cannot conclude there is no supernatural, since that would simply be circular logic, assuming our conclusions. And since our conclusions about the supernatural depend on our assumptions, the logic is no help at all.

A pragmatist approach, though, does not ask what is true, but rather, what is useful. A theory that explains more phenomena, or explains with fewer assumptions, is not necessarily “true” in any ultimate sense, but it is more useful than the theory it replaces. And theories are replaced–upgraded, if you will–all the time. They don’t have to be absolutely true or false–really, that is not a concern. And pragmatically, whether you believe there is a god that keeps the universe behaving naturally, carefully making it look as if the naturalistic explanations work… or whether you believe the naturalistic explanations… actually work… it really doesn’t matter. We know that if you start out assuming there is a god, you’ll conclude you can’t deny it, and if you start out assuming there is no god, you’ll conclude there is no need for one. So it really just doesn’t matter.

But (back to point one) that is all about knowledge. Not about belief. So… why would one presuppose the existence of a god? That’s the question we should be asking. Sure, once you presuppose one, you can’t deny it, but the same is true for Zeus, for Russell’s Teapot, for Sagan’s Dragon, and for compassionate conservatives. There may be no reason not to believe, but there is no reason to believe. Atheism is perfectly justified, even for agnostics.

One last thing… the comments at the article are very strange–given that it is the New York Times, the commenters are not what you usually see at, say, FoxNews or CNN. But the article itself is so bizarre, commenters can’t quite tell if it is satire, apologetics, excellent, horrible, or what. Anyway, I understood it all perfectly. By which I mean, you cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did not.

Christians I Have Known

My uncle is a Christian; that’s the label he would choose
Believing in the bible, and Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News
He never liked Obama, and he thinks the man should go
He’s a literal creationist; the bible tells him so.

My sister is a Christian; she’s the east coast liberal sort
She’s a feminist (and active, I am happy to report)
Loves the “wall of separation”—as a lawyer, she should know
And believes in same-sex marriage, cos the bible tells her so

My neighbor is a Christian, and she has been all her life
She’s married (I’m delighted!) to her lovely Jewish wife
The congregation blessed them, with their faces all aglow
God himself looked down and smiled; their bible tells them so

My parents both are Christians; they are elders in their church
They know the bible’s history, through scholarly research
They put no stock in miracles—that stuff is all for show
But follow Christ’s example, cos the bible tells them so.

Another Christian uncle—I assume he was, at least;
A minister for decades, till he ran off with a priest—
I don’t know if he still believes, or maybe he’s let go
And did he make his choice because the bible tells him so?

I met another Christian—that’s the first thing that he said
And suddenly, these questions started floating round my head
He’d really told me nothing—he’s a Christian, yes, but, so?
What’s it mean to be a Christian? Cos the bible doesn’t know.

Just a reminder that “Christian” is a big tent–nearly as big, and nearly as meaningless, as “believer” or “theist”. I know it bugs me when writers tell me “what atheists believe”, so I’ll try not to paint with the same broad brush.

Mind you, what I really want to do is find out how closely aligned individual members of a faith community are to the actual tenets of that community… and further, how much they are aware of that alignment. In other words… Three layers: official doctrine, member understanding of official doctrine, and member actual belief.

Step one would be collecting all the possible self-labels, to see which doctrine is supposed to line up… there are thousands, and not all mutually exclusive.

The Devil Went To Concord

The Devil went to Concord;
He was there to raise some hell
With Satanic clothes and music
And with drugs and porn to sell
He would fill young hearts with evil things
Like envy, lust, and hate…
He was climbing up the High School steps
When something whispered, “Wait!”

A mom was in the doorway,
Praying loudly, arms outstretched—
Asking Jesus Christ’s protection
Which the students thought farfetched
What an antiquated notion—
It’s as obsolete as sin—
But with Jesus in the doorway
Surely Satan can’t come in

That’s the way some people saw it
And they loved the mother’s zeal
If the school had no objections,
Then perhaps the tale was real
But some others in the district
Find the spectacle quite odd,
Cos the Devil’s merely fictional,
And so, in fact, is God

In a conflict of religious views
A school can’t take one side
So one faith can’t be promoted
And, of course, can’t be denied
Treating everybody equally
Is what it’s all about…
So the law’s the law in Concord
And the praying mom is out.

The full story, relatively neutrally reported, at the Union Leader. Of course, the misLeader is notoriously right-wing, so you have to look at the comments. It’s actually kind of fun, because New Hampshire has a mix of both types of conservative–the social conservatives who support the praying mom, and the (small L) libertarian conservatives who support the constitution.

The Concord Monitor’s editorial, agreeing that the school was right to end the praying. Fewer comments here, of course–a smaller paper–but the first one is the one that inspired today’s verse.

It’s Just A Bloody Cracker!

The flesh of our savior—
A wafer, or host—
Is a part of the Eucharist rites
And a miracle happens
Or so goes the boast
With each of the sav(i)ory bites

No longer a cracker,
It’s turned into flesh
(and the wine’s turned to blood, as you know)
Not rotted and nasty
But perfectly fresh
And we gobble it down, even so!

Some call it symbolic,
But we know it’s real—
It’s a truth that cannot be ignored
And once in a while
The blood will congeal
So we’re sure we’re consuming our Lord!

Via Doubtful News, a miracle! A communion wafer is apparently bleeding. I forget–is it believers or atheists who insist on literal interpretations of scripture, and of transubstantiation, and such?

I expect PZ to face charges, now that the wafer has so definitively been shown to be Jesus Himself.

Why Millennials Are *Really* Leaving The Church

“Why are millennials leaving the church?”
They asked, and they pondered and prayed
But the problem, it seems, that they had with their search
Is, they asked a millennial… who stayed.

Over at CNN, there’s a piece by Rachel Held Evans, “Why millennials are leaving the church“. Young people are leaving the church in droves, and the church wants to know why. In this story, the author (who has not left the church) points to the the slick packaging of today’s religion, the selling of sizzle rather than steak, and opines:

Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions – Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. – precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being “cool,” and we find that refreshingly authentic.

And a bit later:

You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.

Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus.

But there’s a problem with her analysis, and much of it I suspect comes from her own personal experience. After all, she did not choose to leave. She chose to stay. Having made a decision, we (at least we WEIRD subjects of the psych experiments examining the process) tend to justify our decision–we focus on the elements that support our decision, and minimize the elements that would have favored the path we did not take. What the church needs to do is ask the people who left… and then they need to actually listen. (I had two links for that sentence, illustrating what I mean, and for the life of me I can’t find them. If I do, I’ll update, and it will be worth it.)

But I suspect the CNN piece actually has the answer, hidden in plain sight:

At 32, I barely qualify as a millennial.

I wrote my first essay with a pen and paper, but by the time I graduated from college, I owned a cell phone and used Google as a verb.

I still remember the home phone numbers of my old high school friends, but don’t ask me to recite my husband’s without checking my contacts first.

I own mix tapes that include selections from Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but I’ve never planned a trip without Travelocity.

The thing is, it’s easier to find answers than ever before. The church no longer controls the information about the church, and has long ago lost the ability to control the information about the rest of the world. The plain truth is, there’s nothing the church can provide that clubs, schools, stores, and the internet cannot provide–except god… and there is less and less use for a god with every passing day.

If the restaurant you are sitting in turns out to have absolutely nothing on the menu… it’s not really surprising if you leave.

On “No Atheists In Foxholes”

Why the hell would you get all offended?
Is this something you atheists do?
A colloquial phrase
Said for decades, not days,
And it isn’t directed at you

It just means that whenever there’s trouble
Human nature determines, you’ll pray
Thus a foxhole will be
Wholly atheist-free
And that’s all that we’re meaning to say

So it isn’t directed at atheists
But at regular people, like us
And since turning to God
When you’re scared isn’t odd
There’s no reason to make such a fuss

Since we all turn to God in a foxhole
It’s no insult—it’s just what we see
So it’s all for the good;
We’re just misunderstood…

Yeah, it all sounds like bullshit to me.

Via Hemant, a recent kerfuffle over the phrase “no atheists in foxholes”–the foxnews version of the story is, of course, predictable, as are most of the comments there.

The comments that I want to speak to today, in particular, are the ones that say “hey, it’s just an expression, it’s not an insult to atheists, it just points out that when the shit hits the fan, it’s just human nature to look to a deity for help”. Yeah, we kinda knew what it meant, and the problem comes from the fact that it is both insulting and wrong. Not from any misunderstanding.

It reminds me of another “just an expression”, one my bigoted grandfather used to say. Let me preface this by saying I do not intend to equate the two, just to show the similarity in argument. My grand-dad, intending to compliment someone on doing right by him, would say “that’s real white of you.” Which, of course, was not at all intended as an insult to non-whites. It just meant that the attributes naturally associated with whites were honesty, hard work, integrity, and basic goodness, whereas the associated negative attributes were more what we expect to see in non-whites. Just an observation, you see; just a colloquial expression. Nothing personal, and certainly nothing racist.

When you use a phrase that is built upon an insulting falsehood, it doesn’t get to be grandfathered in just because it’s been around a while. Grandfathers can be bigots, after all.

And for those who are so kindly explaining to atheists how our reactions to the false and insulting “no atheists in foxholes” just show how thin-skinned we are… thanks. Really, thanks. That’s real white of you.