Last night, I went to listen to Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization aligned with Americans United For Separation of Church and State. Weinstein is head plaintiff in a court case which seeks to prove that there is a pervasive and pernicious pattern of proselytising within the U.S. Military. His basic premise is that even though the Premillenialists, Dominionists, and Reconstructionists make up only 12% of the population, they make up a higher percentage of soldiers because they're encouraged to join the military where existing organizations teach them to be "soldiers for Christ" first.

Some of the examples Weinstein claimed to have documented include:

• A Lieutenant in Iraq telling his troops after one was killed by an IED that the death was the fault of "the unsaved among us," because they threaten unit cohesion
• Assignments with the highest likelihood of combat fatalities going to soldiers who refuse to fall in-line with the evangelical leadership
• A sergeant (who was later busted, and reported in the media) who was passing out "When Americans are killed they go to Heaven with Jesus, but when Iraqis are killed they go to Hell" Chick-style tracts on the streets of Baghdad
• The Air Force's official policy is that it "reserves the right to evangelize the unchurched." (Quote from the Air Force head of Chaplaincy, Sep 17, 2005 NYT "Religion" column)
• The same Chaplain gives a "voluntary" church service in which he orders those present to "get in the face of your fellow soldiers who are not here and make them bow their knees before Christ"
• The "Crusaders," an F-16 wing, operated over Iraq airspace for a year before anyone complained about their name or their flight patch: a crusader's cross, helm, and sword, with three stars they admit is for the Trinity
• A Pentagon-sponsored officer's organization with the stated purpose of "creating a military empowered by the holy spirit"

That's just what I can remember; the list of examples he had went on and on and on. It was terrifying; if even one-tenth of what he says is true, our nuclear arsenal is more or less in the hands of the people who really do believe that Jesus needs just a little more help to make it back to Earth.

Tags: activism, atheism, religion, shrill
Current Mood: scared
Current Music: Threshold, Hollow

On NPR last week, Penn Jillette was asked to write on their series, "This I Believe." And he chose to toss a grenade into the blogosphere with his essay This I Believe: There Is No God. And I have to agree with him when he writes:

I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven.

Looking through technorati, I find both strong support for Jillette's essay, and lots of backlash. The backlash is saddening because it's so malinformed; one author goes into the adhominem fallacy that "the largest avowedly atheistic endeavors were calamaties," citing Stalin and Mao, and then asking, "Do we really want people who believe like Penn Jillette running things?" and then argues from authority by quoting Einstein's theism as if somehow that closes down all debate.

Another says she's "saddened" by Jillette's article because her faith is the only thing that gives her hope: that this is all for a purpose. AIDS, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, drought, famine all begging the question, "Couldn't this have happened some other way?" A third called Jillette "nothing more than a modern-day socialist"; funny, the man seems thoroughly capitalistic to me.

But more than that, over and over there's the smarmy "I feel sorry for Jillette because he can't see it." Well, y'know, I don't see it either, and if there is a God, that's His moral failing and not mine. If there are consequences for not believing, and God dictates who gets sufficient evidence and who doesn't, then the consequences are arbitrary. We have a word for someone with responsibility who doles out punishment from whim: evil.

When it comes down to it, which, really, is harder: to believe that a super-simple universe, emergent from nothing, iterating simple physical properties billions and billions of times, brought about all the wonderful complexity you see around you, or that a super-complicated and mightily all-powerful God built a simple and undignified little universe of pain and sorrow, leaving behind no coherent explanation whatsoever?

Tags: atheism, religion
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: The Circular Ruins, The Remains of Summer