Posted on 01/01/2011 2:50:50 PM PST by wmfights
Atheist organization Freedom from Religion Foundation demanded the Army halt a spiritual fitness program designed to combat stress because its diagnostic tool allegedly promotes religion.
FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor wrote a letter to Army Secretary John McHugh Wednesday to protest the “spiritual fitness” assessment of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. The co-presidents say statements in the mandatory “spiritual fitness” evaluation tramples on the freedoms of nonbelievers.
The spiritual statements include: “I am a spiritual person;” “My life has lasting meaning;” and “I believe there is a purpose for my life.”
Barker and Gaylor called the assessment of nonspiritual soliders “deeply offensive and inappropriate.”
“By definition, nontheists do not believe in deities, spirits, or the supernatural. The Army may not send the morale-deflating message to nonbelievers that they are lesser soldiers, much less imply they are somehow incomplete, purposeless or empty,” stated the letter.
The Army established CSF to address the increased stress induced by sustained combat. The program is meant to enhance the resilience, readiness and potential of soldiers, family members and Army civilians.
The CSF uses Global Assessment Test to diagnose the soldiers’ overall level of physical and mental fitness. The assessment has a section titled “Spiritual Fitness” that questions soldiers on their personal support systems, motivation, and methods of dealing with stress, among other things.
Besides the survey itself, FFRF also criticizes the curriculum for those who score low in the spiritual fitness as overtly religious. Soldiers in the programs are told that “prayer is for all individuals” and to seek out chaplain guidance, according to the group of freethinkers.
Yet contrary to FFRF’s claims, the program does attempt to acknowledge and cater to the beliefs of secular soldiers. According to the training manual, spirituality and the human spirit is defined, for the program purposes, as “the essential core of the person.”
The manual does make mention of religious practices such as prayer and talking with a chaplain. However, it emphasizes that prayer can be quiet thinking time. It also emphasizes that soldiers can talk with a fellow soldier for support rather than chaplains.
Army chaplains trained last month to participate in the CSF’s spiritual fitness initiative say it is about protecting soldiers’ mental health in the event of a traumatic experience, not conversion.
"Most traumatic events have an element of soul wounding," said the Rev. Dr. Chrys Parker, an Army chaplain, in a statement about the training.
Parker asserts that chaplains are best equipped to deal with issues involving the soul.
"Quite frankly, the chaplains have the expertise on how to deal with the spiritual damage that is inherent in trauma," he said.
So do animals have souls?
Religion frowns on that because it would make them a lot harder to use and abuse for food. My guess is that some animals have much of what we have, whatever it is.
Instead, he tries to help that soldier through a tough spot. Most times that wouldn't involve any religious discussion at all. He'd say something like, "Private Snuffy, what's going on, man?" Pvt Snuff might respond, "Wife back home is having trouble." "What kind of trouble, Snuff?" "Well, she made a mistake in paying bills and they're broke." "Snuff, why don't we get in touch with the family support group back in the states and have them contact her. They have all kinds of help resources. What do you think?" "That'd be great, Chappy." "Good...give me her name and number. I'll pass it on and set something up."
That, my friends, is a "spiritual (morale) assessment" and a follow-on response.
Thank you for the clarification.
The freedom from religion foundation doesn't know didly about the job of the US Military Chaplain.
And that's what really should be taken away from this article.
I take something else as well. I see a growing trend where every little thing (especially anything Christian) is found to be offensive to some small group and to placate the small group the things that made us great must be changed.
Thanks for the great post, lots to chew on.
One thought along the lines of the Franco-German model. If we are no more than barnyard animals why should we obey any higher laws? Why not just form the strongest group possible and do what we want. In the case of our military, the strongest group, why not just take over and make slaves of those that are of use.
Bull patties. Atheism is not a positive stance, it is simply an absence of belief. Lacking a belief in anything does not automatically align you with any random belief that happens to feature that element along with several others. That’s like saying “Failure to accept Mohammed’s prophecies aligns you with Communism.”
snip: I’m telling you that the simplest answer is usually the right one, and the simplest answer is: the world is what it is. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt, and when you die, it’s over. Personalities are indeed just part of your chemistry.
Spirited: The simplest answer is not a belief predicated upon a need to explain away man’s soul, mind, conscience, and free will.
The simplest answer is the one embraced by the Founders, which they defined as “self-evident” truths. Self-evident in that man really does know that he thinks, makes choices, and feels guilt. There is no way except by willful self-delusion that man cannot know these truths.
At bottom, both rationalist materialism and pantheist vitalism are alternative salvation systems. Salvation is not BY God the Father but FROM Him. It is had by either explaining away or denying the existence of mind, soul, conscience, and free will. Scrooge was a rationalist materialist. When Morley appeared, Scrooge tried to explain him away as indigestion caused by a bit of bad meat.
America and the West are even now experiencing an occult revival. Some of the world’s most powerful leaders have spirit guides. The UN has become a veritable temple of spiritism. Occultism always signals the end of a civilization.
Very dangerous times lie ahead. Your denial of a spiritual reality will not save you from its effects, or from the forces behind them. They are there whether you believe in them or not.
It is kind of like the number of dimesnional variables which limit a living thing. With plants the variables are less than with animals, and with animals the variable are less than with humans.
Indeed, 1010RD. This point cannot be stressed enough, IMHO. For it seems a great many people today, atheists and others in the grip of "scientistic" modes of thinking, are living by the "map," and not in the "territory" — which is the Reality in which individuals exist as "parts and participants".
Cicero called this mode of being aspernatio rationis, the rejection of, or contempt for, Reason. He diagnosed this rejection as a symptom of mental/spiritual disorder (read: pneumopathological disease)....
This disease seems to be endemic in our time.
Thank you so much for writing!
And thanks from me, too, dear xzins, for your illuminating essay/post!
thank you, bb
Why then hold to any beliefs about right and wrong?
If there is no belief that humans are any different than barnyard animals why should humans behave any differently?
I do admire your ability to make it up as you go along...
Most of them don't behave any differently. What we do have that animals don't have is imagination. It gives us our ability to create order, and also to destroy on a large scale. But it's just a physical attribute. There's no need to develop these intricate stories and people them with named dieties who have motives and moods. It's human imagination that does that, I suppose, from Native American mythology to Greek mythology to Middle Eastern. But it's the same impulse that allows us to create fantasy worlds with dragons and mages and beautiful princesses. Just a by product of the cerebrum and the frontal lobe.
Ever talk to these folks? It's fascinating, it's well-thought out and complex. It's just all in their head, is the problem. I've talked to others who have very detailed and documented evidence that aliens have warned us that Planet X is going to create a gravitational pull that will draw our galaxy into a nebula that will create such global catastrophe that most of us will die in 2012.
Religion is a series of stories that each generation adds to, tweaks, refines... witness another poster that gave me a hierarchy of souls and spirits in plant and animal life. Is that in the Old Testament? No, they're probably taking what they like of Hebrew lore and mixing it with a little Celtic or Native American... whatever. Each generation takes its parents stories and alters them a little, making them their own. Fine with me, as long as I can live my own simple life a safe distance from your highly-decorated and ritualized dramas.
Christians are only a mild annoyance. It's the muslims I really don't like, for reasons that I'm sure are obvious.
Your "simplest answer" — "the world is what it is" — is a non-answer. To me, it indicates a refusal both to apperceive or explain. You aver, but do not show any evidence in support of your assertion — except perhaps evidence that you have set yourself up as the measure of Reality in your own mind.
Evidently on your view, human beings reduce to their chemical composition — that's all there is — and the "world" is a matter of opinion, which differs from person to person. Although how can there be an "opinion" if all a human being is, is his chemical composition? Do chemicals "think" or "opine?"
But the Reality as measured by you is evidently grotesquely reduced to what can be known by means of direct sense perception. This is the positivistic Cartesian/Newtonian reduction, which envisions the world as a mechanism — i.e., the so-called machine metaphor.
But this machine metaphor, which evidently gave such comfort to Pierre Simon Laplace (the French mathematician and astronomer who authored Mécanique Céleste [Celestial Mechanics]), is ultimately self-defeating for two reasons: (1) All machines are purpose-built; and (2) All machines operate by means of a set of instructions, or "software."
So to invoke the machine metaphor does not get rid of the problem of "non-observables": purpose (whose purpose?) and instructions (information). Since these are examples of what has been called non-phenomenal reality, they are indetectible by sense perception in principle. It takes an act of the mind to explore these realities — a willingness not just to "perceive" (the processing of sense data), but to apperceive (the relation of sense data to each other and to the larger environment in which they occur, which is evidently structured by universal laws which are not themselves direct observables).
As the poet William Blake put it,
We are led to believe a lieIf find it rather amusing that atheists and others of scientistic bent classify the soul as "the ghost in the machine." But I thought these folks didn't believe in "ghosts!" That's another non-observable in principle. How can they use this term without involving themselves in yet another self-contradition?
When we see with, and not through
The eye.
It seems to me (FWIW) that atheists and others of scientistic bent of mind are either totally irrational, or guilty of intellectual sloth....
I think that atheists love having the benefits of a God fearing people, but want to deny the responsibilities of acknowledging the Creator's existence. In the response above the only reason given for not acting like barnyard animals is imagination. IOW, creating order for a groups benefit.
Do atheists believe the behavior of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao was acceptable? They believed they were acting in the best interests of their group. Condemnation of mass killing would be inconsistent with a belief that we are just the sum of our biological parts.
If all that makes us different from the rest of the biological world is our imagination why wouldn't might make right?
Not really. Witness the Middle East. Lots of God-fearing people there, and what advantage are they to anyone? As for might making right, it usually is accepted that it does, although people rarely admit it. Christianity gained a foothold in the 5th century through might, via the emporer Constantine (if I remember correctly.) The winners of wars tend to write the books, explaining why it was morally preferable that they win.
Look at the Old Testament: The Hebrews slaughtered the Canaanites, took the land, and lo, their might was evidence that their God was right (apparently.)
And remember, I don't have to prove anything because you can't prove a negative. You can't prove unicorns don't exist, you can only indicate that you've never seen one. That doesn't mean you must accept their existence until someone proves conclusively that they cannot possibly exist.
I should add that it's not a non-answer, it's simply an answer you don't like or accept. What you're saying is, "I don't like that one, come up with another." But no matter how elegantly you put it, it's still kind of a childish response.
That is precisely what I am not saying. "Like" or "dislike" is not the standard I advert to.
Evidently you are firmly committed to relativistic thinking. I am saying that relativistic thinking is non-thinking, for it lacks a ratio, or a standard of truthful judgment.
Or as the classical Greeks and the later Christians would put it, it has no Logos. It leaves us in a situation where one man's opinion is just as good (or bad) as any other man's. In consequence, for any given man's opinion to prevail in society is a matter of power, not of truth.
This sort of reasoning — or better, refusal to reason — not only disorders, isolates, and ultimately alienates the human person from Nature, but also disorders the society in which he lives.
You can call that "a childish response" if you like. You're entitled to your "opinion." But you are not entitled to make up your own facts about the truth of reality. Which can be empirically discerned if one would but make the effort.
Heraclitus (c. 600 B.C.) had this to say about the matter:
But though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. [2]
Those who are awake have a world one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their own private worlds. [89]
Those who speak with the mind must strengthen themselves with that which is common to all.... For all human laws nourish themselves from the one divine [i.e., Logos] — which prevails as it will, and suffices for all things and more than suffices. [114]
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it.... on the contrary, [they] are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep. [1]
It is not meet [i.e., fitting or proper] to act and speak like men asleep. [73]
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