[cpfohl]

Uh, honest question: why would you put atheist on a list of religions?

Like…leave the religion off the dog tag and that communicates enough right? What’s there to recognize?

I’m super not trying to be antagonistic. I’m trying to understand why an atheist would be upset by this.

[Atotalnoob]

Religion provides certain benefits in the military. If you are say a Christian, you get assigned time to go to a (hopefully) air conditioned church and relax and recover. Even if it’s short, it can be beneficial to collect yourself in a high stress situation like basic training/boot camp.

If you elect not to go to a religious service, you typically have to keep doing whatever you are doing. Atheists or other less organized religions should be treated equally under the law. If a Christian gets a 90 minute religious service, an atheist should also get 90 minutes to do whatever they want.

You also see this reflected with something like The Satanic Temple advocating for human rights under the guise of religion.

In my opinion, religious organizations should not have any more rights or privileges than businesses.

[rubyfan]

This was true 20 years ago (not sure about now). As an atheist/agnostic in basic training I used to try different church services to get away from the barracks on Sundays. If you didn’t you were definitely assigned some cleaning detail instead of having down time. At the time it didn’t come across as discrimination and felt more like a way to keep control. At various times when control was lax bad stuff happened, e.g. fighting, sex, awol, etc. In a new light this does seem like it has a disparate impact.

[cpfohl]

Got it, that helps me understand.

I am curious how the variety of faith based practices could be handled…I’m super on board with providing a universal spiritual/mental health space regardless of your affiliation. That gets very weird when you start having to account for the variety of schedules and practices.

I am pretty sure I disagree on religious orgs having no more rights than a business. I think that seriously under accounts for the degree of identity that folks get from their religious affiliations and the types of activities businesses and religious groups tend to do.

A business and religious group are pretty fundamentally different…I’d have to reflect a lot longer and harder to come up with a more stable and coherent stance on that. I can definitely think of valid arguments on either side.

[herewulf]

> I’m super on board with providing a universal spiritual/mental health space regardless of your affiliation.

This is what was happening in the Army's Chaplain Corps[1] prior to this administration: Seeking to emphasize and credential Chaplains as mental health specialists in an organization with a consistent track record of personnel with pervasive mental health problems.

It seems that has all been scrapped and we're going to fix mental health problems with "good ol' religion".

[1]: I can't speak for the other services but probably the same.

[daft_pink]

I guess my question is does it make sense for the US government to spend money providing church services for people who just want mental health benefits, and a break? I think believing a religion is very different from creating a religion so that you can maximize government benefits.

[happytoexplain]

As somebody who works with data and humans, I know it's not a good idea to use the absence of information as information. Then you need confidence that the absence was on purpose, and means a specific thing. Whereas you could simply not omit the information.

It being a "list of religions" is just a semantic distraction, like saying "bald" shouldn't be on a list of hair colors.