{"id":27812,"date":"2011-12-06T12:17:32","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T16:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=27812"},"modified":"2011-12-06T12:17:32","modified_gmt":"2011-12-06T16:17:32","slug":"atheists-in-foxholes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=27812","title":{"rendered":"Atheists in foxholes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Old Trooper sends a link from CNS<\/a> about some dildo who is complaining that the troops are praying together before they leave for missions into the mouth of the lion;<\/p>\n

Jason Torpy, president of the Military Atheists and Free Thinkers Association, told \u201cAll Things Considered\u201d over the weekend about an incident in 2003 or 2004, in which his commander gathered his team together to pray before the Army unit deployed — rather than make preparations for the mission.<\/p>\n

NPR: Can you give some examples of where as an atheist, as a humanist, you felt left out?<\/p>\n

TORPY: Going on a military mission, for example, we were getting ready to roll out. And \u2018Everybody come in.\u2019 So as the commander of this convoy (said), \u2018Everybody come in and we\u2019re going to do a prayer first together.\u2019 We\u2019re not going to talk about communications, we\u2019re not going to talk about route planning, we\u2019re not going to talk about first aid, we\u2019re not going to talk about maintenance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like I’ve said before, I’m not a real religious kind of guy, but I’m also not anti-religion either. When I found myself in those kinds of situations, I just bowed my head and went along with it…why get in the way of someone else asking for a blessing from their Creator, or being a dick and complaining to NPR that someone violated my right to be a God-less heathen.<\/p>\n

In the remainder of the interview, Torpy told NPR that chaplains in the military today do not “minister” to troops. but carry out secular “support” roles — and that atheist chaplains are needed to support humanist soldiers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The military already has atheist chaplains, they’re called psychiatrists and psychologists. How do people with no faith need “ministering”? I guess what pisses my off most is the implication in the name of Torpy’s organization that being faithful to God isn’t “free thinking”. <\/p>\n

I guess he and I are both lucky that he wasn’t my company commander.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old Trooper sends a link from CNS about some dildo who is complaining that the troops … Atheists in foxholes<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}