There Are Atheists In Foxholes
Yeah, I know, big shock, but apparently it is to CNN...and to a lot of the army. As for me, I find it amusing that we're told the military is out there "protecting our freedoms", but, apparently, a lot of members of it don't actually believe in them.
Note I said "amusing", not "surprising". The military, by definition, is a conformist, groupthink, organization -- any military, not just ours. The whole point of military training is to destroy individualism and turn a person into a part of a machine, a part willing to die if ordered to do so, a part willing to order others to die if necessary. The grimly hilarious part is that it's the only way the system can work -- an army of individualists would be swiftly destroyed by the enemy or destroy itself in chaos. Call it reason 598,012 why only an all-volunteer army is morally justifiable -- because no one should ever be subjected to that kind of deconstruction and reconstruction if they didn't sign up for it as a free adult. The other side of that dodecahedron is that the kind of people most likely to volunteer are those already not too keen on this whole 'individualism' thing in the first place, people who want to 'belong', who enjoy being 'part of the team', etc. (Well, and the occasional high functioning sociopath steered to a place where his predilections can be channeled in a socially acceptable manner.)
