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They're not tracking atheists or working to measure and expand chaplaincy services for "atheists" separate from "no religion".

The religion list doesn't mean that much. The religious respect requirements for the armed forces are codified in law; the DoD can't alter them.

On the contrary I would expect that the most immediate effect is the impossibility of commissioning chaplains for any of the 180 faiths removed from the list. Good luck with that if you're a chaplain candidate who is an ordained minister of "Other".

No doubt there are other concrete effects that are buried in reams of DoD policy.

However, the message being sent is far clearer. Expect that the goal is to pare down the current list even further in due time.

No religion on the list, I suppose that counts.
Ok I looked at the list. There are 31 entries, which are "no religion", "agnostic", Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, and 22 different varities of Christian (Baptist, Catholic, etc.). Sheesh. At least they didn't get all the way to “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912".

(explanation: https://www.fpcmarion.org/2024/04/die-heretic/ )

Here's the video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78
Heh nothing like what I'd have guessed.

There's also this: https://theonion.com/various-deities-still-sorting-through-v...

Emo Phillips is a weird comedian.

Can be quite funny, though.

Ah yeah I missed that. Thanks
Is "no religion" atheist? Or is "Atheism" an organized religion now?
Atheism is not a religion, and someone who is religious can also be atheist (and some religions are not theistic), although having no religion does not necessarily make you atheist either (although many atheists are not religious). (However, considering that, putting "agnostic" in there seems to be strange compared to this.)

Howveer, when knowing what should be in the list, there is the question of what the information is used for, in order to know what divisions are helpful for this purpose.

> someone who is religious can also be atheist

Technically true but I don't see the word used like that much.

No religion = atheism

That’s what was officially on my docs, the whole time while in the Air Force

Athiesm continues to not be a religion despite religious people trying to make it stick

I don't know... The null set is still a set.
Yes but that’s only half of the atheist equation

It’s saying I don’t know and also saying I do not have a belief in any particular thing

So it’s accurately:

“I don’t know what set it is and I don’t even believe in the concept of a set”

So for me I reject the concept because nobody has ever offered their definition of god with a falsifiable hypothesis

Yes it looks that way
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.

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.

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.
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.

> 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.

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.
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.