Originally posted by Humanbrain
You have been egregiously misinformed by some insidious malcontents. First, you are confusing the terms "secular" and "atheistic." Second, I highly recommend you to take a look at the First Amendment contained in the US Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the US Constitution): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This has been the law of the land since 1791. Third, is true that even after ratifying the Bill of Rights, some states continued to claim that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government whereas each state still had a right to maintain its own official state religion. However, a series of Supreme Court decisions established that the First Amendment applies across the board to all levels of government (federal, state, and local).
It is true that Americans tend to be more religious than their European counterparts. It is also true that the US happens to be a home to pretty much every religion that exists in the world. However, the American tradition of acknowledging deity (a superior being, or God, if you will) in official public settings is built around the concept of civil god, or civil religion. The concept of civil god rests on the idea that some sort of a moral and spiritual foundation is essential for any modern western society because it serves as a form of social cement, or social fabric, helping to unify and solidify the state by providing it with supreme (“sacred”) authority. (As it was, this was a pretty novel concept in because you have to remember that that prior to the great revolution France was run by kings who ruled by divine right, and one one was faced with a task of figuring out what the state's source of authrity is if a king, who used to personify the state and served as the only source of authoprity, is no longer there). The concept was initially developed by the French enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who promulgated it in 1762 in his book The Social Contract. In this book, Rousseau outlined the following tenets of the civil religion: deity; life to come; the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice (which could be understood as “What goes around comes around,” or even more prosaically, “Karma is a Bitch); and the exclusion of religious intolerance. This concept was later taken up by Thomas Jefferson, who used to reconcile the individual colonists’ religious piety with the desire to guarantee individual freedom of religion and avoid the emergence of another official religion (AKA Church of England 2.0) in the agglomeration of colonies that were fighting for independence from the British Crown. He pushed this idea through with the establishment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which became the precursor to the US Bill of Rights. The statute disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and guaranteed freedom of religion to people of all religious faiths, including Catholics and Jews, as well as members of all Protestant denominations. In short, Jefferson’s attitude toward religion was can be summarized in the following quote of his: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, it is universally recognized that no harm to individual religious liberty is done whne can acknowledge the presence of a superior being (i.e. God) in a public (official) setting as long as we do not specify what this superior being is, put an official stamp of approval on a particular idea (image) of a superior being, and force others to subscribe to this idea.
Thus, in the United States, you WILL see the invocation of God in political speeches and public monuments, the quotation of portions of religious texts on public occasions by political leaders, and religious gatherings called by political leaders. However, what you WILL NOT see is an official pronouncement of approval of a particular type of God, be it Jesus, Allah, Buddha, etc.
I must add that the mention of God in the oaths of enlistment of commissioning exists is a direct reflection of the tradition of civil religion and, as such, it only acknowledges the God without specifying what this deity is. It is up to the individual to maintain his / her own concept of God, and if you have difficulty mentioning God at all, you say “So I affirm.”
Finally, everywhere in the Army, on every installation, and in every major command, just like everywhere else in the Depertment of Defense (or the rest of the US government for that matter), you will find organization, known as Equal Oppotrtunity office, or EO. The EO's explicit reason for existance is ensuring that nobody is being descriminated against on the basis of one's ethnicity, religion, sex (and now sexual orientation), or national origin.
Leave a comment: