George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 July 2013.]

New levels of social justice are being sought in our military.  The very same people who militate for separating church and state in all corners of public life are now demanding to have their fair share of padres in the armed services.  Actually, in the military men of God are called chaplains, and now (seatbelts please) atheists are demanding that the military provide them the comfort of a compassionate chaplain who shares their religion. (more here)

Did I say religion?  Yes, atheism is a religion because it satisfies the requirements of a distinct faith in the structure, organization, and origin of the cosmos and everything in it.  Let’s not confuse the atheist with the agnostic.  An agnostic is a person whose belief system is moot about the existence or absence of God, Creator, Universal Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it.  An agnostic believes that God’s existence is either unknown, or more strongly, that it is unknowable.  (more here)

This is a distinct difference from the atheists, who sometimes also call themselves humanists, and who believe strongly that there is no God.  They have had their case made by notables like physicist Stephen Hawking and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Their philosophy is the ‘turtles all the way down’ theory of cosmology.  Mankind will just keep discovering ever more esoteric layers of scientific knowledge, each of which underpins all the previous layers of our understanding.  Research without end, Amen.

But unfortunately, atheists can claim no science to back up their professions of God’s absence.  You see, science is a biped, it advances only on the principles of falsifiability and Occam’s razor.  The latter resolves questions between two competing theories which explain all the known observations and data, and then selects the simplest of the two for further exploration.  Falsifiability is the bedrock principle of science.  Every proposed theory of science must be such that it can describe tests or realworld experiments, which if it fails, would cause it to be discarded as a description of truth about our universe.

So if one’s belief is not based on science, it is based on faith – something that may be very complex, and most certainly something that cannot be falsified through an experiment.  Atheism is such a belief system based on faith.  It also promotes a cosmology that is infinitely complex, making Ptolemaic epicycles of yore simple child’s play, and atheism delivers no hope of defining a falsifying experiment.

But dear people, that’s OK.  We can agree that atheists have every right to have their own chaplains in the military.  They may even develop a humanist liturgy, add hymns, and prescribe certain sacraments such as the equivalents of baptism and marriage that God-based faiths enjoy.  And as people of faith, atheists should have every right to have their own services on military bases, and the opportunity to take great comfort from their chaplains, the guardians and purveyors of their religion.

The current opposition by the military establishment against nascent organizations such as MASH – it stands for Military Atheists and Secular Humanists – is ill-founded.  MASH organizers wish to meet with the existing leadership of military chaplains and make their case.  They propose that chaplains be commissioned who could then comfort their faithful charges with messages such as ‘not to worry, all is meaningless, besides, it will soon be over, and oblivion awaits everyone’.  Thus fortified, the troops will rejoin their ranks to practice the highest order of altruism for the benefit of their comrades, baseless altruism that expects no reward save self-satisfaction.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[28jul13 update]  Since this is a piece about religion and several commenters have sought to expand the discussion, I thought this little coda on the recently published Zealot would by appropriate.

Written by Reza Aslan, a reportedly devout Muslim, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth has taken the country’s politically correct crowd by storm.  The author has been invited to do so many interviews on various radio, TV, and cable outlets that he could be in the saddle 24/7 promoting his book.  The book is hailed as the latest academic expose on Jesus Christ.  In fact, it is nothing of the kind, but it is a well written hit piece on Christianity.  And therein lies the real tale of secular humanists going ga-ga over this clever piece of pseudo-journalistic commentary.

What I come to that no one wants to consider is again the asymmetry of the weak western and robust Islamic cultures.  What do you think would have happened if a prominent Christian author would today write a similar tome on 'the life and times' of the prophet Muhammad?  Whether we want to admit it or not, we can all answer that question.  The resulting Islamic riots covering half the globe would take hundreds of lives.  European cities would have their Islamic populations attempt to burn down everything in sight to avenge the slight.  And every raghead terrorist organization worth its salt would want to pull the trigger on its next assault on western civilization.  These promoters of the religion of peace would not stop until blood atonement for the insult was complete – whatever that meant.

Meanwhile, in response to studious inattention by our lamestream, the country has again ignored a real atrocity of stupendous magnitude when we compare it to the killing of Trayvon Martin.  (Here’s a paper that did report it)  In Austin, Texas a thirteen year old girl was picked up by three Latino illegal aliens and taken to a place where ten more of their brethren joined in to gang rape the child in a celebratory session that lasted for hours.  Two of the men have been apprehended and are under arrest.  The lamestream’s response has been crickets, and none of the country’s hyperventilating paladins of social justice has made a peep.  Why?  Again, it’s not part of the agenda – illegal aliens, especially of Hispanic descent, can do what they want, especially to their own kind.  It doesn’t matter, it’s not important in the greater scheme of things, especially now that we have “immigration reform” aka a serious increase in Democrat voter rolls on the front burner.