What I Would Say to Atheist College Student Who Wants Atheist Chaplains
An atheist college student, Daniel Moran, confronted U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) at a town hall meeting and asked why he twice voted against a measure to allow atheist chaplains in the military.
Earlier this summer Democratic Rep. Rob Andrews of New Jersey presented an amendment to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act that called for non-theist chaplains to join the armed forces.
“The Secretary of Defense shall provide for the appointment, as officers in the Chaplain Corps of the Armed Forces, of persons who are certified or ordained by non-theistic organizations and institutions, such as humanist, ethical culturalist, or atheist.”
The amendment failed.
As with all things liberals, a single failure will not stop a liberal. At the same time, Rep. Burgess did not back down when confronted by the atheist college student. “Instead of shrinking from the student’s pointed question, Burgess had this to say: ‘Yeah, I thought that was a dumb idea. I’ll do it again.’”
I would have added the following:
“I don’t know why an atheist would need a chaplain. It certainly can’t be to comfort a fellow atheist. According to atheists, we are a nothing more than a conglomeration of matter energized by electricity. ‘All we are is dust in the wind.’ If there is no soul, there is no mind. Any senses you have are electrical stimuli on ‘a bag of meat and bones.’ We’re all molecules. We’re no different from the plants and the rocks.’
“You should happy about war. Killing another evolved bag of meat and bones is part of the evolutionary process. The survival of the fittest . . . Nature, red in tooth and claw . . . Kill or be killed.
“Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, does a good job of explaining the foolishness of worrying what happens to meat machines: ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you — your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . .’
“Given the ‘science’ of Darwinism, according to Richard Dawkins, ‘human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism. . . . From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb.’ So I’m not sure what you want an atheist chaplain to do. If he is faithful to his religion, then he should tell the soldiers under his ‘religious’ charge to kill as many people as he can for the good of the gene pool. War isn’t hell. War eliminates the weak.
“This means that atheist chaplains would only prolong war, make it more bloody, and increase the body count on all sides.
“An atheist student in Finland opened fire in a school. He posted the following in a video: ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’ He would have made a good atheist chaplain.”