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May 29, 2006
Religion and Soldiers in Iraq
For those who cling to the belief that when faced with life at its most intense atheists inevitably will waver, here's the Iraq veteran and American military chaplain Major John Morris, interviewed on the public radio program, Speaking of Faith (thanks to Robert Schwartz):
"It's not true. There are atheists in foxholes."
Indeed, war, as the thoughtful Major Morris acknowledges, can intensify disbelief::
What I saw in Iraq....on the battlefield: a third of the soldiers were men and women of faith, growing in their faith or coming to a new understanding of their faith; a third of the soldiers were indifferent or fatalistic...; the other third were either indifferent or jettisoning their faith..
War does what life can do, only faster:
Many would say to me very bluntly, "I've lost my faith. I saw my buddy get blown away," or "I was involved in a firefight that killed innocent people. And if there's a good God, he would not have let that happen, so I do not want to believe anymore."
This is, of course, the classic "problem of evil" -- one of the more compelling arguments against the existence of God. Major Morris attributes another related argument to some of the soldiers in the irreligious third -- the often unavoidable apprehension that "the center cannot hold":
...War is chaos. You can do everything right and still die.... That chaos seems to...harden people into saying, "I can't think about transcendent things. Nobody's in control. ...Whatever is, is. And whatever will be, will be. ...So don't bother me with anything transcendent or eternal."
And this particular war -- unlike the two World Wars or Korea or Vietnam -- adds one more reason to reject religion, as Major Morris reports:
Now the thing that really throws a wrench into all of this is being shot at by people who were praying a few minutes earlier in a sacred place... That really hardens people to say, "I don't know what kind of God you all are talking about, but I don't want to have anything to do with any kind of God that uses the sacred to condone this. So I don't want to deal with any of you people who have anything to do with religion, cause you guys are causing the wars of the world."
Posted by Mitchell Stephens at May 29, 2006 11:21 PM
Comments
Whatever a soldier goes to war believing, they come back so changed they spend the rest of the lives hiding, coping, and struggling to put a world together that makes sense.
I spent a year as a 1st Air Cav grunt in Vietnam. Since then my eyes have been shut wide open. I was one of the lucky ones and I cherish my experiences there though it is still a struggle, especially these days. The tragedy is not that we ask young forming minds to risk death fighting for freedom, it is that we ask them to kill for freedom, which would be OK if it were true, but its a lie that will be damaging those soldiers' minds and our society for the rest of their lives.
These folks will never know freedom from knowing they were not fighting for it.
Posted by: Jay Saul at May 30, 2006 12:16 PM
Whatever a soldier goes to war believing, they come back so changed they spend the rest of the lives hiding, coping, and struggling to put a world together that makes sense.
I spent a year as a 1st Air Cav grunt in Vietnam. Since then my eyes have been shut wide open. I was one of the lucky ones and I cherish my experiences there though it is still a struggle, especially these days. The tragedy is not that we ask young forming minds to risk death fighting for freedom, it is that we ask them to kill for freedom, which would be OK if it were true, but its a lie that will be damaging those soldiers' minds and our society for the rest of their lives.
These folks will never know freedom from knowing they were not fighting for it.
Posted by: Jay Saul at May 30, 2006 1:10 PM
