One Reverend Bryan Griem, writing to the Pasadena Sun:
Look, you just read the stats: “Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping and on mental health.” Atheists be damned. They will be. So I really don’t care what they think regarding these tests. I’m tired of having their constant nagging, their constant opposition against God — their evil. They contribute nothing positive in the long run. Their very name, “a” theist, means they are “against,” with a big “no” regarding America’s “creator” and “Nature’s God” (the one mentioned in our Declaration of Independence). I’m frankly sick of them. Why they are here on the In Theory cast is beyond me. It’s like saying, “I have no spiritual input because I don’t believe in the spirit. So here’s my ignorance….”
I wonder what the military puts on gravestones of atheists, a thumbs-down? Listen, all religions are protected by our laws, but atheists don’t countenance America’s documents that mention God. They don’t actually deserve rights that even bizarre religionists have. If it could be shown that people who deny God create military weakness, however small, what should commanders do when choosing a winning military?
Whee-ew. We’ll be damned. We’re evil. We contribute nothing positive. We don’t deserve rights.
Well at least he’s a civilian, so Justin can safely ignore him.
Reminds me of Alice’s Restaurant:
I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the
other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on
the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the
following words:
(“KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?”)
I went over to the sargent, said, “Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to
ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I’m
sittin’ here on the bench, I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench
’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” He looked at me and
said, “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send you fingerprints
off to Washington.”
I guess maybe the Army thinks that the religious in particular figuring that they have an ace-in-the-hole with Jesus or Muhammad [piss on his name] are going to be more amendable to committing murder and mayhem. Something along the line of an observation by Blaise Pascal:
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Too bad we couldn’t just get most of the religious fundamentalists to murder each other and then the remaining ones might be more willing to listen to reason.
Assume for the sake of argument that everything he says about atheists is correct. They still might be better soldiers than Christians. With Christians, you have the risk that they might actually read the gospels and discover that Jesus told his followers to not resist one who is evil, but instead turn the other cheek, give him your cloak also, go with him a second mile, love your enemies, and so forth; basically to practice nonviolent pacifism.
See http://www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/the-ethics-of-jesus
“I wonder what the military puts on gravestones of atheists, a thumbs-down?”
He couldn’t bother to do five seconds of research to find out it’s the American Atheists atom symbol? Nah, just go for another ignorant insult instead.
http://www.cem.va.gov/hm/hmemb.asp #16
So ‘a’ means against eh? Well only if you’re paranoid.
The ‘a’ means ‘without’, hence atheist means without god.
Christians are inventing reasons to feel persecuted again.
This quote is significant to me, because it illustrates one of the biggest problems the US has when it comes to religious douchebaggery.
The instant assumption that the douchebag is a “fundy” and thus one can instantly take comfort in “Well that’s not my brand of religion, no siree.”
This is the result.
“Look, you just read the stats: ‘Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping and on mental health.’”
This is a bit like the ad that says “university tests have proven that XXXX toothpaste best whitens and best prevents decay.”
However, I could probably agree with the Reverend Grien, provided we could first find a definition of ‘spiritual’satisfactory to us both.
Could be a lot of beating about the bush there, and I wouldn’t be holding my breath..
Weird. The Romans thought that Christians were cowards (lots of records of them throwing away their shields on the field of battle), and the Roman military was one of two institutions that had to be Christianised by force. The other, of course, was the legal profession.
Love and respect for his fellow citizens just oozes through Pastor Bryan’s words.