Via Pharyngula, a video titled Campus Crusade for Christ Air Force Academy Propaganda. As PZ notes, one Crusade leader in there declares they want to create “government paid missionaries.” Government paid missionaries with bombers, of course. Also disturbing, though, is the suggestion that evangelists should target Air Force cadets because they are stressed and vulnerable, especially early in their careers. The CCC scumbags know exactly what they’re doing.
You can read background on the situation in this article by Chris Rodda. That will take you to a very good video segment with Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Notice that Stephen Mansfield, the guy brought on for counterpoint, spends most of his time justifying what’s been done rather than denying it. He actually justifies the actions of officers who evangelize their subordinates. The problem with this, as Weinstein points out, is that the military is so rigidly hierarchical that there’s no way for officers to non-coercively evangelize their subordinates, which is what the apologists for this stuff are claiming. As Weinstein has pointed out in other interviews, it’s for this reason that officers aren’t even supposed to be pushing Amway.
One thing that I agree with Mansfield on, though, is that there’s no conspiracy needed: only officers who can work out the logical implications of believing that those who don’t believe as they do will burn in hell for eternity. That’s what makes this challenge such a big one: you don’t have to strike at some concrete organization, you need to strike at beliefs. Weinstein doesn’t seem to relish that fight, even though from reading his book I know he’d agree that fundamentalist doctrine is vile.
If there were a futures market for this of the sort the Overcoming Bias folks are always talking about, I would bet on this effort ultimately folding, with groups like the MRFF coming out on top. Still, the thought of government paid missionaries with M16s is one of the scariest threats on the world stage today.
“Still, the thought of government paid missionaries with M16s is one of the scariest threats on the world stage today.”
Amen to that.
Those people are fucking scary.
We knew that already, but people like that actually make me, as an atheist, fear for my life – they’re about as batshit as the radical Muslims who assault people who criticize their beliefs.
I wonder if America’s going to become a clone of the Middle East – not that most people want it to, but I am immensely afraid of what people with so little ethics can do.