Like…leave the religion off the dog tag and that communicates enough right? What’s there to recognize?
I’m super not trying to be antagonistic. I’m trying to understand why an atheist would be upset by this.
If you elect not to go to a religious service, you typically have to keep doing whatever you are doing. Atheists or other less organized religions should be treated equally under the law. If a Christian gets a 90 minute religious service, an atheist should also get 90 minutes to do whatever they want.
You also see this reflected with something like The Satanic Temple advocating for human rights under the guise of religion.
In my opinion, religious organizations should not have any more rights or privileges than businesses.
I am curious how the variety of faith based practices could be handled…I’m super on board with providing a universal spiritual/mental health space regardless of your affiliation. That gets very weird when you start having to account for the variety of schedules and practices.
I am pretty sure I disagree on religious orgs having no more rights than a business. I think that seriously under accounts for the degree of identity that folks get from their religious affiliations and the types of activities businesses and religious groups tend to do.
A business and religious group are pretty fundamentally different…I’d have to reflect a lot longer and harder to come up with a more stable and coherent stance on that. I can definitely think of valid arguments on either side.
This is what was happening in the Army's Chaplain Corps[1] prior to this administration: Seeking to emphasize and credential Chaplains as mental health specialists in an organization with a consistent track record of personnel with pervasive mental health problems.
It seems that has all been scrapped and we're going to fix mental health problems with "good ol' religion".
[1]: I can't speak for the other services but probably the same.
It being a "list of religions" is just a semantic distraction, like saying "bald" shouldn't be on a list of hair colors.