The military gets a lot of church-state cross-fire, as religous liberals and secularists complain when chaplians get too evangelistic and religious symbolism and rhetoric slide into things. However, this Earl Tilford piece points out some of the downside of de-godding the military that liberals would not like.
[A]ll wars are quintessentially human endeavors. It’s impossible to kill inanimate objects like MiGs, tanks, trucks and missile sites. But we do kill people. To make “crispy crittering” easier, we noted, we dehumanize the enemy with terms like “Japs,” “Dinks,” “Gomers,” “Krauts,” “Huns,” “Injuns,” “Rebs” and “Yanks.” We noted the Nazis refereed to the genocide of Jews as “evacuation” and the murder of the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals, and other “inferiors” as “medical re-socialization.”
We can quickly dehumanize the enemy in an God-free setting. Religion often does bring conflict, but in most Christian flavors, it treats even the enemy as fellow creations of God worthy of respect.
Tilford closes with this thought-
When absent God, human advancement—whether ideological, political, philosophical or technological—reflects our intrinsic nature, which is evil. Better we fly with a wing and a prayer.
Secularizing the military would tend to make it more brutish rather than less, so peace-lovers on the left should be careful what they wish for in our military.
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