It would be valuable to notify the MAAF of that, so they can make use of it.

Probably because at the time the issuer didn’t know what that word meant and assumed it was a religious denomination.

On the other hand chaplaincy within the military is there primarily to get people back into the fight.

That’s not really true. Most military service does not consist of fighting. And needs in the service are very different than for civilians: they own you 24/7. You have vast array of obligations and rules to follow and situations to deal with that civilians don’t. Military life is strange and difficult. Spiritual (moral) counseling is a pervasive need simply for health and welfare, and includes career advice (what decisions to make for one’s future), advice dealing with difficult work situations or life problems that are conflicting with work or even that have nothing to do with it (e.g. those in the service are away from family, spouses, children, friends for months at a time, often the better part of a year, and when problems arise in those domains it can be hard dealing with them from afar), and a lot else, like help getting your needs met by the chain of command. Civilians can get this advice easily. Military personnel often have no one near them to turn to.

Chaplains also provide social services (e.g. they can marry you, provide you with information that you may not have any easy channel to otherwise, etc.) and assistance in crucial ways that, again, civilians take for granted but that often are accessible to people in the service in no other way (e.g. soldiers suffering severe injuries or psychological traumas often need someone to turn to that they can speak with in confidence and be confident share their values–this is not about getting them back in the fight, but simply meeting their needs as a human being).

Then he tried “Humanist”. That was accepted. I’ve seen his dog tags, with HUMANIST stamped right into the tin.

So the Army has recognized humanism before, quite a while ago — but probably not officially until now. No doubt my friend’s case was an outlier.

On the other hand chaplaincy within the military is there primarily to get people back into the fight. To reassure the service members that the supernatural forces many believe in are all right with what the military tells them to do. The old ‘God is on your (and your nation’s) side’ argument helps to assuage the natural and human revulsion to murder, maiming, and mayhem. All the better to calm their doubts and fears over possibly being wrong or unjustified and get them back to the work of visiting death and destruction upon people who have never done you wrong.

I’m not sure retreading soldiers morally bald tires so they can pound a few more people into the ground is what humanists want to associate themselves with.

Thanks very much for providing that necessary background information, which I should probably have looked up before making my initial comment. It definitely clears the air; in such an environment, I would positively identify as “Humanist” in order to combat the Christian-led thinking that seeks to deny atheists access to essential community services within the military. The practical consequences of discrimination that you’ve pointed out must be corrected, and it sounds like this is a reasonable way of having that fight, since the chain of command and the federal bureaucracy are either asleep at the switch or actively colluding with the Christian propaganda of denying atheists those community services.

Ideally, of course, the military would *only* employ secular counsellors/chaplains…or at least uncontroversially employ them along with the myriad other kinds of chaplains currently extant. The fact that this fight is even necessary shows how successful the Christian Right has been in taking over the US military apparatus. In order to successfully prevent the establishment of a secular/humanist/atheist chaplaincy, the religious authorities have effectively elided three categories into one: religion, politics, and ethics.

Atheism is a religious stance. This is not (or is not merely) to say that “dictionary atheism” is the only legitimate form of atheism, but it is a fact that “atheist” is an answer to a religious question. Secularism is a political stance, having to do with the relationship between state power and religious authority. Humanism is an ethical stance, having to do with both aggregate human behaviour and specific choices individuals may make in response to questionable scenarios.

An atheist can be secular or not; e.g., some atheists want atheism established as a matter of state, or some very small number of atheists might believe theism is necessary for the masses and should have some kind of official sanction. An atheist can also be humanist or not (as your reply acknowledged). Likewise a secularist might well be religious or not, or humanist or not. Similarly for a humanist with respect to atheism and secularism. There is overlap between all of these philosophical positions, not just statistically but also logically, but that overlap is nowhere complete. Only by the Christian (or at least the religious) insistence that the second two categories are necessarily subsets of the first category can the current state of affairs be understood. Consequently, it will only be the disabusal of that notion which might lead to a true solution to the chaplaincy issue in all of the branches of the US military.

That’s certainly fine, too, but be aware of the politics of this: the religious (de facto that means: Christian) opponents of a secular military argue that “atheist” means no beliefs and therefore you have no right to a chaplain (or chapel resources or any of the other benefits believers receive); whereas humanist is an assertion of a positive belief system about which no such argument can be made.

This has played out several times, as preference-declared atheists get stonewalled when they try to, for example, get access to chapel resources for a wedding, or ask for a non-believing chaplain as counselor, adviser, and advocate. It’s also playing out now in resistance to an atheist chaplaincy, which is one reason why the mission now focuses on establishing a humanist chaplaincy, which would then service atheists who don’t declare a preference of humanist.

The more soldiers etc. who declare “humanist” and thus show up in the stats, the stronger the case for a secular chaplain becomes. In essence, the bullshit of Christians is being used to hide the true number of people in the military who warrant a secular chaplain, by only counting humanists as warranting that, and then not allowing atheists to be counted as humanists.

So there is a reason to declare yourself a humanist in military databases, if you are indeed a humanist (in addition to your other identities), or indeed even if you aren’t but want access to humanist chaplains and chapel resources and privileges (like getting the same time off as believers do for chapel service each week).