DoD Officially Drops 180 Faiths from Military's Recognized Religion List (opens in new tab)

On the contrary I would expect that the most immediate effect is the impossibility of commissioning chaplains for any of the 180 faiths removed from the list. Good luck with that if you're a chaplain candidate who is an ordained minister of "Other".

No doubt there are other concrete effects that are buried in reams of DoD policy.

However, the message being sent is far clearer. Expect that the goal is to pare down the current list even further in due time.

Ok I looked at the list. There are 31 entries, which are "no religion", "agnostic", Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, and 22 different varities of Christian (Baptist, Catholic, etc.). Sheesh. At least they didn't get all the way to “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912".

(explanation: https://www.fpcmarion.org/2024/04/die-heretic/ )

Ah yeah I missed that. Thanks

Atheism is not a religion, and someone who is religious can also be atheist (and some religions are not theistic), although having no religion does not necessarily make you atheist either (although many atheists are not religious). (However, considering that, putting "agnostic" in there seems to be strange compared to this.)

Howveer, when knowing what should be in the list, there is the question of what the information is used for, in order to know what divisions are helpful for this purpose.

No religion = atheism

That’s what was officially on my docs, the whole time while in the Air Force

Athiesm continues to not be a religion despite religious people trying to make it stick

Religion provides certain benefits in the military. If you are say a Christian, you get assigned time to go to a (hopefully) air conditioned church and relax and recover. Even if it’s short, it can be beneficial to collect yourself in a high stress situation like basic training/boot camp.

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.

As somebody who works with data and humans, I know it's not a good idea to use the absence of information as information. Then you need confidence that the absence was on purpose, and means a specific thing. Whereas you could simply not omit the information.

It being a "list of religions" is just a semantic distraction, like saying "bald" shouldn't be on a list of hair colors.

It does seem to be common to make LDS not counted as Christianity, although the reason is unclear to me.

Another comment mentions that the rejection of the Nicene Creed does not seem to be the distinction.

I had thought that it is because they have the Book of Mormon, although that is unclear. Orthodox have additional books of the Bible that Catholics do not have, but are still Christian. (Although, I think the additional books that the Orthodox have are still a part of the Bible, and Book of Mormon is different.)

Something that I had heard is that it is because Mormons use a different baptism, which is not Trinitarian. However, it seems that it is Trinitarian, although this trinity is different from that of Christians (even though they still say "the Father", "the Son", and "the Holy Spirit").

Quakers (which are listed as Christian) also apparently do not use baptism (and reject other sacraments as well). Although the Religious Society of Friends is Christian, they do have differences and not all Quakers are necessarily Christian (or necessarily theists).

So, I don't know.

And yet Jehovah's Witnesses are denoted on the list as a Christian faith. So whatever the distinction that is being made here, it isn't simply rejection of the Nicene Creed.

Just to clear this up, all the various "Christian" ministries that embrace modern prophecy and prophets are, therefore, not actually Christian?

  From the beginning of the Assemblies of God, prophecy has been affirmed as a spiritual gift for the Church today. Since the Day of Pentecost, the Church has functioned as a prophetic community. Any Spirit-filled believer may prophesy while discernment and judgment of prophecy belong to the full body of Christ.

~ https://ag.org/Beliefs/Position-Papers/Modern-Day-Prophecy

( no vested interest here, I've got Wagyl riding shotgun on the stagecoach of my life )

Not a core tenet [note 1] at all - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessationism_versus_continuati...

[note 1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/tenant-vs-tenet-diff...

Those places have never liked Trump, as immoral as he is perceived, but they consistently put their conservatism first when it comes time to vote. I don't see this situation changing any time soon.

That does explain why Jehovah's Witnesses would be on here. They won multiple court cases to be excluded from military services.

Heathen is yet another term to describe Germanic paganism which has a similar etymology as the Latin originated word "pagan"[1]. It describes the people "of the heath"[2] — the rural folk who were the last to change their beliefs (as opposed to the city folk following the latest trends). English is unique among Germanic languages for preferring non-native vocabulary but the cognate of "heathen" is extant in every other Germanic language to describe pre-Christian belief. Among modern reconstructionists there is no consensus for a term to describe a belief system that never had a name (because prior to Christianity, it didn't need one).

That it is also a Christian pejorative term is irrelevant to the former DoD list.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/paganus

[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heathen#English

> It's not a hill to die on, especially because it's cringe to watch you crucify yourself

It absolutely is a hill to die on, because that is how fascism always starts and escalates. It's "tiny" and "petty" stuff that gets done first - think of the "Gulf of Mexico" renaming - and when that does not provoke meaningful resistance, the fascists see that as a sign to tighten the ratchet. And rather sooner than later, we see the East Wing of the White House torn down, dozens of people dead in ICE custody and Trump creating slush funds worth billions of dollars.