Just Words

You may have read a story in the last week about an airman who may be forced to sue the United States government to regain his right to re-enlist in the U.S. Air Force.  The gentleman in question, a technical sergeant based at the Creech Air Force base near Las Vegas, Nevada, has been barred from continuing his service because, as an Atheist, he refuses to recite the final words of the required oath.

Those words being: “So help me God.”

When he entered the Air Force, the rules allowed for the omission of those words, but that rule was changed only last year, and now the unfortunate airman, and many more like him, are stuck with the difficult choice between duty and deception.

This is a choice no one should be forced into, and thankfully, it seems that he has chosen the third option — fight for change!

The thing about this situation that horrifies me, I mean beyond the pure religious coercion which seems to have become a staple within the Air Force, is that so much public opinion on this matter seems inclined to have this fellow simply mouth the words that are placed before him.

I don’t understand what people are thinking.

How can anyone with even the slightest sense of honor or integrity suggest that anyone of any belief, should perjure themselves rather than stand up against an injustice?

Bit of a rhetorical question, I suppose.

The reality is that this proposed lawsuit will very likely not go far enough.  I’m sure the complaint will request that the airman, and many like him, once again have the freedom to skip that particular line in the oath of service.  For justice to be truly done, however, there should be no religious language in the oath whatsoever.

The expectation among a certain majority, that Christianity is going to be the religious standard, and that an ‘opt out’ provision should be made available for some unspecified minority, does one thing very clearly – it establishes that Christianity is the national religion.  And that is an action that the U.S. Constitution very specifically prohibits.

All of which brings me back to public opinion, at least some of that which I have seen expressed within the comments sections of the various news stories which detail this case.  The more troubling of these responses fall into one of a few categories:

The Un-Specified God

“God,” so many like to claim, “is an entirely generic term that could mean any deity, from the God of the Bible to Allah or even Zeus, and is therefore not prohibited by the Constitution’s non-establishment clause.  Sadly, over the years we have been at the mercy of a few Supreme Court justices who share in this misguided notion.

Who else, but certain Monotheistic sects, are so strangely squeamish about addressing their deity by name?  Who else, but the Christians and Jews, are so particular about using that word in the singular form, and capitalized, as if it were a proper name and not a title, which is carried by multitudes of other beings.

This ‘generic’ God is a farce.  Everyone knows which God is being spoken of.  To pretend otherwise reflects poorly on those making the claim, and the silent majority who would benefit from this fiction.

Still, there are those who will claim that because a singular sect of Christendom is not thusly enshrined as the state religion, that there is no ‘establishment’.  And how, I might ask them, does such a philosophy look from the outside, from the eyes of a Buddhist, a Pagan, or an Atheist?

The Christian Nation

“This nation was founded on christian principals and if you don’t agree with that, you don’t belong.”

This is just another instance of the ‘If you don’t like it, get out’ defense, which I have already dealt with recently here.

There are no Atheists in the Foxholes

The thinking here, is that anyone who does not believe in the Christian God, will, when under the threat of death, feel compelled to hedge their bets, just in case there IS a lake of fire awaiting them in the here-after.

The basic assumption being made by those who use this argument is that everyone is a coward at heart and that the Atheists (and others) are really just lying to themselves.

And this, in turn, brings us to the final category of arguments against changing the Oath of Service…,

They’re Just Words

“If you don’t believe, then the words have no meaning, so it’s no harm to say them.”

“It’s just words to them, they could say ‘so help me Scooby Doo’ and it would mean as much.”

It never ceases to amaze me how so called ‘people of faith’ can have so little understanding of what an oath really is.  How do you center your life around the writing in a book, and still have such low regard for the true power of the spoken word.

To swear an oath is to place the whole of ourselves, our reputation and standing, our very name and worth, behind the words which we utter.  It is not a thing to be done on a whim or by rote, and cannot be accompanied by falsehood.  If you cannot stand behind every word pronounced, they are, every one of them, worthless.

This is why I have always spoken out against having the words “Under God” within the Pledge of Allegiance.  To those who say I should just skip that section, I respond that I cannot, in good faith, just pretend that the offending words are not there.  How can I pledge my allegiance, when to do so would mean bowing to religious coercion?

I do not believe in your god and I will swear no oath to him.

And meanwhile, how many millions of school children begin their day with ‘the Pledge’.  They recite it by rote, most of them mumbling through words they don’t even understand, while themselves under the authority of a specific deity whom they were never given a voice in choosing.

Oh but they are “just words” I am told, again and again.

Is THAT what we want to teach our children, that words are only important if you mean them, that the promises we make are ‘just’ words and have no real power in and of themselves?

What if, instead, we taught them that their promises should be composed of ‘just words’, as in justifiable – words that we believe in our very hearts to be true, words that form the utmost foundation of ourselves, words with no hint of deceit or evasion?

They will learn that lesson best if they see that the words of their elders are those of truth and honor rather than equivocation and conformity.

Let our words be just and our oaths be true.

A Question of Resolution

What does a promise mean?

When we make a pledge to undertake some action, whether that pledge is made to ourselves or to another, do we not feel bound by the words we speak?  Or has our increasingly casual relationship with language diminished the hold which our own words have over us?  Words are, as they have always been, little puzzles of meaning, intent and context, which we seem ever more inclined to ignore as we make our merry way through life.

Traditionally, we have invested certain words with greater power or importance.  Some few take on special meaning under certain circumstances or at a particular time of the year.

Resolution: as we tick away the final hours of December, this word seems to take on a special prominence.  The expectation, as we all know, is that we will ‘resolve’ to make some change in our habits in the coming year.  The dawning of a new year would seem a natural time in the turning of the great wheel to introduce some change into our lives and when we make these year-end promises, we are taking part in a tradition that stretches back into the very beginnings of human history.  What we today think of as the New Year’s Resolution, was already ages old when the Norse clansmen swore great oaths to their gods and ancestors in the deepening hours of Yule.  The tradition may have begun, as written accounts would suggest, in ancient Babylon, but I rather suspect it predates the written word.

This yearly ritual links us to the traditions and beliefs of our most distant ancestors, and yet, when I hear people speak of their New Year’s Resolutions, they often seem to be such trivial things, hardly worth attaching to such a nobel sounding word.  In the coming year, we will strive to eat better or exercise more.  Maybe we will try to be more consistent about recycling or make an effort to call our distant relations more often.

More often than not, there is the clear expectation that we will break our resolutions at some point in the coming year.  We assume that we will fail in our promise, anticipating the moment when we can abandon these self imposed constraints for yet another year and return to business as normal.

Is it possible that people simply don’t understand the word?  Resolution is a big word after all, and in a culture that trivializes language, its many meanings may have become lost or confused.

While in the context of the New Year, we may resolve to move forward with some course of action, the best way to do that may be to take a good look at the year now past.  Let us, for a moment then, consider not the promises to be made but rather the culmination of the year’s events.

Consider the last three hundred and sixty five days to have been a puzzle or a test.  How did you resolve it?

A resolution is more than a vow to be made and broken, it is the answer to a question asked.  In this case, that question is 2012.  What was the result of this year?  How did it affect you, your family and friends, or even the world as a whole?

How can we hope to know what change we should introduce into our lives if we are not considering the year now past?

Is there a single quantifiable answer to that question?  I think, not.

The outcome of the past year is an aggregate of a million smaller questions and answers which bring us to yet another of the interrelated meanings for the word Resolution.

As you read this blog you are looking at a screen on which millions of tiny dots of varying color and brightness come together to resolve the words and pictures you see.  When we speak of Resolution from this frame of reference we are discussing the number of dots (or pixels to be more precise) which come together to form the images you see.  The higher the resolution, the sharper the image and the more clearly you can see and understand what it is you are looking at.

In the same way, looking back at the last year is not simply a matter of examining a singular conclusion to the events of that year because that result is derived from the amalgam of every decision we made during that span.  The more aware of ourselves we are, the more awake to the choices we have made and the consequences following therefrom, the higher the resolution of our perception and the better equipped we are to make necessary changes going forward.

Dictum meum pactum

My word is my bond.

Once upon a time, the words we spoke were held as a reflection of the person speaking them.  To knowingly break a promise would reveal you as faithless and untrustworthy.

To whom do we make New Year’s Resolutions in this day and age?  We do not typically make them to one another.  So to whom then?  Our gods?  Our selves?

And if we cannot keep a promise we made to our own selves how can we ever feel we are deserving of the trust of another?  Or is that not something we concern ourselves with any longer?

If you choose to make a New Year’s Resolution this year, make it with awareness of the full meaning and importance of the word.  Look not just forward but back and with an eye to the little decisions that brought us to where we are.

Embracing that kind of self-awareness may be resolution enough.