Military Tramples First Amendment with Purpose Driven Suicide Prevention Program

In an effort to cut down on military suicides, a new program called "A New Approach To Suicide Prevention: Developing Purpose-Driven Airmen", modelled after Rick Warren's "A Purpose Driven Life", is being pushed which violates the constitution, history, and science. In particular, the program slanders Charles Darwin with some of the most blatant lies I've ever seen, and this coming from someone who has been watching Ben Stein a lot lately. Consider this slide:



Humanism is depicted as love of self, with Charles Darwin as an example. This is laughable to anyone who actually studied humanism, or Charles Darwin's life. Here is a man who dedicated much of his life to painstaking scientific research, eschewing the typical pleasures of life for hours and hours studying barnacles. If Darwin was an example of love of self, then Jesus was an example of an early MMA fighter. As for humanism, it is in many ways the opposite of love of self. It posits humanity as the focus, working together to solve humanities problems.

But wait, just when you think that is as bad as it could get, along comes the next slide:



It is difficult to know where to start with this one, but it is a testimony to our horrible education system that this could evoke any reaction but disbelieving laughter. As we all know, evolution is not chance, quite the opposite. The brutal culling of the herd meted out by natural selection is about as nonrandom as one can get. However, even granting that premise, how does one get from there to the notion that man is the center of the universe? The overwhelming message from evolutionary science is that man is the center of nothing. We are but one branch on the bush of life, no more important than any other, and just as likely to end one day. Further, the impact our environment has on us implies that we may be self-focused at our own peril.

The third slide makes use of some common political lies of the right wing, but one does not normally see them set out so clearly and blatantly:



That's right boy and girls, our military is now telling our soldiers that Darwin was the father of communism. Never mind that he lived and died decades earlier, and that his writings and theories were banned by Stalin, as they espoused a natural explanation for human behavior, contrary to The Party line that man could be shaped into any form desired. Finally, it all ends with the lie that evolution implies atheism, and an appeal for the soldiers to accept faith.

Obviously this program is unconstitutional, as well as embarrassingly ignorant, and should be ceased immediately. It also, ironically enough, sends exactly the wrong signals as to how we should treat the enemy in this little conflict of ours. For I'd like to see where the Islamic terrorists that blew up the towers in 9/11 would be placed in the program. Whose view of the world most resembles that of Osama Bin Laden, Rick Warren's or Charles Darwin's? Warren all the way. Yet in this war between religious factions, scientists and atheists are blamed. It is doublethink run amok. Orwell would be proud. The rest of us should be embarrassed by this national disgrace.

For the full slide show, go here.