Cipher Girl

Hi FatherTorque666

I spent sveral years active duty in the Air Force, and currently I'm in the reserves. In my experience, I had no problems due to my lack of religion. I even had None in the religion category in my records and dog tags. This did not affect my promotions at all.

In fact like several others in this thread, overtly religious members were usually made fun of in the units where I was in. Once a junior captain (male) who worked for me made a big stink about a civilian's (female) use of the phrase "software from hell". Well a couple of us senior captains (all female) had a conversation for about 15 minutes long in the hallway outside of his office. Let's just say the fuck-word was use quite frequently. This guy never chewed the civilian out again.

Dark Jedi

USMC vetran, here.

The jesus freaks are out there. I had hell at one command because I needed new dogtags. I requested "atheist" insted of "no pref", which they had put in boot camp.
Went all the way to the Old Man (Colonel) who essentially told me that nobody is atheist, to quit waffling and decide on a religion. (preferrably Christian.. unstated, but hinted by the KJV sitting prominently on his desk).

I decided not to fight it at that time, and never got around to picking up the battle again at other commands. I kind of regret that now, but a young boot Lance Corporal is easily intimidated by a Colonel.

The salty dog I became 8 years later would have fought it in a heartbeat if I really needed to. I was at a pretty secular command, and didn't feel any need to at that time. Never did need new dogtags either. Learned not to feed them to moving machinery the first time.

JohnR

Another former Marine here. In Vietnam most of my squad were atheist. The only shit the fundies gave us was to turn down Sgt. Pepper on Sunday. When I asked for none on my dog tags for religion in boot camp they would not do it. I was asked what my mother's religion was. Well I said Catholic and that is what my dog tags say to this day.

HaysooChreesto!

My off duty hours in the army were spent drinking and chasing women. I don't specifically recall ever having a single discussion about religion.
For my dog tags, I put "Baptist" for pragmatic reasons. They told us that atheists were seen as devil worshippers in some cultures, so I figured it was the safe thing to do.
I do know this though, at least in my unit, there wasn't exactly an atmosphere that encouraged intellectual stimulation of any sort.

mongrel

I'm ex Royal Australian Navy('88-'92). I have to say that the religious were a definite minority there. There are institutionalised things like the "Navy Prayer"(I think that's what it's called, and I think it's really only said for commissioning ships and the like), blessing new ships, and chaplains who join ships on deployment, but religion was always a choice- apart from the first Sunday at recruit school, when we had to attend a multi-denominational service. On most Sunday mornings, those of us not on duty-watch would usually have something better to do anyway, like finding an early opening bar...

On my application forms I listed atheist in the religion box, and no mention of it was ever made by anyone. Not even the chaplain I told raised an eyebrow, but he was a nice bloke who didn't push his shit on us or even bring up any god-talk when having a normal conversation- at least not that I heard.

sourdough

you might want to visit here;
www.thewaronfaith.com

Shake

Ahh, yes the dog tag issue. We've had several threads about this in the past (check the archives). I was still in the deconversion process ... basically done, I didn't go to church anymore, but hadn't fully admitted my atheism to myself ... so I just put "No religious preference" which is something I'd redo now if I could. Ah well, no one ever really saw them anyways.

daria

I've recently started in the Navy. No one has given me any crap personally about my atheism, but the command I'm currently at is very obviously christian-oriented.
On our first day, when the retired Marine who runs the gym came and talked to us about its policies, he basically told us that there are no atheists in foxholes with a five-minute sea story/sermon. I was livid. I hate having to see a damn scripture of the week at the end of every Plan of the Week as well. I don't feel like I can say anything though, because I'm in training, and every little thing we do or don't do affects our final placement.
I'm hoping it won't be quite like this out in the real Navy. I've already decided that there will be no invocations whatsoever at my retirement ceremony. I'm not a line officer, so I'll never be in a command situation (unless I come back to command Supply School), but if I were, I wouldn't have invocations at any of my functions if I could help it.

Megatron

I'm active Air Force, and honestly, I think more of the people I work with are atheist/agnostic than otherwise. But that may have something to do with my workplace (lots of computers = lots of geeks... lack of religion seems a lot more common among us.)

diana

hooah, all, from FatherTorque666 to Jacey, who gave me an honorable mention.

I've never had a problem with my atheism. Much like Zero Angel, I've been pleasantly surprised to learn that I'm far from the only atheist around. And I do discuss it as often as my coworkers discuss their Christianity. It's been my experience that athiests are tickled to learn they aren't alone, and Christians are anxious to be accommodating. Unless they're fundies, at which point everybody else knows they are and strives to avoid them, as well.

Why, just this morning, I had an interesting conversation with a coworker (who comes to work with a bible on Sundays) who was a bit shocked to learn that even the bible itself wasn't written during the life of Jesus.

Living in fear is not living.

d