Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Once you address those two issues in a way that says,

A.) "You are no better than anyone else. You are judged and advanced by words and deeds alone."
B.) "There is no other law than logic. G*d has no place in this."

...i think most of other problems go away, bezrat ha shem !
I'm just curious how you go about addressing B), where religious beliefs and traditions are ordered out of the discussion through an appeal to some system of logic. That might be a little easier said or assumed, than done.

Heck, there are still lots of people around here that want no part of the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools, logic and scientific evidence be damned, because of their own religious beliefs.

Now I don't know that local religious beliefs are necessarily the barrier in training foreign armies. It may just make us seem that much more alien and foreign to them, hindering cooperation. But if THAT is a significant problem, I doubt that any appeal to logic, reason, or expediency by a U.S. serviceman will make it go away. I have nothing to back that up other than a lifetime of hearing people discuss and defend their own religious beliefs and why they believe them.

They may not have a particularly good reason to believe what they do (at least in the eyes of somebody who is not a coreligionist), but that doesn't mean they are likely to change their religious beliefs.