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Adolfo Scilingo
"They were unconscious. we stripped them, and when the flight commander gave the order, we opened the door and threw them out, naked, one by one. That is the story, and nobody can deny it." With these words, former Argentine navy Captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, 48, spilled one of the dirtiest secrets of the "dirty war" that raged in his country from the mid-1970s through the early '80s. Human-rights workers and relatives of at least 9,000 Argentines who "disappeared" under military rule have long contended that the missing were systematically murdered by troops acting on orders from the ruling generals. But Scilingo is the first ex-officer to echo these charges in public.
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For the next two years, he remembers, some 15 to 20 prisoners were trucked every Wednesday to the Buenos Aires airport, put on a military plane, and then dropped, drugged but alive, from a height of about 13,000 ft. into the Atlantic Ocean.
Scilingo estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 people "disappeared" in this manner from his base alone. He admits responsibility for 30 of them. He says he was ordered to participate in two of the death flights in 1977, adding that his fellow officers drew the same sort of assignment: "It was to give everyone a turn, a kind of Communion." On his first flight, Scilingo helped strip and then throw 13 victims out of a coast guard Sky Van; on his second, he did the same to 17 more out of a navy Elektra.
"Personally, I could never get over the shock," he says now, even though he still feels the fight against "subversives" was for a righteous cause. His first death flight so disturbed Scilingo that he went to a navy chaplain: "He told me that it was a Christian death because they did not suffer, that it was necessary to eliminate them." The Roman Catholic Church, long criticized for tolerating the military, responded last week with a veiled mea culpa chastising priests who may have condoned the "dirty war." But human-rights activists still called upon the church to acknowledge openly its sins of omission.
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I have read claims that religion is the source of law, and that human law is derived from religion. In my opinion, the opposite is true. Religion is created, and is amended, in response to human desires for order and absolution. I added the quote from the Argentine trial to illustrate that when circumstances changed in Argentina, as they have changed in the US, even religious authorities changed in their response. Instead of religion providing leadership, religious authority was lead by events and moral cowardice into ignoring their responsibility.
God either exists or does not. If God exists, he existed before religion because religion was created by men. Religion is to spirituality and God what farming is to plants growing, it is an attempt by man to domesticate what occurs naturally. Saying that you need religion to experience spirituality or God is like saying that plants only grow on farms.
Natural law exists for all animals, especially mammals. Most animals are arranged in groups - prides, flocks, packs, etc. Many of these groups have some form of natural law. In most cases, the natural law is brutally efficient. Man's law probably started out as primitive as that of a wolf pack. It was only later that any attempt to protect the weak was considered, probably when conditions improved to allow it.
Saying that religion is the only path to social order is almost as bad as saying that one specific religion is better than all of the others at providing social order. History pretty much disproves that idea. If God instilled in us, through divine spark or evolution, the qualities of compassion which most animals lack, he did it before there was any religion to worship him for it.
Mankind is perfectly capable of seeking social order without religion. Sometimes this is through positive efforts like charity and inclusion. Sometimes this is through negative efforts like authoritarianism and tyranny. Either of these types of efforts can be wrapped in religion, but they do not have to be. Roosevelt's "New Deal" was not religious.
In general, without knowing anything else, I can trust a man who declares himself an atheist as much as I can trust a man who wears his faith on his sleeve. I don't know many atheists, but I do know some self-proclaimed 'righteous men' who I wouldn't trust with a nickel.
Men imprint themselves on their religion, not the other way around.