Kris Thomas Flory just added his dog tags to the pile in the American Atheists Military group on Facebook.

Kris Flory: Today was my last day in the US military. These tags cause a minor shit storm when I had them made by another soldier on an army tag making machine at our mobilization station prior to deploying to Africa. Anybody else have “official” tags?

Thanks for the service, hero!

The government legally can’t decide which religions are ‘true religions’. The dog tags are not the same as the official records, which would say ATHEIST (or ‘other’ if he really went all out with the Jedi thing). There is a list of ‘approved’ religious preferences for the official records (once again, not for dog tags). These are referenced for various reasons including: death rites, dietary restrictions, making sure people aren’t making up holidays, verifying theological objections to war…

That being said, dog tags – including these – are official documents too. Their content ‘stays on the dog tags’, and no statistics or other reporting data are gathered based on them. It’s okay to have fun with the religious preference entry for your dog tags. Mine say ATHEIST / FSM, and are also 100% ‘legal’.

More often than not, it takes some real perseverance to even get plain old vanilla ‘ATHEIST’ dog tags. So color me impressed with what Kris Flory accomplished here. And looking at those ribbons, he has been quite the badass for just six years of service. That’s not to say six years is ‘short’ amount of time to serve your nation, obviously.

Awesome stuff. I want all military atheists reading this to be sure that they update their official records to say ‘ATHEIST’ if they haven’t already. If you aren’t sure why, read this chilling account of a worst-case-scenario.

Also, please add your dog tags to the group, like Kris did!