drl2Blog

Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.

That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)

But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:

“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.

So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:

Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.

A while back I applauded Iowa Senator Charles Grassley for his probe into the finances of several prominent televangelists.

There’s been little other news of this effort because it is proceeding, one would assume, at the usual glacial governmental pace; but this piece of news did come out recently:

Four of the ministers have since complied with the probe, but Rev. Kenneth Copeland, whose congregation recently bought him a $20 million private jet to preach the gospel, is holding out against the inquiry, which he claims is “aimed at publicly questioning the religious beliefs of the targeted churches.”

“It’s not yours, it’s God’s, and you’re not going to get it,” Copeland says of his financial records. He has launched a website to publicize his crusade and has received support from several leading conservatives, including Paul Weyrich and Kenneth Blackwell.

Okay, so it’s God’s money, and therefore the items you bought with it are God’s as well. He must be a really generous guy to keep letting you borrow his stuff.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know more about this “God” person than the Reverend, who obviously knows him well enough that they travel together. But from what I remember reading about him years ago, I’m pretty convinced of one thing: he doesn’t need a plane to get around.

Ah, well, I suppose we can just say He invests in mysterious ways and move on to some praying and passing of the collection plate.

In speaking to a liberal Christian group in 2006, Obama made the simple point that even among Christians there is hardly agreement on what is the correct interpretation of the Bible:

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”

Apparently Focus On Family’s James Dobson knows for sure what every passage in the Bible is supposed to mean, because on the basis of that speech he’s accused Obama of “distorting the Bible“.

Says Jimmy D (not to be confused with Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy):

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

So pointing out that there are many possible meanings to biblical passages and then citing a few examples where there is frequent disagreement is tantamount to deliberate distortion? Or is Jimmy D (not that I have anything against sausage) just throwing a radio-broadcast temper tantrum and shouting “My distortions are better than your distortions!”

Because the larger issue here – and both Dobson and Obama need to have this scribed into some holy book so maybe they’ll start to believe it – is that any interpretation of the Bible as anything other than a collection of fairy tales devised by people who got bored with the old fairy tales is a distortion – a distortion of reality. Lending it any credence beyond what’s due to a mixed-message collection of Aesop’s Fables is a distortion of reason.

So, in conclusion, the best breakfast ever is an omelet with some sage sausage, crumbled up bacon, and the cheese of your choice. Mmmm, that’s good eatin’.