Posted on 05/16/2008 7:55:57 AM PDT by rosenfan
Maybe the reason the misperception persists that there are no atheists in foxholes is that nonbelievers must either shut up about their views or be hounded out of the military.
Just ask Army Spc. Jeremy Hall, who is making a splash in the news because of the way his atheism was attacked by superiors and fellow soldiers while he was risking his life in service to his country.
Hall, 23, served two combat tours in Iraq, winning the Combat Action Badge. But he's now stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., having been returned stateside early because the Army couldn't ensure his safety.
There is something deeply amiss when we send soldiers on a mission to engender peaceful coexistence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, yet our military doesn't seem able to offer religious tolerance to its own.
Hall recounts the events that led to his marginalization in a federal lawsuit he filed in March in Kansas. Hall is joined by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group devoted to assisting members of the military who object to the pervasive and coercive Christian proselytizing in our armed forces.
Hall's atheism became an issue soon after it became known. On Thanksgiving 2006 while stationed outside Tikrit, Hall politely declined to join in a Christian prayer before the holiday meal. The result was a dressing down by a staff sergeant who told him that as an atheist he needed to sit somewhere else.
In another episode, after his gun turret took a bullet that almost found an opening, the first thing a superior wanted to know was whether Hall believed in Jesus now, not whether he was okay.
Then, in July, while still in Iraq, Hall organized a meeting of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. According to Hall, after things began, Maj. Freddy Welborn disrupted the meeting with threats saying he might bring charges against Hall for conduct detrimental to good order and discipline, and that Hall was disgracing the Constitution. (Err, I think the major has that backward.) Welborn has denied the allegations, but the New York Times reports that another soldier at the meeting said that Hall's account was accurate.
Hall claims that he was denied a promotion in part because he wouldn't be able to "pray with his troops." And of course he was returned from overseas due to physical threats from fellow soldiers and superiors. Things became so bad that he was assigned a full-time bodyguard.
This is nothing new to Mikey Weinstein, founder of MRFF and a former Air Force judge advocate general who also served in the Reagan administration. Weinstein says that he has collected nearly 8,000 complaints, mostly from Christian members of the military tired of being force-fed a narrow brand of evangelical fundamentalism.
Weinstein, who co-wrote the book With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military, has documented how the ranks of our military have been infiltrated by members of the Officers' Christian Fellowship and other similar organizations. On its Web site, the OCF makes no secret of its mission which is to "raise up a godly military" by enlisting "ambassadors for Christ in uniform."
Weinstein says recruitment is easy in a strict command-subordinate military where the implied message is, if you don't pray the right way, your career might stall.
Beyond the mincemeat being made of church-state separation and religious liberty, it seems particularly combustible for our armed forces to be combining "end-times" Christian theology with military might. That's no way to placate Muslim populations around the world.
But there's no will for change. The military's virulent religious intolerance could be eradicated tomorrow with swift sanctions against transgressors. Instead, it's winked at and those caught proselytizing suffer no consequence. It appears that brave men like Hall, who simply wish to follow the dictates of their own conscience, will be needing bodyguards for a long time to come.
“So you have some information to the contrary. Please share.”
Well, buddy, if you choose to take the word of a commie writing for one of the most leftwing papers in America without a shred of evidence to support the allegations, you go right ahead.
I’m glad you find her word more credible than all of us who have spent years and years in various branches of the military and experienced NONE of this. I was certainly a non-believer when I was in. My guess is, I was in the majority, not the minority, not that the subject ever really came up.
There’s yer freakin’ contrary info.
Sorry, the Constitution says different.
Article VI, Section 3:
...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
The word of a soldier vs. the word of an Iraqi? I see a difference.
I wonder what the tone around here would be if the story were about one of the majority Christian complaints this organization gets.
We had two corpsman that were conscientious objectors. Both of them saw combat with Marine squads when the fighting got heavy during Tet. One of them was agnostic and I don’t recall him ever saying that combat changed his views on God.
The clear anti religious bigotry of a name like that blows this guys credibility completely out of the water. No sympathy.
Suppose there was an organization called the Military Association of Christians and Believers. Would you consider that a religiously bigoted name?
I can’t find the Complaint, but here’s another article.
http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/press-releases/religious-suit-detailed.html
So which point are you contending; that this happens at all, or that if it is happening it not un-American and stupid?
So it didn't happen to you? Well, it happened to another military poster on this very thread.
That's a pretty small pool, so I'd say that there is some merit to the article. And if that is happening, it is un-American and stupid. So what is your point?
That, my friend, is what "religious test" means.
It's not a question of "articles of faith" but of "membership".
That is a quite objective thing.
In fact, that clause was included in the Constitution to prohibit Quakers in Pennsylvania from restricting public office (in the federal government) to only Quakers.
You must be very careful in stretching the concept of "religious test" to articles of belief ~
No need. I'll make a mental note that your default assumption is that MSM articles are true.
Look, you’re the one seeing the conspiracies. I’m simply noting that it’s your imagination. There are NO Christian conspiracies.
No, we are not slaves. On the other hand, the association referenced definitely would like to make us slaves 24/7 by bounding our behavior, thoughts and speech by their standards ~ so they do not feel "uncomfortable".
Irrelevant. You said that the there is "no authority under the Constitution to determine what is or is not religious in nature."
Isn't a religious test a "determination of what is or is not religious?"
Yes, it is.
So instead, I should assume that the non-religious members of the military in this article are liars.
No, you should assume that there are actually two sides to the story and should also consider that the guy who is annoyed at being reassigned just might have a chip on his shoulder.
He may well be telling the truth, but the author of the article has done precious little to verify any of his claims.
That's pretty much it.
The US government (through the agency of the USPS, an independent executive establishment) discovers if the organization is what it says it is ~ it does not examine its beliefs.
IRS has some similar standards (having copied them from the Post Office Department decades ago).
A school has to declare it's a school and prove it with documentation, and maybe pictures, to get the same lower postage rates, or IRS nonprofit classification.
True enough the government has to know that an organization is "religious in nature" to determine if a membership test were actually in violation of the specific clause on "religious tests", but at the same time the US government is simply prohibited from examining the specific nature of religious beliefs ~ hence my example of "You're gonna' go to Hell". The government cannot examine "Hell". If you were to tell me that 100 times a day, morning, noon and night, and used it to verbally harrass me and destroy my morale (within the framework of military service) the government could certainly go after the "harrassment" behavior, but it need not discuss Hell.
Capice?
I'm afraid not ~ atheists and their running dog lackeys in the margins of belief usually can't. To them the mention of a religious term is all it takes to set their blood to running and their sweat to dripping ~ it's the "Hell" part, not the harrassment, that's significant.
>The word of a soldier vs. the word of an Iraqi? I see a difference.<
I would tend to take the word of the agnostic soldier before the rugrider but evidently the Pentagon JAG thinks the Iraqis word is stronger.
I saw both this, and variations of this, in the military back in the 1980s. Bad officers and NCOs cannot resist coercion for any number of reasons, not just religion, so it is not a religious problem as such. It is, however, very prejudicial to good order and discipline.
However, that being said, I saw a *lot* more officers and NCOs who bent over backwards to follow the rules. Again, both with religion and other reasons.
One company commander regularly compelled her subordinate officers to enroll in non-military organizations she belonged to, as well as advancing her political opinions and trying to discourage soldiers in her unit from voting (which gives away her party affiliation). But she was also unethical with unit funds, and openly favored female and white personnel over males and ethnic minorities. In other words, she was rotten.
A more dangerous situation was dealt with immediately, because he was a chaplain. The only chaplain I ever heard of who was sectarian and offensive about it, and I got to see the event which led to his involuntary retirement.
While he had strayed in the past and been cautioned, mostly because of his strong anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish views, he made the mistake of shooting his mouth off before a large group of visiting foreign officers, which required extensive apologies from the post commander.
But he was completely different from any number of the other chaplains I met, who as a group were some of the most honorable, responsible officers I ever knew, and in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
In fact, based on the description in the article, I would guess that the unit chaplain was either a novice, or they were short a chaplain. Senior chaplains usually take a very dim view of religious prejudice or coercion in the ranks, and have no problem remonstrating with even senior officers who violate the rules.
And you have not been chewed out, until you have been chewed out by a chaplain.
During the run up to Desert Storm, I broke my arm and got stuck stateside for 6 weeks working at 1st Mar Div HQ. I saw numerous malcontents that were sent back for bad behaviour. Most of them had stories about how the Marines mistreated them. One of them intentionally hurt himself in order to come back stateside. Magically, within a day of returning his abuse story was on the front page of the LA Times, completely made up but reported as news.
I’m not saying he is lying but what he is reporting is inconsistent with 8 years of personal active duty observations.
From my stay in the service 95% could have been athiests and nobody would have known.
Okay, so how exactly does the government verify that a religious organization is "organized for religious purposes"?
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