Archive for the Military Category

Religious Deceits in US Military

Posted in belief, Military, politics, religious extremists, spiritual sabotage with tags on September 1, 2017 by chouck017894

How far will religious extremists go to exert control over those who do not subscribe to the beliefs that the extremists champion?  We do not have to look toward foreign nations such as Iraq or Syria or insanity of Isis to find examples of harsh, underhanded religious misconduct and deceit that the aggressively devout claim is carried out in the name of morality.  We need look no further than the halls of the US Congress to find religious guerillas, and in the tax-free charities, and even find religious fanatics contaminating the ranks of our nation’s armed forces.  How low these misguided faith warriors are willing to go is astonishing, for much of what they do to impose their faith upon others flies in the face of what their own scriptures teach.  Such conduct of religious extremists is also unconstitutional.

The United States rose to greatness because it extended the rights of personal freedoms to its citizens, which included the freedom to believe or not believe in some never seen deity.  There is spiritual strength in tolerance which is power beyond man-invented dogma.  Those blinded by some ritualized “faith” will always fail to understand that attacking others in acts of spiritual sabotage will not unlock the gates of Heaven.  One of the worst sins, if sins can really be graded, is to get swept up in spiritual pride for, if scriptural accounts are consulted, spiritual elitism has no place in God’s domain–for all things stand equal before the Creator.  Seeking to impose some brand of man-contrived “faith” upon others therefore is not to practice one’s faith, but is the indulgence in activist politics of this imperfect world.

So we may ask: How far will religious extremists go to exert control over those of  us who do NOT subscribe to self-serving belief systems that the extremists champion?  Apparently a sewer atmosphere offers the extremists their best view of Heaven.  Consider:  Not so long ago, back in 2009, the military was screening service persons through the “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” test (CSF), an alleged “holistic fitness program” which purportedly employed as a means to reduce the number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases that often led to suicide.

The test was allegedly an experimental Army mental-health and fitness project which had a critical portion in it devoted to what can only be termed the spirituality measurement of the one being tested.  In practice it amounted to a religious test on service men and women who put themselves in harms way to protect what is professed to be the land of freedom.  Clearly this type of “testing” tramples on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  Indeed, Clause 3 of Article 6 of the body of the US Constitution explicitly declares  it to be illegal to use any form of religious test in correlation with any government service.  Perhaps we should note here that this so-called “fitness assessment” test happened to have been designed by the same psychologist who inspired the CIA’s torture program which was okayed with the blessing of the Republican administration of “born again” George W. Bush

In that sham of psychological practice, the standard for judging a person’s mental desirability was that the test required enlistee to believe in God or some similarly imagined “higher power” deity to qualify as “spiritually fit” to serve in the US military.  The questions in that test were specifically written to approve only those who believed in God or similar entity and bar any nonbelievers from training.  The test subjects had to measure up to the psychologist’s arbitrary level of spirituality.  In other words, the test had been intentionally (devilishly) designed so that nonbelievers (of which the psychologist disapproved) were discriminated against.  Military service persons were thus being entrapped and attacked for their asserted “lack of belief” as determined by religious fanatics who had wormed themselves into  positions to pass judgment.

Thankfully there are persons of conscience and genuine integrity standing sentry against such mockery of true democratic principles being practiced by those religious fanatics who entrench themselves within military ranks.  The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which currently represents many hundreds of Army soldiers who were once subjected to the so-called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test, stepped in and strongly objected to the Secretary of the Army and to the Army’s Chief of Staff in regard to that travesty of true freedom.  According to released Defense Department documents, after that registered objection the “spiritual” portion of the CSF test was then rated as being the Army Chief of Staff’s “third highest priority.”  That, too, is curious.

Just what seemed more important than combating the spiritual sabotage of service men and women and be positioned as “third” in  importance in its relationship to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to our Constitution?  In seeking to impose spiritual subjugation upon our service men and women who are willing to fight for our country’s freedom of religion or from religion was apparently trivialized as being of only “third in importance”.  Our Founding Fathers, who sought freedom from obligatory faith requirements, must be weeping.

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How Low Will Religious Fanatics Go?

Posted in agnoticism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, freethought, Government, humanity, Military, random, religion, Social, thoughts with tags , , on May 4, 2011 by chouck017894

God and Jesus Christ must be so pleased with the Christian domination being attempted at the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) at Colorado Springs, Colorado.  That institution has been a hotbed of Christian discrimination and proselytizing for years now, from the top brass on down, and the dogmatic activities at the Academy have been anything but complimentary to the teachings attributed to Jesus.

A case in point is the recent cowardly attack upon an innocent animal, a service dog of an Associate Professor of Economics at the Academy who had dared to speak out critically on the academy’s monkey-wrench handling of religious proselytizing and the religious discrimination misconduct being widely indulged in at the Academy.  The black Labrador retriever, named Caleb, was trained as a medical support canine for the professor who has a health problem causing occasional vertigo and imbalance.  The primary owner of the dog, however, happens to be Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Suspicious is an understatement for the cowardly attack upon the gentle dog.  And it is questionable how such cowardice and disregard of innocent life reflects the proselytizer’s claims of Christian enlightenment.  The heavy Christian proselytizing activities at the Academy have been investigated for several years by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and the professor happens to be the only openly known supporter of that investigative group.  But there are also over 250 MRFF clients at the Academy who have sought help over the unethical (and unconstitutional) attempts to indoctrinate all cadets into one specific man-formulated faith system.  The triggering point for the deadly attack on the dog was likely the professor’s testimony in a federal court in February 2011 in the MRFF attempt to block an evangelical proselytizing ex-Marine from speaking at the National Prayer Day event.

On retracing events on the day of the dog’s sudden collapse, it was pretty conclusive that the dog could not have been poisoned anywhere other than the professor’s office while the professor was conducting a class.  All office doors are locked during such times, but  the lock on all doors of the USAFA faculty offices were identical, and therefore any of the staff or faculty would  possess a key that would open his office door.  This certainly suggests an “inside job.”  The professor had the lock on his office changed after the dastardly attack, and when he turned in the key to the old lock, the key number which had been registered to it did not match the returned key.

Radicalism is not a psychological quirk to be regarded as a leadership attribute.  Such mental inflexibility does not qualify a person with the ability to interact with mutual respect with others to achieve a common good.  Certainly the limited and perverted spiritual characteristic that indulges in such conduct as threats of violence or even death threats—as relayed to the founder and president of the MRFF—toward people who are not of the same faith system has no loyalty to democratic principles upon which the United States was founded. 

Should we be placing the safety and honor of our nation in the hands of such fanatics?

P. S.  The dog is being nursed back to health.

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Shameless Religious Testing in Armed Forces

Posted in agnoticism, Atheist, belief, Christianity, culture, faith, freethought, Government, Military, politics, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , on January 7, 2011 by chouck017894

How far will religious extremists go to exert control over those who do not subscribe to the “beliefs” that the extremists champion?  We do not have to look toward foreign nations such as Iran to find examples of harsh, underhanded religious misconduct that the aggressively devout claim is carried out in the name of morality.  We need look no further than the halls of Congress, the tax-free charities, and even find it polluting the ranks of our nation’s armed forces.  How low these misguided faith warriors are willing to go is astonishing, for much of what they do to impose their faith upon others flies in the face of what their own scriptures teach.  Such behavior is also unconstitutional. 

The United States of America rose to greatness because it extended the rights of  personal freedom to its citizens, which included the freedom to believe or not believe in some never-seen being.  There is spiritual strength in tolerance that is beyond dogma.  Those blinded by some ritualized “faith” will always fail to understand that attacking others  in spiritual sabotage will not unlock the gates of heaven.  One of the worst sins, if sins can really be graded, is to get swept up in spiritual pride, for, if scriptural accounts are consulted, elitism has no place in God’s domain.  Seeking to impose some brand of man-conceived “faith” upon others therefore is not a spiritual practice; it is indulgence in activist politics. 

So we may ask again: How far will religious extremists go  to exert control over those who do not subscribe to the self-serving “beliefs” that the extremists champion?  Apparently sewer depth offers their best view of heaven.  Consider: Since late in 2009 the military has been screening service persons through the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test, an alleged “holistic fitness program” purportedly employed as a means to reduce the number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases that often lead to suicides.

The test, an experimental Army mental-health and fitness project, has a critical portion in it that is devoted to what can only be termed the spiritual measurement of the one being tested!  In practice it amounts to a religious test on the service men and women who expose themselves to life threatening danger to protect the alleged land of freedom.  Clearly this tramples upon the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  Indeed, Clause 3 of Article 6 of the body of the US Constitution explicitly declares it to be illegal to use any form of religious test in correlation with any government service.  Perhaps we should note here that this so-called “fitness” assessment test happens to have been designed by the  same psychologist who inspired the CIA’s torture program that was used with the blessing of the Bush administration.

In this sham of psychological practice, the standard for judging a person’s mental desirability is that the test requires enlistees to believe in God or at least some “higher power” to qualify as being “spiritually fit” to serve in the US Army.  The questions in the test have been written in such a way to approve those who believe in God or other deity, and target nonbelivers for training so they can be made to measure up to an arbitrary level of spirituality.  In other words, the test has been intentionally designed so that non-believers are discriminated against. 

Thankfully, there are persons of conscience and  integrity standing sentry against such mockery of democratic principles imposed upon service personnel.  The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which currently represents over 200 Army soldiers who have been subjected to the transparent Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test, has strongly objected to the Secretary of the Army and to the Army’s Chief of Staff.  According to released Defense Department documents, since that registered objection the spiritual portion of the CSF test is rated as the Army Chief of Staff’s “third highest priority.”

Acts perpetrated against the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and indulgence is spiritual sabotage rank third behind —what?

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Belligerent Faith, A Danger to Democracy

Posted in agnoticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, faith, freethought, Government, humanity, Military, politics, random, religion, Social, thoughts with tags , , , , , , on December 18, 2010 by chouck017894

When one’s “faith” is expressed belligerently or aggressively, that “faith” has willfully closed itself off from receiving the in-flow of any higher spiritual potential.  Once “faith” is expressed in aggressive proselytizing it has degenerated into an attempt to take from other people’s spiritual essence rather than remain open to receive from universal essence.  The reason for this philosophical observation is prompted from having read once again of the shameful proselytizing that continues to infest the U. S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. 

A ministry founded by Don and Anna Warrick calling itself Cadets for Christ has long been given pretty much free rein to indulge themselves in unwanted proselytizing all over the campus.  How could this unconstitutional imposition of one religion over the widely diverse backgrounds of cadets be allowed?  The answer is not pretty, and it discloses how tenacious and deceiving the fundamentalist Christian organizations can be, for behind the allowance are some close ties to senior Pentagon officials!  There is no question that this allowance of Christian proselytizing amounts to subversion of the democratic principles set down by the founding fathers—the very principles upon which this democratic form of government rose to world power. 

A recent  United States Air Force Academy Climate Survey has brought to light some taboo data.  (It should be noted that the Survey was undertaken only after insistent pressure from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.)  The statistics on the inappropriate proselytization conduct that has been allowed to continue at the Academy revealed that at least 20,000 servicemen and women, as well as Department of Defense civilians have experienced religious harassment.  And of the non-Christian Air Force Academy Cadets, forty-one percent of them related that they had been subjected to fundamentalist proselytization spiels, and even outright threats.  How the fundamentalists equate this  mental/physical harassment as spiritual guidance is, apparently, a divine mystery.

But this type of religious abuse goes much further than the Air Force Academy: the abuse and infractions by fundamentalist Christians has been uncovered at nearly every military installation across the world.  The fact is that such reprehensible religious posturing extends even into the Pentagon, which places democratic principles and national security in unreliable hands, thus posing a danger to everyone’s freedom.

Think that this is an extreme deduction?  As an example, The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches has for years been making it possible for a stream of military chaplains to thumb their noses at the military code of behavior and have refused to cease and desist from proselytizing when in uniform.  In doing this, they do not even follow the advice given in Romans 13:2, “…he who opposes the authority has taken a stand against the arrangement of God…”  And in verse 10 it adds, “Love does not work evil to one’s neighbor…”  But then fundamentalists are experts at ignoring things that interfere with their material ambitions. 

How did the beautiful democratic acceptance of each person’s religion get levered around the longstanding regulation that apportioned chaplains in accordance with religious demographics that determined the faith of the majority of service personnel?  Properly, the percentage of one particular belief background would be matched closely with the same percentage of that faith’s chaplains.  Even so, all chaplains were then  obliged to receive training to minister to the troops of any faith.  All that changed after the Reagan administration breezed in.  The Pentagon, like the nation, was becoming infected with dubious divine sales pitches, resulting in accrediting a disproportional amount of evangelical and Pentecostal so-called “endorsing agencies” that then swamped the chaplain posts.  Those  who were “endorsed” were graduated from fundamentalist Bible colleges that taught that any other faiths were enemies of Christ.  Thus today this “conservative” and/or Pentecostal atmosphere has come to predominate as the spiritual guidance offered throughout all military branches!

As an example of how this imposition of evangelical/Pentecostal Christian “faith” upon what amounts to a captive group can be more of a disservice than a blessing, consider how service persons suffering post traumatic stress disorder from combat have been too often “treated.”  Far too many who have been casualties in body and  spirit have received “treatment” by religious quacks rather than by psychological diagnosis and professional treatment.  Chaplains generously offered comfort through evangelism, in effect implying that only in accepting Jesus as savior would they experience healing.  Prescribing heavy doses of scripture can twist even a healthy mind, so in effect the evangelical prescription was more like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Those men and women who place themselves in harm’s way for the nation that is supposedly dedicated to freedom and liberty deserve to be granted freedom from such shameful proselytizing in military closed ranks and freedom from chaplain “treatments” that alleviate nothing. 

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Religionists Attempt Takeover of US Military

Posted in agnoticism, Atheism, Atheist, belief, Bible, Christianity, culture, faith, freethought, history, Military, politics, random, religion, thoughts with tags , , , , , on April 27, 2010 by chouck017894

Every citizen of the United States should awaken to the real and present danger that religious fanatics in branches of the US military bring to national security.   Religious fanatics with guns and aircraft and uniforms and a Pentagon allowance are today a part of an undemocratic contagion being nurtured in the bowels of democracy.  The idea that a combination of mismatched ideological groups are actually conspiring for the common goal of imposing a theocratic-form of government  upon US citizens may seem unbelievable, but that element does exist.  If in doubt, consider how religious views influenced the Bush administration and shaped the nation’s foreign policy that regarded the war in the Middle East as essential to its Bible-inspired mission.  And let us not forget the devotion expressed by the born-again president for torture of defenseless prisoners as was practiced in Europe during the church-controlled Middle Ages. 

We should ask, who makes up these seemingly mismatched ideological groups?  First off, major corporations and their puppets known as neoconservatives.  Corporate ideology stresses for profit business.  In itself that is not anti-American.  But it is how they wheedle lawmakers and the media to con the public in ways that increase profits while also setting up safeguards for themselves to avoid liability for the damages they knowingly inflict upon the public.  As a screen these cohorts invariably set up so-called “think tanks” and phony “not-for-profit” fronts that twist their purpose into plausible sounding indulgences.  The goal, however, always remains money and power.

Linked with these are the theo-cons who are dedicated to a theocratic agenda.  In “spirit” there are “faith” enthusiasts who choose to indulge in a long-range plan of Christian reconstruction of America’s genuine history for the purpose of eventually imposing severe  limitations  on every citizen’s freedoms.  Since the 1970s these political minded persons have used religion as a front for attempting the overthrow of democratic principles and imposing a restricted form of government—or as they put it, a  “God-based or Bible -based government.”  The proposal agreed upon in the late seventies and early eighties was to gain control of one of the political parties, and this was accomplished with the full takeover of the Republican Party in 1996.  A few names that were active in this mockery of democracy have become well-known: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, John Hagee, to mention only a few.  The organizing was covertly funded by corporations, and the big-lie battle-cry adopted by the brainwashed was that the constitutional demand for separation of church and state was a myth!

But this was not the end of the religious right-wing plotting.  Grabbing and taking command of the nation’s muscle—the military operations—was desired and remains the big prize.  If the military can be brought into submission under religious intimidation, Christian tyranny can be made to prevail.

Thus with religious undertones the US was urged by the Bush administration into a “crusade” against Iraq, and to engage in a “war on terrorism.”  The funding for the religious-right clamoring was  provided by the major corporations that would thereby augment their profits by ensuring their control over the oil subsidized NeoCons.  It has been these institutions that have bankrolled the right-wing religious activists that have brazenly attempted to seize control within the US military. 

Today in 2010, in all the military branches that are intended to guard America’s freedoms, there are still acts of religious intimidation taking place.  At the US Air Force Academy, for example, cadets were still being subjected very recently to heavy-handed proselytism by evangelical Christians.  Shockingly, military officials appeared to be working in conjunction with them.  Hundreds of active duty servicemen from all military branches have reported and complained of similar ham-fisted proselytism tactics.  The general pitch of the proselytizers is that if one does not believe in the Christian version of “spiritual” salvation, then they are destined to become, as on proselytizing officer avowed, nothing more than “worm-dirt.”

Such shameful disregard for spiritual integrity and a lack of respect for other peoples’ sense of spirit is still being fanned by those who profit materially by the phony holy hubbub.  The extremes that militant faith will sink to was recently revealed to the public in the disturbing news that a rifle-sight supplier to the Department of Defense had been imprinting all their rifle-sights with coded references to Bible verses.  Our service personnel must face constant danger and the possibility of death every day when on active duty: they should not be made to endure such a conniving  practice of Christian proselytizing while they are defending a nation that rose  to power by proclaiming everyone’s right to religious freedom.

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