A Chaplain giving marines or pilots a pep talk about God is Love
before they go out on their killing missions.
The irony is breathtaking!
Why aren’t Chaplains the world over telling the men and women who serve in the Armed Forces to lay down their weapons and go home? Why are they there at all, in the Killing Fields, standing next to a cross?
Why aren’t they strongly condemning war and calling those who create it and make money from it evil?
Which God are they serving – the God in the Bible or the God of War and Greed?
By their presence, Chaplains are condoning war and all its horror which completely refutes the Christian message.
And so-called Christian nations who wage endless wars are just as hypocritical, just as evil.
Let those who claim to be believers put down their weapons and work to bring about peace.
I agree to an extent, however Preachers of the armed forces are not only there to preach about god (even thought one commandment says “they shallt not kill”), often they offer comfort to maimed, dying soldiers regardless of their religion and who they fight for, something generals, never do nowadays.
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Well, God is either with us or with the terrorists. (Grin) Hey, he wants to earn his paycheck. Great post. Good point. I can hardly wait to see the responces to this. LOL!!!
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Kemosobi, religious clerics of any kind are not supposed to be blessing those who are about to set out on missions to kill people. The two things are contradictory.
Somehow humans have managed to get God and Killing together and they talk about serving God and country. Some nations have gone further and talk about serving God, Country and the Oligarchs.
You can’t serve two Masters!
76-water, God is a human creation and, as a result, he, she or it will do whatever humans want and condone their most barbaric behaviour.
It wonder if the Chaplain blesses those who torture prisoners before they engage in their fiendish acts! “I pray that God will bless you as you waterboard these prisoners or beat them to death. Amen.”
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All religions are effed up they are control orders the human world doesn’t need religions, we do onto others what we want done onto are selves simple, humans have the power to choose between right and wrong we all know the difference between right and wrong, the only excuse for the (so called) people who commit vile crimes against there own kind that i can think of is that the fiends are not human at all and should be dealt with as such.
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Thank you David:
I have said the same thing time and again. Where the hell are all the so-called “Christians” when it comes to denouncing war. I don’t see alot of “Christians” at the anti-war rallies, unless they are of the so-called liberal sects. If “Christians” were really Christians, they would be out there protesting, agitating and doing everything they can to shut down the Military industrial complex. Humans, unfortunately, rarely think for themselves, and can hardly ever see the hypocrisy of their views and ways, since that would require CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS.
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I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
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David,
Excellent!
This is partly why I left all organized religion. As a Marine in Vietnam, we had the chaplain pray for us to kill the other folks. While he didn’t pray specifically for us to kill them, his prayer that we would be “successful” in our operations amounted to the same thing. The job of Marines, soldiers, or any military is to kill and destroy.
When the commandments say not to kill, when Christ said to love one another, how can the chaplain pray for the deaths of the “other” human beings? Can you say hypocrisy? I can and do.
I would rather be a pagan/heathen than to follow any religion.
I try to treat all living beings as I want to be treated. Yes, I apply the do unto others to the “animals” as well as to humans.
Religion seems to exist only to divide us from each other. My god is better than your god. In the US we saw senior military folks say such crap. One general, I forget his name, said that he “knew” we would “win” in Iraq because “his god” was real and the Iraqis worshiped a “false god”. I don’t have the quote exact, but the message the clown was sending was very clear. Muslims worship a “false god”, while the christian (xtian) god is the “true god”. More like Mars than any Christ to my way of thinking.
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Sunny Cloud Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 6:46 am
Yes,Man! You have an understanding! I am totally with you!
Thanks!
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It’s not really ironic if you consider the fact that christianity is cut from the same cloth that gave the world a talking bush and an ocean that simply moved out of the way. It’s cut from the same cloth that gave us plagiarized stone tablets (3 versions) that say ‘do not kill’ – with the convenient caviat, “except”, and the fantastic story of ‘wandering in a desert for 40 years’ – without leaving a trace. It’s part of the same Jewish Book of Fables that gave us an imaginary Kingdom of David and an Exodus that never occurred.
Christianity is a re-molded, re-branded version of older religions like Bacchus and Attis Zoroastrian and the Osirian religion. The only thing original to christianity is its alleged founder. But he preached little more than what was offered by the Buddha and Confucius. It was, afterall, Confucius that gave the world the Golden Rule. And we should always remember there were at least 16 crucified savior God-men in the history of religion, not just ONE. God, if it exists, is certainly LOVE. But the actions and mindsets of his alleged followers are not. The old adage “Lord save me from your followers” certainly comes to mind.
So when I see articles like this, I nod and say to myself, “just as I suspected, confirms all my suspicions”. They serve the same fictitious god as the ancients in the Book of Lies. They still cling to the “kill every man, woman and child” directives of old. They still believe in the tooth fairy.
Ambrose Bierce coined it rather well:
RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. – the Devils Dictionary.
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Amerikagulag Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 4:00 am
Ambrose Bierce has another observation worthy of note here from his “The Devil’s Dictionary”
SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
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Amerikagulag,
Yes, I realized many years ago that the “Bible” is based on stories from much older cultures. While it may not be outright plagiarism, it is surely based on many other stories that predate it.
I also find it funny how “we” are supposed to revere that book while tossing aside the “holy” books of other peoples and religions. They all have at the core similar principles/ideas.
The Buddha is not very different from Christ either. Maybe Jesus was a student of Buddha.
It all just proves again that it is not necessary to be a Christian to be moral or ethical.
Many of those who claim to be Christian are really xtians. They do not even try to practice what they preach. That may be true of most religious people of different religions.
Personally, I think that the old nature based religions such as pagan “Indians” were as ethical as any Europeans.
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Sunny Cloud Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 7:12 am
When Evil arrived to this Planet the first thing he did he created religion.
Therefore – Religion=Evil!
It is religion who divides us in castes and by this creates all evil qualities possible in our hearts towards each other!
It is religion who searches for difference among the humans – not for unite them,but divide!
It is religion who push us to kill,rape,hate,steel and afterwards easily giving us an arguments for justify all what we’ve done by simply saying that nobody’s perfect!
Yess,Charlie! I rather talk to Mother Earth and with with animal world than with human ‘high advanced’ society!
All these bull**** stories about Christ,Buddha,Muhamed as well as Hindu gods were created FOR and accepted BY naive masses who had no enough self-esteem and had no enough inner power for being self! Yes! Evil was (and still is!) cunning,but masses were (and still are!) stupid idiots who are not able even for thinking by themselves! This is religion who killed all Divine qualities and powers in humans! Well,where are sheep there are clippers!
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David G Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 8:45 pm
Sunny Cloud, you speak with wisdom. Your final sentence speaks volumes.
Religion does divide. Each religion promises much but delivers nothing. It is a massive fraud.
Please call again.
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I seem to recall both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Robert Runcie infuriated Thatcher by praying for the Argentinians killed in the Malvinas (their proper name: after Iraq, I don’t think we have any right to the Falklands). He was the only tank commander in World War II to capture a submarine, by the way – it was in the Kiel Canal.
You might just as well ask why Jesus hung out with tax-gatherers and prostitutes. If the chaplains said “don’t fight”, and the men ignored them, should the chaplains just go home? Surely those men need them all the more. Every young man is prepared to die. Not many are prepared to live as cripples, or to face up to what they wreak. Why should the Church abandon them in their hour of need?
I have absolutely no religious impulses whatsoever. But in the 1990s, I saw the secular “Guardian” and “New Statesman” lie our countries into the devastation of Yugoslavia, the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the only country to stand up to Stalin. They turned a blind eye to the most fearful atrocities done by their side, such as the gang-rape and burning alive of Serb girls in the Medak pocket, the slaughter of 3800 elderly Serbs and children around Srebrenica, the ethnic cleansing of the Krajna. And after they slaked their blood-lust in Kosovo, and installed the most brutal gangsters in power, they covered up all the consequent organ-harvesting, sex-trafficking, drug-smuggling, ethnic cleansing, destruction of World Heritage monasteries and political murder. If they had approved it, it must be right. If a Kosovo sex-slave is beaten up in a Soho brothel for not earning £475 a day, not too far for the Guardian and New Statesman to hear her, does she make a sound?
The churches did not overthrow international law. The churches did not trash the rules of war. That was done by secular politicians who thought they were onto a winner. They thought they could get away with it. What’s a million deaths compared to two, three, or five more years in power? Within a decade, they had achieved their own complete moral, political, economic, and social destruction.
Some questions lie beyond words and reason. True, many clergyman are only too happy to slam the Bible in Christ’s face. And we’ve all seen what those disgusting rabbis do to egg on the recent immigrants to Palestine. We’re all human. We all fall short of what we might be. But I think a little humility is in order, and some recognition of the plank in our own eyes.
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David G Reply:
January 8th, 2011 at 8:50 pm
No questions lie beyond words and reason, Bob. None.
The Churches do not embrace what the Bible tells them. If they did they would speak out against war strongly and every Sunday. They are frightened of losing their tax-free status or offending those of their flock who make money from investments in arms manufacturers.
If clerics don’t speak out against war, who will?
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Bob Jackson Reply:
January 9th, 2011 at 12:17 am
I think Shakespeare, Picasso, Tolstoy and others found a few such questions. Why else do we have such a hunger for imaginative literature, art and music? Drama, which developed in the bosom of the Church, is the only way to explore moral dilemmas without privileging one side over the other.
We have a fatal flaw in our natures. Conscience stops us doing wrong. But if we can convince ourselves that our cause is just, we can bypass it completely. Nothing will hold us back. That is the reason the history of the Church is one long record of cruelty. And it’s also the reason why the modern British and American Lefts are such dab hands at producing war criminals like Clinton, Blair and Obama. They did it it all in the name of promoting human rights.
We seem to be talking about different churches. If you mean the American God-Marts, then you’re absolutely right, no question about it. They’re Satanic. They claim total power over their God, and will twist Him any way they wish. But does that advance the argument? Rowan Williams kept telling Tony Blair that he would face consequences in the after-life for what he had done.
In the Commonwealth, every season is marked by a royal ceremony protesting war, and praying for peace: Anzac and Armistice Days in the spring and autumn, the Queen’s Birthday Parade and Christmas Message in the summer and winter. King George V had said, “I would rather wave a red flag in Trafalgar Square than lead my people into war again”. In New Zealand, when the war-mongers took over television in the ’90s, the Birthday Parade was the first thing they axed – it’s a symbolic exploration of the role of disciplined force, in all its ambivalence, in society.
If you meant chaplains should not be urging soldiers on to kill, you’re right. But if they do, they should be court-martialled. It’s their job to keep human decency alive, in even the most disgusting circumstances. The big problem is that the “western” world has produced a crop of leaders who treat war as a fashion accessory. They’re impervious to any appeals. They just think up wars to use up weapons. The wartime generation created ceremonies which they hoped would counter this. Why not breathe life back into them?
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David G Reply:
January 9th, 2011 at 8:02 am
You know something is wrong, Bob, when the country which claims to be the most Christian one on earth is the major warmonger. The whole message of Christianity has been pushed to one side and ignored. And the Church, in the main, has condoned this.
Religion should be leading us towards peace, not sanctioning endless war!
Here in the US the army conducted an experiment on 800,000 soldiers to make sure they were “spirituality fit” to go out and kill people.
I guess they only want good christians killing the innocent in foreign countries, atheists are not allowed to be murderers.
Does this sound sane?
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Amerikagulag Reply:
January 10th, 2011 at 3:48 pm
That’s because atheists are far more moral people than deluded sheep. Just ask Hepatia the oracle, who was flayed by Christians.
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David G Reply:
January 10th, 2011 at 4:01 pm
I raised the question of how many civilians’ Christian’ America had killed since Vietnam the other day, Amerika.
I’ve received no estimate yet from the Pentagon but that could be because the top brass can’t tell the difference between millions and billions when it comes to defense spending or body counts!
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No surprise here, if you check the history there were more people killed in the name of god than for any other reason.
But as George Carlin said: “hey if there is a bunch of religious people trying to kill one another I am a happy guy.”
And few more…
“Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man … living in the sky.
Who watches everything you do every minute of every day.
And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do.
And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time.
But he loves you. He loves you.
He loves you and he needs money.”
— George Carlin
“Something is wrong here.
War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades.
Something is definitely wrong.
This is not good work.
If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being.
This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude.
And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would’ve been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago.
And by the way, I say “this guy”, because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.
No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this.
So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he’s at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.”
— George Carlin
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I really liked the second quote, George B. Thanks for putting them up!
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I remember being in Iraq and hearing our chaplain make the following statement: “We need to kill all those bastards.” I was shocked. I guess I was also brainwashed; both about relegion (believing) and thinking that the US was doing the right thing.
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