"Rescue me o Lord from evil men; protect me from men of violence.
[men]who devise evil plans in their hearts and stir up war every day"
~~Psalm 140:1-2~~
I have a confession to make; I am a news junkie, I can't tell you how many different stories I read, watch, and listen to every day. But some stories always seem to get my attention more than others.
Like when I came across this story about the soldiers being sent camouflage bibles by various religious groups. Apparently this has been going on for awhile, but surprisingly, it just caught my attention.
Honestly, the shit is troubling. Although I suppose that we could reason that since we are a Christian nation our troops should be protected by christ. Hey, the "evil doers" according to some groups are praying to allah, why can't our boys who are charged to protect us, pray to our god?
But who says we are a Christian nation? Not history, and certainly not the facts. Weren't our founding fathers deists? Deism was what was practiced by the intellectuals in the early part of our Republic's history. And they were folks who who believed that human reason should be used to solve political and social problems. Deist did not believe in the divine inspiration of the bible. Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, to name just a few, were deists. So where did this myth of us being a Christian nation come from? The slaves who were brought here, and who worked to build up this nation certainly were not Christians. Nope, if you hear their plantation owners tell it, they were pagans who practiced things like witchcraft, voodoo, and other "dark" mysterious things. The Native Americans, who were already here, were not Christians. Nope, I don't think that they had a Christian god in mind when they spoke of the "great spirits".
Look, I know I am not a true believer, and if I thought that the bibles would give our troops even a slight edge over those allah loving Muslims they are fighting, I would be all for it. Unfortunately, I don't think that whoever is up there pushing the buttons has a bias in this fight one way or the other. And let's be clear, I have no problem with Christians, Muslims, or any other religious group. Most of the folks I know (like some of the people who comment here) who happen to belong to one religion or the other are good decent people. It's the ones who try use their religion to impose their will on others that I have a problem with. You know the ones; the crack pots who fly planes into buildings in the name of allah, or the crack pot who sends innocent men and women to die because he thinks he has some divine right as the leader of a Christian nation.
I do know one thing, if there is an evil force out there, he [she] is glad for the person who put us into this mess. And if he [the person who put us in this mess] calls himself a Christian, and it makes him feel better about himself and his war, well then so be it. Just keep killing those "evil doers", and we will see where that gets us.
So let's keep sending those bibles, shall we. And don't forget to make sure that they are camouflaged. After all, we wouldn't want our soldiers to give away their positions while they read the good book.
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