Goodnight, and Good Luck
--What'd the general have to say?
--It was a colonel. Two of them
--That makes a general
--Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
Last night the wife said,
Oh boy, when you're dead,
You don't take nothing with you but your soul, think!
--The Ballad of John and Yoko
--It was a colonel. Two of them
--That makes a general
--Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
Last night the wife said,
Oh boy, when you're dead,
You don't take nothing with you but your soul, think!
--The Ballad of John and Yoko
The current Army Echoes (May-Aug 2009) drops little hints that your military does not abide by the separation of church and state dictum.
John Radke, Chief of Retirement Services, signs off, "in your thoughts and prayers."
General (R) Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, ends his letter, "Thank you, and God bless our military, our vets and our nation."
If there is a God, why would there be blessings poured forth on an Army or a nation? Is God a flag-waver? How has religion insinuated itself into military subjects?
George Casey fronts the newsletter, signing off, "You echo the call to serve and, in doing so, help our Army remain the Strength of the Nation." If this is true, then surely we are in need of a prayer. God bless us, every one!
If we want to pray, let us pray simply for our own souls, which is all we have in the end.
Labels: christian military, prayer, religion in the military
posted by rangeragainstwar at 7:00 AM
15 Comments:
"If we want to pray, let us pray simply for our own souls, which is all we have in the end."
I think I have the same problem Mark Twain has...er, had with people who pray for victory, war, whatever...there is always the "unspoken" prayer that hides between the lines of the spoken prayer.
God acts in mysterious ways and has many usurpers..... consequences i'm sure....
G.D.,
Terry Jones is fabulous!
"General Windischgraetz and all his commanders
Started the battle at the break of day;
Hop, hop, hop!
They started the battle and began to pray:
Help us, O Lord, with the Virgin Mary;
Hop, hop, hop!
With the Virgin Mary and the four bridges here,
Piedmont, look out, for your end is near;
Hop, hop, hop!
There at Solferino a battle began,
Lots of blood was shed, knee deep it ran;
Hop, hop, hop!
...
...
..."
Jaroslav Hasek
I think they got the spelling wrong Ranger, they meant prey !
Not sure how to do the embedded tag, but this is the "prayer" of Mark Twain's I was referring too.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_War_Prayer
Yes, there are always consequences when invoking G-d amongst human endeavors, but rarely is G-d consulted in the planning.
Rather, G-d is treated as a mindless, gibbering rubber stamper...
"Here you go lord, put your stamp of approval on this future endeavors request of ours like a good bureaucrat.
No, no need to worry about the details, we've covered them because we're good followers.
Know what I mean, eh!
Excellent, and another stamp on this page here...good, and this page here, and we'll need an initial here, here, and here.
There we go!
Very good, back to the temple with you so we can all properly invoke your name the next time we need you.
That's a good lad...lord, I meant Lord.
Right, off with you, we got you covered."
sheerahkahn,
Is this not perfect? God as rubber-stamper and gift-giver -- bureaucrat and carny. Because that is the breadth of our ability to conceptualize God.
Some say Twain grew embittered as he aged. I'd say he grew more incisive and less willing to suffer fools.
"I'd say he grew more incisive and less willing to suffer fools."
I completely agree.
lads, if you have any praying in you, i suggest you send it out now. i ain't particular, i pray to all of them and finish with an apology for any i might miss. it's sometimes nice to think a little bit about heaven when hell's on its way and going to get here soon.
MCBM Norr
one of the things i find disturbing about the "all volunteer" armed forces is the uniformity of thought and dogma that has taken foothold.
draftees forced us to be diverse in our approach to things like religion the same way they injected freedom of thought and approach to tactics. there's a great passage in nathaniel fick's "one bullet away" when his princeton classmates are gigging him for his ROTC participation and he is told that the absence of officers from other disciplines other than those taught at the academies is one of the dangerous causes of groupthink and lockstep logic.
if anyone in the pentagon or congress gave a flying fuck what i thought i tell tham that our founders had the right idea when they viewed a standing army as something dangerous to the very idea of liberty.
what was so fucking wrong about the way things had been for nearly 200 years? a small core of career officers and noncoms ready to train an influx of new recruits and draftees which will materialize once the long, slow, clumsy process of a responsive democracy going to war is accomplished.
identify the clear and present dangers, debate at length, find the funds, debate that shit at length too, assemble and equip the armed forces.
fast reaction forces are among the stupidest ideas of our modern world. all it means is that we can bring more ordinance to our mistakes swiftly.
i hope that macnamara's soul has found some rest at last. lord knows i still have sleepless nights from following his orders. when i read that he knew that vietnam was a bad and bloody mistake in 67. he didn't say shit back then, and we just kept on dying 9 more years because he wasn't man enough to tell the truth.
Sorry, technological change has made the pursuit of industrial war a game for professionals.
In WWII it took a couple of years to gear up. Today, I suspect it would take even longer.
If you want effective modern armed forces, then you pretty much need them to be volunteer professionals.
Of course, it may turn out that you don't really need an effective armed force.
MB,
FWIW I still have my Mc Namera boots hanging in my barn.Now as to RN. I seem to feel that he paid the price for his actions, according to all reports he was a basket case and on the verge of breakdown when he left the DOD. That in itself is quite a statement since in effect broken person was running the DOD. Now that's scary.
If one reads his later books such as Wilsons Ghost istm that he atoned and a t least tried to speak reason- much unlike Bush/Cheney.
God protect us from well intentioned liars.
jim
call me a fucking luddite when it comes to warfare. go right ahead. 'scool.
here's the deal though. for all your vaunted technology, for all your air supremacy the plain facts are that we have had our asses handed to us by little motherfuckers in black pj's who didn't give fuck all about no air power. we sent bombers, they dug deeper.
the same guys who are stepping up the action in afghanistan are the same fuckers who fought the russians to bankruptcy, wearing shower shoes and packing thier ordinance on burros.
your great and glorious army is being ground into hamburger by burros and shower shoes.
think about that shit yo.s
MB,
You are a Luddite and that's one of your saving graces.
You forgot to throw the AK 47 into the equation with the shower shoes, also throw in interior lines of communication, tribal level OPSEC and a non-industrial society that is impervious to big guided bombs. Every mudhut we destroy is one less college education for a poor American college hopeful. WE ,of course, always prefer to pay for bombs.
One must ask- if we win ,whatr do we get out of it?
jim
Ranger, I double-checked the Echoes rag after this post. Yep, you got it right. All I've got to say is that these guys are just institutional sheep following the herd. You don't think they give any conscious thought to this religious pap, do you? Much to the detriment of our nation and our principles, overt displays of religion are now all the rage.
With such piety throughout the land, you'd think we wouldn't do things like, oh, invade other nations under false pretenses, or kill our youth trying to bring another nation from the stone age to the 21st Century. Isn't there something in those religious books all of these guys love so much about bearing false witness? And about overweening pride?
Did you see where New York City paid $10K to the guy who was ejected from Yankee stadium by an off-duty cop for trying to hit the john during "God Bless America"? We need more of that.
MB, all I've got to say to you is, keep those hits coming. On you, Luddite looks good.
Publius,
You did not double check me- you triple checked me! Everything that I write is submitted to Lisa and she further fact checks if applicable. Everything posted is usually backed by hard copy.
My comments and replies are off the cuff with no filters.
I do not understand religous people but then again I don't understand much.
jim
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