Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
US Denies Letting Troops Convert Afghans
KABUL - The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages.
General Order Number 1 from the U.S. military's Central Command forbids active duty troops -- including all those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan -- from trying to convert people to their religion, considered a crime in many Muslim countries.
File photo shows an Australian Army Chaplain and soldiers in Oruzgan Province, southern Afghanistan. (AFP/DOD/File/Neil Ruskin) Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: "The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."
But a U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving.
She said the bibles had been mailed to a soldier by a church back home in the United States and were never distributed.
"That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of translated bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them," she said.
"The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment."
She said she was aware of at least one case of a soldier who had been punished for giving out coins that had biblical inscriptions on them.
Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. An Afghan man who converted to Christianity was sentenced to death for apostasy in 2006 but was allowed to leave the country after an international uproar.
- Posted in
65 Comments so far
Show AllAnd here I thought President Bush assured us these military incursions were not a repeat of the Crusades . . .
Is this conversion at the muzzle of a gun. They say there are no atheists in the foxholes, also not in bombed out villages under fear of drone attacks. WWJD? Fighters need to check their Christianity at the door of the battlefield. Muslims got a bad rap because of 911 and all the suicide bombings. What kind of reputation do Christians have after our bible waving soldiers kill a few hundred innocent women and children in the villages over there? What hypocrisy; a follower of Jesus with a gun killing people! It might be argued that it is OK to kill a burglar if one's life is in emminent danger; maybe. What is the argument if you are the burglar? Our soldiers are effectively breaking in every country that we are invading. The Muslims are better Christians than our soldiers in that regard. This world is the same as it ever was. It's always a crusade in some form or another!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheists_in_foxholes
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: "The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."
__________________________________________
Wow! I never realized that The Greatest Story Ever Told was really so much like "24"!
In the watered-down Gospels I grew up with, Christ's apostles and disciples were fishermen and such. I never realized that they were actually a crack team of assassins, whacking the Bad Guys for Our Lord.
I guess "fishers of men" was a mistranslation for "whackers of men". Who knew?
· Yr Obd't Servant
I am offended by the preceding comments! As "U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving." How else can be interpreted the following passages from the,
"video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, [wherein] Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility 'to be witnesses for him.'
'The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,' he says.
'Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business.'"
Misinterpretation is obvious considering,
"as Al Jazeera reports:
[T]he chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.
'Do we know what it means to proselytise?' Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.
'It is General Order Number One,' an unidentified soldier replies.
But Watt says 'you can't proselytise but you can give gifts.'"
Even Al Jazeera makes clear "the chaplains . . . have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One." Having "found a way around the regulation," well, obviously they made "clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving." Rather than proselytizing, soldiers were gift giving, yet again proving our high minded purpose in occupying Afghanistan!
There ae ways to offend you even more -- but because I'm being nice I'll just refer you to
http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/ ;-)
"She said she was aware of at least one case of a soldier who had been punished for giving out coins that had biblical inscriptions on them."
But it's okay to deliver planeloads of $100 dollar bils with the inscription "In God we trust"?
Hahaha, that's great.
God is not the Christian name/title for God. God and Allah mean the same thing.
God and Allah and Jehovah do not mean the same thing, no matter how much it is claimed. If they meant the same thing, why are there three different religions? For example, to a Christian, God is divided into three parts. This is sacrilege and idolatry to a Muslim or a Jew.
This illustrates perfectly why we should just pack up and leave. The US could give every man, woman, and child $50,000 and a new Koran. We could build schools and roads for the next 10 years. Even then all it would take is the "perception" that a single soldier tried to convert someone to Christianity and we'd be back to square one. The presumption is that the US is an invading force trying to convert them. Anything we do bad, reinforces that assumption, and anything we do good does too, as in "it's all part of their plan to trick us".
The US military is rife with evangelicals who are implementing a religious agenda within the military and on missions. The confluence between the US military and the right wing christo fascist Blackwater Security is pronounced and probably unconstitutional; another Bush/Cheney accomplishment.
Blackwater should be closed down and thoroughly investigated, and any evangelizing taking place within the military should stop. Do your religion on your own time, not on the the taxpayer's dime.
Deepa
The May issue of Harper’s Magazine (www.harpers.org) reveals the continued practice of Christian evangelical proselytization by the American military in the US OCCUPIED IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN.
"Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military," By Jeff Sharlet
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488
- An Easter Sunday raid on Iraqi insurgents in 2004. Special Forces Officers, inspired by a showing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, wrote the words “Jesus Killed Mohammed” in Arabic on their Bradley Fighting Vehicle and shouted the saying in both English and Arabic to entice Muslim soldiers into the open before embarking on an attack to put down the insurgency.
- A meeting of an underground all-male, cadet-led prayer group at the U.S. Air Force Academy where members discuss, among other things, the deceptions necessary for missionary work in China. The author attended the group’s meeting under the promise that he would not publish the group’s name out of fear that: “Those who do believe in separation of church and state might interfere with its goal of turning the world’s most elite war college into its most holy one, a seminary with courses in carpet bombing.”
- Interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Young in which he defends and shows no remorse for stating that it would be better for a black to be a slave in America and know Christ, than to be free and not know Christ.
- A speech given by Army Lieutenant Colonel Greg Metzgar before the Officers Christian Fellowship – a group with 15,000 active members at 80 percent of military bases – in which he stressed: “Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks, because every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of ‘spiritual terrorism.’”
- Excerpts from a book published in 2005 by Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy, Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, which describes an “anti-Christian bias” in this country he seeks to counter by making the case for the “necessity of Christianity for a properly functioning military.” McCoy’s book was endorsed by General David Petraeus, who said: “Under Orders should be in every rucksack for those moments when soldiers need spiritual energy.” General Petraeus, while claiming his statement was not meant for the public, has never recanted his statement.
Deepa
The proselytization by the American crusaders in Iraq and Afghanistan reminds me of a similar crusade in Philippines.
The American history is filled with its sacred missions in the world. One of them was to Philippines. William McKinley, then US President explained:
"I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me: 1) That we could not give them [the Philippines] back to Spain — that would be cowardly and dishonorable; 2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany — our commercial rivals in the Orient — that would be bad business and discreditable; 3) that we could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and 4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the ... War Department map-maker, and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States (pointing to a large wall map), and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!"
The President described the combination of sadistic cruelty and starry-eyed self-adulation as a noble campaign to ``uplift and civilize and Christianize" the Filipinos. “Civilizing” and “Christianizing” the Filipinos took longer than McKinley thought. This noble campaign brought out the brute in the soul of the US Christian crusaders. A frustrated US General ordered troops to kill every Filipino male over age ten. The righteous American Christian warriors succeeded in their campaign by overcoming local resistance forces through their overwhelming superiority in weapons and sheer ruthlessness. They slaughtered about half-a-million Filipinos within the next few years. The American media explained that it would take patience to overcome evil, and bring liberty and happiness to the Filipinos.
One critical citizen satirized McKinley's war: "G is for guns/ That McKinley has sent/ To teach Filipinos/ What Jesus Christ meant."
Agreed. From first inception, I have always thought that the parallels between Bush/Iraq and McKinley/Philippines are uncanny.
Sure wish some good anarchist could have made the comparison even more uncanny.
And the Philipino/as were already good Catholics - but having lived in the south, I still remember how fundamentalist Protestants always considered Catholics to be non-christian in therefore need or saving.
“Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks, because every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of ‘spiritual terrorism.’” There you have it. That kind of paranoia, within Christianity and also within the US government, is the reason the word terrorism has no real meaning.
Is it any wonder that the Taliban is making a comeback? These brainwashed x-tians have been reading too many Tim Lehaye "Left behind,"books. I bet Mohammad and Jesus are just shaking their heads at the insane behaviors of their followers.
If individual Afghans choose to become Christians, that that is fine as long as it is with their own free will. They should not be prosecuted for it, but neither should the US military be trying to convert people, which I am sure they are not, at least not officially.
The US mission in Afghanistan should end eventually but religion has nothing to do with it.
How naive can you be? We should never have invaded/occupied Afghanistan and should remove all NATO soldiers and any civilian contractors immediately. As for proseletyzing being done officially or unofficially it is all illegal and certainly goes against American law as well as Afghan law.
Only the fool will trust a government that continually lies.
Yes and the military have been sitting too long at the feet of governmental leaders.
They can be caught in criminal activity on video tape and still try to lie. Apparently it works on some level. The practice is more and more frequent and is now being copied by the military.
Onward Christian soldiers. As Christianity has become the easiest means of the US government to control its population, it only makes sense that conversion is a part of the strategy for gaining control of oil and routes of the future pipeline. When people threaten to rise up, we just hold our hands up in the air and recite bad translations of centuries-old mythology. Rather than learn about their superstitions, we simply try to impose our own.
How is Christianity used by the government to control people?
Religion is the opiate of the masses. Many of our laws are based on religious fundamentals. Thou shalt not kill, so there is a law about it... we swear on bibles in court, our politicians swear oaths under God, it's everywhere and so inherent it's hard to identify.
So, there shouldn't be laws against killing?
And, please look up what Marx actually wrote before you use that "Opiate of the masses" again.
Laws against murder shouldn't be based on a religions book. It is a self evident law of nature except in the case of individual or species survival.
try marrying someone of the same sex in all but 4 states.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.
Christianity is eons above Islam. Christianity teaches that people are equal since they are created in the image of God. That is why the Christian Church does not behead anyone, give ultimatums of "you either convert or you die," does not treat woman and children as property, teaches forgiveness and not vengeance like the Mohammedans do when they sever a persons limbs or take the offenders life away for stealing or adultery. Christians do not advocate that people be tortured, killed, or have their limbs severed. I know that many Mohammedans do not do those things, those that don't tend to have a great deal of Western influence. But the Afganis and the tribal muslims still carry one with those lugubrious practices, thus them subjecting themselves to Christ can only bring more civility, respect, and equality of persons to the tribal muslims. Although I will say that if the soldiers are converting at the point of a gun, then they are bringing no one to Christ. Conversion comes from one's own free will.
"That is why the Christian Church does not behead anyone, give ultimatums of "you either convert or you die," does not treat woman and children as property, teaches forgiveness and not vengeance"
That is why the Christian Church burned people at the stake, murdered all Muslims and Jews within reach when they conquered Jerusalem and slaughtered natives in America in the name of Christianity, and Christianity's biggest proponents (notably Spain)engaged in the slave trade.
Oops. Read some history.
Those were Catholics. The middle east is where europe was back in the dark ages.
And Catholics are not Christians?
It might be better if you didn't open your mouth. Your ignorance is showing. In the 'dark ages', Muslims were tolerant of Christians and Jews. Oops, I mean 'Catholics' and Jews. Oops again. There were only Catholics in the middle ages, except for heretics, of course. There are many ignorant and uneducated Muslims today who hold backward views. We really don't have that excuse in the West.
Jaypimpernell 5;24 ------- There is a commandment thou shalt not kill. There are no modifiers or exceptions. Obviously none of the killers in foreign occupations are christians because christians do not kill.
If you expose yourself to the broad world and history you will learn that every religion can and has at one at least one point been violent and corrupt.
Cultures have great influence on the specific manifestation of a religion.
As in the USA culture which is violent,selfish and lacks empathy so are many christians, christians in name only.
Of course there are modifiers and exceptions. Animals were routinely killed for sacrifice.
Moreover, a more accurate rendering of the commandment is "Thou shall not murder". Killing fellow Jews was taboo but killing the inhabitants of the already populated promised land was just fine.
Killing as punishment for a crime seems to bother few conservative Christians.
I'm pretty sure Buddhists have no major murderous episodes in their history.
Of course cultures influence religion, just as religion influences cultures, and both, being creations of the human animal suffer from human deformities.
"Killing fellow Jews was taboo but killing the inhabitants of the already populated promised land was just fine."
I don't think any group in those archaic times felt differently.
I question the term 'archaic'. If we have progressed at all as a species we have not kept pace with our technology. Instead of using slings and bows we can now kill en masse from thirty thousand feet.
Modern civilization also produces great and wonderful things...but yes, technology most often creates new ways to kill before anything else.
The commandment,Thou shalt not Kill, stands alone with out any modifiers relating to those Ten Commandments. I assume it meant people.
The word murder has been substituted recently in school textbooks, after two thousand years of KIll being the correct translation I can only assume that it has been changed to give murderous "christians" free reign in war.
Surprisingly some Buddhists were fierce warriors,such as some horse cultures of the Asian steppes.
What false "christians" do or believe has nothing to do with the Gospel of Love which includes the unqualified commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill"
You obviously don't know much about Islam -- but you can learn if you try. One place to start is http://islamonline.net/english/index.shtml , which is fairly orthodox. There are also more liberal Islamic places.
Deepa
In any religion we find various streams. The history of any religion is the history of the religious stream of elites and conquerors, not the conquered. This is true whether it is Islam or Christianity....
That is why in Islam values like compassion remained confined to one section of society represented by Sufis and weaker sections and hence never appeared on the pages of history which are reserved for the ruling classes. As we all know we read more about ruling classes in history than the ruled. And what rulers and ruling classes do is interest-oriented rather than value-oriented and it is for this reason that pages of history are red with blood.
The very opening of Qur’an, the holy book of Islam is with Bism Allahir Rahmanir Rahim i.e. I begin in the name of Allah who is Compassionate and Merciful.
Thus it will be seen that Compassion is one of the names of Allah and it is among the most popular names of Allah. Muslims always begin their name with this incantation i.e. ‘I begin in the name of Allah who is Compassionate and Merciful’. A Muslim, who worships Allah has to be compassionate in his own behavior else his/her worship would not be complete. There are four key values in Qur’an which are repeatedly emphasized are: Justice (‘adl), benevolence (ihsan), compassion (rahmah) and wisdom (hikmah) and compassion is one of them.
Deepa
The violent history of the institutional church has been marked by Inquisition, Crusades, Slave Trade , Segregation and collaboration with Colonialism, to name a few. Collaboration of the church and imperial power in violence against native peoples around the world is vividly illustrated by David Stannard in his book "The American Holocaust":
"At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance ‘as vassals’ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer ‘all the mischief and damage’ that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you."
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the mission wing of the Anglican Church, was involved in the slave trade. Rev. Simon Bessant of Blackburn, UK, described the Church’s involvement in slave trade by saying, "We were at the heart of it." According to him, the organization owned the Codrington Plantation in Barbados, where slaves had the word "Society" branded on their backs with a red-hot iron.
We continue to see atleast two kinds of Christianity: one promotes all forms of violence (which we see in Iraq, Afghanistan; Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Pope, George Bush, to name few believers of this stream of christianity), and the other opposes all forms of violence.
Society!
>>The friar, greatly scandalized by the indignity offered to the
sacred volume, stayed only to pick it up, and, hastening to
Pizarro, informed him of what had been done, exclaiming, at the
same time, - "Do you not see, that, while we stand here wasting
our breath in talking with this dog, full of pride as he is, the
fields are filling with Indians? Set on, at once; I absolve
you." *20 Pizarro saw that the hour had come. He waved a white
scarf in the air, the appointed signal. The fatal gun was fired
from the fortress. Then, springing into the square, the Spanish
captain and his followers shouted the old war-cry of "St. Jago
and at them." It was answered by the battle-cry of every Spaniard
in the city, as, rushing from the avenues of the great halls in
which they were concealed, they poured into the plaza, horse and
foot, each in his own dark column, and threw themselves into the
midst of the Indian crowd. The latter, taken by surprise, stunned
by the report of artillery and muskets, the echoes of which
reverberated like thunder from the surrounding buildings, and
blinded by the smoke which rolled in sulphurous volumes along the
square, were seized with a panic. They knew not whither to fly
for refuge from the coming ruin Nobles and commoners, - all were
trampled down under the fierce charge of the cavalry, who dealt
their blows, right and left, without sparing; while their swords,
flashing through the thick gloom, carried dismay into the hearts
of the wretched natives, who now, for the first time, saw the
horse and his rider in all their terrors. They made no
resistance, - as, indeed, they had no weapons with which to make
it. Every avenue to escape was closed, for the entrance to the
square was choked up with the dead bodies of men who had perished
in vain efforts to fly; and, such was the agony of the survivors
under the terrible pressure of their assailants, that a large
body of Indians, by their convulsive struggles, burst through the
wall of stone and dried clay which formed part of the boundary of
the plaza! It fell, leaving an opening of more than a hundred
paces, through which multitudes now found their way into the
country, still hotly pursued by the cavalry, who, leaping the
fallen rubbish, hung on the rear of the fugitives, striking them
down in all directions. *21
This is an accounting of the slaughter visited upon the Incans when their leader refused to accept Christ as his sovereign.
This slaughter was done in the name of "God" with the full blessing of the Church.
"Christianity is eons above Islam."
Hilarious.
Long live religious freedom !
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: "The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."
Muslims already believe in Jesus and the Virgin Mary. What an ignoramous Army Chaplain. Islam is one of three Abrahamic/Ibrahim faiths. Its these Christians that need the education. Not to mention the whole scary hunt them down phrase.
http://www.islam-guide.com/ch3-10.htm website explaining Muslim belief in Jesus.
They torture the Muslims who refuse to convert.
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: "The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."
Read it and weep! This is the verbal equivalent of a self-inflicted bullet through the back of the mouth. The military, as usual, is lying and lying BIG! There is more snot per square inch in the Water Walking, Crusading United States than in any nation anywhere in the world. The Elmer Gantrys, Billy Sundays and Harry Powells sit hunched over around their campfires in Afghanistan, grumbling bitterly about sin and perdition, spitting into the glowing embers and beseeching Jay-zus to wipe out the heathens. If there is any group of people in the USA who don't know their asses from a package of bacon, it's these ignorant MoFo's.
As a longtime spiritual seeker, I currently practice Shambhalah Buddhism with Episcopalian Christianity. Both are very compatible with each other and I openly profess them together to leaders in either the Episcopal Church and the philosophy of Buddhism. They get along because of their common link to peace and compassion. Yes, peace and compassion rightly belongs to both groups although I would bet it is recognized much more often in connection with Buddhism, thanks to hateful and violent zealots that claim Jesus for their intolerant beliefs. They are in the military more regularly (sorry, i'm not up to par on my citations, but this was a recent headline) and they're in civilian groups including churches unfortunately who condone warfare in the name of Jesus. I hope people do not get the idea that sane christians agree with this kind of thing much less condone it; I and others I know of are sickened by their use of Jesus, a Jewish man who sought to go beyond rules and regulations and also who told the people of his time that the greatest commandments and what the commandments boil down to are: Love YOUR God and Love One Another as you would have them love you. There is no war for Jesus. I am no scholar of Judaism and Islam, but what study I have done shows that Yahweh (one of the names of the Hebrew for God) is a loving and just God; Allah is known for peace and love, say the sufi writings. It is the humans who have made deities of war and violence for their own convenience. I hope believers of various faiths and non-believers of good conscience stand together, not apart as the violent people would have us do, and speak out against war and violence. Humankind has evolved to a point where there is diplomacy, conversation, compromise, and as the saying goes, War is not the answer. Also if anyone is interested, there is an author who is very good on the topic of the United States Empire using the name of Jesus for its wars and plans for global domination. This author is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. The book of his that I am currently reading is SAVING CHRISTIANITY FROM EMPIRE. Other titles include Is Religion Killing Us; Jesus Against Christianity; Violence in the Bible and the Quran; Reclaiming the Missing Jesus; and School of Assassins: Guns, Greed, and Globalization. Peace be with you and God Bless the whole world no exceptions!