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The Boston Globe, 2001-10-25
A little known weapon in the Army's arsenal is a mobile house of worship that could be called the stealth sanctuary. Developed at the Army's research facilities at Natick Labs, the "containerized chapel," as it is formally known, can be dropped out the back of a cargo plane and within six hours be transformed into a multidenominational religious center catering to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It's all in a day's work for Natick Labs, the scientific center that develops high-tech products for the military...
"We like to say that we not only take care of the soldier's body, but of his spirit," said Ben Richardson, the chaplain at Natick Labs who has helped develop the containerized chapel. Even as the war on terrorism has called upon the military's most sophisticated operational equipment, it has also spurred a public relations offensive to portray America's forces as tolerant and diverse. "We're great defenders of the right of everyone to express their faith," Richardson said...
Webmaster's comment:
Another violation of church/state separation, spending public revenue on religious equipment.
Sydney Morning Herald — Australia, 2001-10-23
...as the world lurches deeper and deeper into war, it becomes progressively more clear that a fair proportion of both sides are marching behind the banner of different gods. On the side of Osama bin Laden, of course, the religious imperative seems to have been clear from the beginning, when the 19 terrorists hijacked Islam as well as planes, as their justification for their hideous act...
On the American side of things, the Christian god has equally been constantly invoked... much of the American political leadership seem similarly convinced that their God is smiling upon them from above, propelling their forces towards Afghanistan...
...what is truly most extraordinary about both sides is their case that an omnipotent being made the world, complete with rivers, trees, jungles, animals and believers in Him, but also took the trouble to create those who didn't believe in Him. If the belief system of either side works, what on Earth was the Supreme Being's motivation for creating infidels?
If his rather vain desire was simply to be worshipped, wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just create believers and then be done with it? And if there is a God with the power to choose George W. Bush to lead America at this time - nice job in Florida, by the way, God - why wouldn't he have used that same power to divert the planes from the towers, or to feed the starving thousands of women and children in Iraq and help lessen the hate that has done so much of the damage in the first place?
The Nation, 2001-10-22
The connections between religious fanaticism and the suppression of women are plain to see (and not just applicable to Islam--show me a major religion in which the inferiority of women, and God's wish to place them and their dangerous polluting sexuality under male control, is not a central original theme). So is the connection of both with terrorism, war and atrocity...
But if fundamentalism requires the suppression of women, offering desperate, futureless men the psychological and practical satisfaction of instant superiority to half the human race, the emancipation of women could be the key to overcoming it. Where women have education, healthcare and personal rights, where they have social and political and economic power--where they can choose what to wear, whom to marry, how to live--there's a powerful constituency for secularism, democracy and human rights...
Now more than ever, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which opposes both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as violent, lawless, misogynistic and antidemocratic, deserves attention and support. "What Afghanistan needs is not more war," Tahmeena Faryel, a RAWA representative currently visiting the United States, told me, but massive amounts of humanitarian aid and the disarming of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, followed by democratic elections. "We don't need another religious government," she said. "We've had that!"
Washington Post, 2001-10-11
A group of prominent Islamic legal scholars in the United States and the Middle East has ruled that Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces have a duty to fight for their country even if it means combat against other Muslims.
The religious opinion, or fatwa, was issued Sept. 27 in response to a question put to one of the scholars, Taha Jabir Alwani, of Leesburg, by a Muslim chaplain serving in the U.S. military, Army Capt. Abdul-Rasheed Muhammad.
Webmaster's comment:
Not only is the God of Christianity on the side of the Americans, but so, apparently, is Allah! ;-)
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