Faith

Saints Anne and Joachim, parents of the Blessed Mother and grandparents of Jesus, are honored by the Catholic Church on July 26th, their feast day. The readings for the memorial are taken from the Holy Bible, specifically Exodus 32:15-24, 30-34, Psalms 106:19-23, James 1:18 and Matthew 13:31-35. The reason for not including Scriptural references to the parents of the Blessed Mother is simple: there are no Scriptural references to the parents of the Blessed Mother. We do not know anything at all about them, such as their real names, whether they had other children (aunts or uncles of Jesus) or whether they were "of the House of David." We know that Mary was, through her marriage to her husband Joseph - whose father, incidentally, Matthew calls "Jacob" and Luke calls "Heli" and whose mother, like his mother in law, isn't mentioned at all. (That Mary was "of the House of David" by her maiden ancestry is a popular, but Scripturally insufficient, Protestant tradition.)

There is, of course, a person named Anna in Scripture. Luke says that she was about 84 years old, making it unlikely that she could have been the mother of young Mary. She didn't seem to know who Mary was, and lived in another country (Judea), separated by another country (Samaria) from Galilee, where Mary and Joseph lived.

To be sure, there are interesting and provocative narratives about Joachim and Anne (and child Mary) in other ancient documents, such as the Gospel of James, written, as far as anyone has been able to tell, about the year 150CE. However, this fictitious "gospel" is as much a part of the Bible used by Protestants or Catholics as The Book of Hershel in the movie Wholly Moses! The Catholic Bible, the Vulgate, consists of popular Latin translations by Saint Jerome of 46 Books of the Old Testament and 27 of the New. The Council of Trent, 1545-1563, reaffirmed the Church's position that these represented the only Biblical books. The most commonly used Protestant Bible, the King James Version (KJV) contains a formal English translation of 39 of the Catholic Books of the Old and the same 27 of the New Testaments. None of these contain the Gospel of James any more than they do the Book of Hershel or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There may be some people who consider the Gospel of James (and possibly The Book of Hershel and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) as canonical Scripture, but educated Catholics and Protestants are not among them.

The Koran, in which Mary is the only woman mentioned by name, claims that Mary was born to the unnamed wife of Imran, a prophet, who had expected a boy. It says that Mary was dedicated to God and raised by Zacharias and Elizabeth. This would certainly explain why young Mary was so concerned about personally helping out old Elizabeth as soon as she found out about Baby John, who would have been her foster brother (Jesus' foster uncle), but there is no Christian Scriptural evidence one way or the other.

Scriptural reference to the relationship between the family of John the Baptist and that of Jesus is vague, to say the least. The Angel Gabriel, who announced Mary's (and Elizabeth's) pregnancy to her, refers to Elizabeth as Mary's "cousin," in Luke 1:36, one of only two places where that word is used in the KJV. The other is in Luke 1:58 where "Elizabeth's neighbours and her cousins" are described as rejoicing with her when her baby was born. However, in neither case is there any indication whatever that the word is intended to mean biological or first cousins. Updates to the KJV use a different word. In 44 modern English translations of the relationship, the word "cousin" is used 12 times, "relative" 26 times, "kinswoman" 5 times, and "of your family" once. The Vulgate, the official Catholic Bible, uses the term "cognata," that is, "somebody close enough that you know." The sense in all cases seems to be that of "fellow Jew," not "having the same grandparents." In addition, the difference between Mary's and Elizabeth's ages makes it unlikely that their parents were siblings. ("First cousins twice removed" is only one of many more likely possibilities. We Mississippians might call them "kissin' cousins" if they were opposite gender.)

I personally find the proposition that Mary was raised by Zacharias and Elizabeth, at least for a time, reasonable, but certainly not conclusive. I think you can be a good Catholic and believe either way.

The Catholic Church accepts some teachings that are not specifically contained in Scripture, much to the confusion of some of our Protestant friends, and some Catholics as well. Trent was "aware that this truth and teaching are contained in written books and in the unwritten tradition that the apostles received from Christ himself... [and] also accepts and venerates traditions concerned with faith and morals as having been received orally from Christ ('And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.' - John 21:25) or inspired by the Holy spirit and continuously preserved in the Catholic Church." What this means is that Catholic Tradition (with a capital T) consists of beliefs authoritatively taught by the Church, not fanciful fairy tales or fictitious twaddle! Catholic clergy have a professional obligation to know the difference!

Of course, Catholics (and others) believe that Mary had parents, just like everybody else. We just don't know anything about them. That they are saints is a belief that predates the Reformation and is now lost to history. It is convenient to call them something. "Joachim and Anne" is probably just as convenient as, say, "Archie and Veronica," "Boris and Natasha" or "Ozzie and Harriet." In their anonymity, they are very much like Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. He is a once wildly popular saint about whom we know so little today (including his real name) that his former celebration, the day before that of Saints Joachim and Anne, was rededicated in 1970 to that honoring Saint James the Greater. This James is well documented in Scripture. He was the son of Zebedee and Salome and elder brother of the Apostle and evangelist John. He obviously did not write the fake gospel 110 years after he died any more than did James the Less, also identified in Scripture, who died 18 years after he did.

(Incidentally, this does not make Christopher any less of a saint than he was before. The whole purpose of commemorating saints is to encourage the living faithful to follow their example, and that isn't possible if we don't know anything about them. Given the thousands and thousands of people once recognized as saints throughout the history of Christianity [such as Anne and Joachim], it makes sense periodically to prune the list of saints who can be recognized in the limited number of days throughout the year to those about whom we know enough to imitate. Saint Christopher, along with all the [possibly 100 billion or so] other unknown saints, is formally honored on November 1, All Saints Day, on which devout Catholics go to church to do that.)

This points out the problem with faith. Everything we know, or think we know, involves a personal decision to believe that it is true. Faith is our link, through the evidence of their senses, to the rest of the universe. It served our ancestors very well. It motivated them to avoid or escape what they believed were predators, interact appropriately with what they believed were other people, and eat and drink what they believed was good for them. They obviously had faith that great care was necessary when they believed they were uncomfortably high above ground and supported themselves only on perches they believed were strong enough to support them and actually were where they were believed to be. Had they done otherwise, even once, we, their descendants, wouldn't be here!

The invention of language produced a new requirement for reliance on faith. Language provides the opportunity to have faith in authority, those things we cannot directly perceive are true. It allows us to believe in the veracity of information from others of our kind within hearing distance, in addition to that provided directly by our own experience. Literature extends the opportunity for reliance on authority to all of our kind everywhere and any time in the past, including those long dead, and telecommunications and multimedia technology, including TV news and the Internet, exploits this potential. Today, very little of what we know, or think we know, comes directly from experience. Almost all of it relies on faith in authority that begins with being taught language, especially the value of listening, when we are very small.

Belief in authority presupposes a decision to believe that such an authority knows more than we do already and is inherently trustworthy. For children, this is easy, because we are all born completely ignorant, regardless of our intelligence. If we know nothing at all, obviously anyone who knows anything knows more! Indeed, it is our native intelligence that provides the incentive to believe what we are told by those who are obviously bigger, stronger and more powerful (and have survived longer!) than we, that is, our parents and other adults in our young lives. Gradually, as we get older ourselves, the aura of authority based on physical superiority is gradually replaced by faith in others whose essential authority, in turn, is based on the common consent of those authorities we already recognize. These include our teachers, instructors, professors, consultants, therapists, influencers, celebrities, acknowledged experts, and those who exercise physical and psychological control over us.

At some point , we begin to rely on our own knowledge to manage our daily lives, usually when we are in our teens.

Our species has yet to evolve a natural response to authority based on other than interpersonal language, which is why teachers are so universally popular, especially when they are also bigger, more respected and otherwise more impressive than we are in our formative years. They are naturally necessary for this purpose, of course, before we learn to read or discriminate between fact and fiction in the media. Thus, we preferentially favor learning from personal conversation. Even when we extend our thirst for knowledge to the limits of what is already known by anyone, we still employ lectures, meetings, classes, courses, seminars, conferences, symposia, and conventions to listen, discuss, talk, debate and converse, rather than assembling all the available printed material and simply reading through it until we understand it, even though that is a perfectly valid method.

Thus, we have a natural tendency to equate physical, social or moral authority over us, like that of our parents, with the authority of greater knowledge as well. We can be persuaded to believe even the most ridiculous and demonstrably false ideas if they are proposed by those whom we believe are superior to us in political power, prestige, fame or wealth. These include such ideas as "humanity would be improved by eliminating all Jews," "the entire universe is less than 7,000 years old," "Donald Trump won the US Presidential election in 2020," "nobody ever landed on the moon," that "human-caused catastrophic global warming is a myth" or that "the foregoing introductory image shows more people on the right than on the left."

Unfortunately, the overwhelming advantage of being able to acquire knowledge from reliance on language from authority, rather than having to learn everything we know from personal experience, contains a mortal danger! The acceptability of such ideas depends very little on their usefulness to our survival. Rather, it depends to a much larger extent on the degree to which their sponsors are seen to be superior, that is in authority, over us. So our perceived inferiority to them increases our gullibility to what they preach as well, rendering such perception potentially fatal if they happen to be manipulators, fools or liars! Their propaganda promulgated and enhanced by popularity and repetition until it is accepted as absolute fact by large numbers of people, sometimes resulting in disastrous wars costing millions of lives when it is wrong!

Political parties and religions tend to exploit this potential. Admonitions to "get out the vote" or "share our faith" are, in fact, efforts to popularize even the most apparently absurd ideas enough that listeners will believe and act upon them, especially if it involves donating money! Such effort is often enhanced by emphasizing the aura of authority. This includes using fancy titles, claims of popularity, advertising in large, ornate buildings, or claims of speaking directly for God!

The dichotomy of faith between experience and authority is resolved by intelligence. It is also strongly influenced by bias, what we want to believe. For example, almost all of us experience that the universe appears to consist of the biblical representation of an immovable flat earth crowned by a "firmament of heaven," populated by two large lights, the sun and the moon, and dotted with little lights called stars. Some of these (the planets) wander about against a fixed background of the others. Faith in the veracity of this experience was once reinforced by the recognized authority of the Catholic Church, whose teachers were themselves influenced by previous authorities. Today, it has generally (but not completely) been supplanted by faith based on the reported experiences of authoritative astronomers and cosmologists and Apollo and other astronauts. There are now many more convincing arguments in favor of believing in science, and most people probably accept them. What we believe ultimately depends on the experiences we perceive, including what we believe others have told us, and how we choose, given our intelligence and possibly conflicting desires, to interpret them. This is why we spend so much time and effort inventing and perfecting methods to improve and extend our senses, going to school, reading, and surfing the Internet.

In the final analysis, one is saved by faith only if what he believes is objectively true. Belief in what is false condemns one as a fool or a liar or both. Faith "matters" only if it aligns with truth! Otherwise, is less than worthless, and may get us and our friends and neighbors horribly killed! This especially includes believing something without evidence one way or the other - or simply because somebody else does.

Faith in what is not true, the consequences of poor choices, can be catastrophic! Whatever we choose to believe about it, the external universe is what it is, not necessarily what we think it is, want it to be, believe it should be, or are told that it is. People who otherwise might have become our ancestors whose senses did not portray their environment as it actually was, or chose not to believe them, were violently weeded out of the gene pool, a process that continues to this very day. As a result, almost all of us have the genetic ability safely to believe in what we think we see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Recently, we have developed technology to fool these senses by means of what has become known as virtual reality, but participation in this experience usually involves deliberately employing expensive toys or sitting in a movie theater and wearing special glasses. Even with the finest in high fidelity surround sound reproduction, for instance, most of us can tell the difference from that and sitting in the middle of an actual orchestra.

Not so with language, authority, literature and telecommunications. False information received through these means differs little, and often not at all, from that which is true, as, for example, with regard to the danger of COVID-19! It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to distinguish between the two. This is why successful civilizations, and their guiding philosophies known as religion, strongly condemn the portrayal of what is not true as if it were. For example, The Catechism of the Catholic Church has an extensive article on the Biblical admonitions in Exodus 20:16 and Deuteronomy 5:20 not to bear false witness against one's neighbor, which it considers to forbid "misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others" in any manner. Jesus himself warned his followers against the disaster of having faith in lies preached by those in ultimate authority by exhorting them to "beware of false prophets" (Matthew 7:15). Islam, one of the Five Pillars of which is Faith, also strongly supports truth as well. The Koran specifically condemns lies and liars over 100 times.

Unfortunately, adherents of the world's religions, including the Catholic Church, do not always (!) practice what they preach, either. Most of those that I know of tend to rely on bias. Thus, if a dichotomy appears to exist between what we think we already know, or perceive, and what we think our religion tells us, we are often urged to give our intellectual assent to the latter, to have faith primarily that what the prophets tell us no matter how incredible, is true.

It is also unfortunate that the distinguishing characteristics of many popular religions are demonstrable lies! My step grandmother believed with all her strength in the validity of the foregoing picture of the universe. She was thus a victim of this bias with respect to her refusal to accept the reality of the US Space Program. Fortunately for us Catholics, our Church has a very large body of published information about what it officially teaches, including the Vatican website (in various popular languages) to allow us to look it up and decide for ourselves if it is worth believing. It also sponsors hundreds of thousands of educational institutions, hopefully to help us to recognize lies when we come upon them. Even so, its most official representatives sometimes succumb to Dark Powers such as, for example, the Church's historical persecution of Galileo Galilei regarding heliocentrism.

Religious leaders have a special obligation not only to avoid lies, but to adhere scrupulously to the truth, the teaching of which, after all, is their job. Historically, they have achieved remarkable, and, in my view, undeserved, levels of credibility by implicitly or even explicitly threatening their followers with eternal damnation and the most fiendish tortures imaginable for not believing, or acting upon, false ideas that they claim to be true. For example, Catholic Archbishop Joseph V. Brennan publicly declared, and later reversed, his position that the use of fetal cells at any stage of a vaccine's development means Catholics cannot avail themselves of its scientific results. "I won't be able to take a vaccine, brothers and sisters, and I encourage you not to, if it was developed with material from stem cells that were derived from a baby that was aborted, or material that was cast off from artificial insemination of a human embryo," he said. "That's morally unacceptable for us." His original statement directly contradicts guidance from the Pontifical Academy for Life issued in July of 2017, of which the good archbishop, it seems to me, has a continuing moral obligation to be aware, believe, and promulgate. He was willing to allow those for whom he was responsible to die from a pernicious disease in defense of a position his own religion disavowed! Shame on him!

I think Bishop Brennan can be accused of moral cowardice as well by using the phrase "if it was developed" in his proclamation, leaving the individual members of his diocese to blunder about trying to determine for themselves if that were the case or not. His reluctance to do his job as a teacher detracts significantly from the authority associated with his lofty office as official teacher of Catholic doctrine! Shame on him again!

Other totally false religious proclamations I recall recently seeing were highly biased news articles about the end of the world on September 23, 2017. Various so-called "Christians," and maybe others, claimed that a prediction of the date of this supposed catastrophe, now long past, was found in "Scripture." I couldn't find it in mine, and I'm still here. Maybe it was in the Gospel of James.

I find it interesting that, whereas there are mathematically and philosophically definable limits to what human beings can know, there is no limit whatever on what they can believe! Belief in the perfidy of persons of Jewish ancestry in WWII Germany led directly to the shame of the Holocaust. The exact same scenario was repeated most recently by our former President and his supporters. They claimed, despite no credible evidence whatever, that he had actually won the Presidential election of 2020, but that Democrats had "stolen" the election. This was allegedly accomplished by a totally covert nationwide conspiracy of a complexity that rivaled the Apollo moon exploration program. Prior to the election, the President himself claimed to be aware of this conspiracy enough to predict its outcome, but he was somehow unable to frustrate it or even demonstrate its existence to a single investigative agency or court of law! Enough Americans believed this crap (as, unfortunately, many still do) that thousands of them violently invaded the US Capitol as the electoral votes were being counted, threatening to kill Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and "Hang (Vice President and presiding officer) Mike Pence!" on the gallows they had erected outside.

I'm not even going to discuss the assertions of some of these morons that The Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were "staged," that an airplane did not crash into the Pentagon on 9/11/2001, that the California wildfires were ignited by "Jewish space lasers," that former President Clinton's family crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane and are operating a child sex trafficking operation on the planet Mars, or that Democrats are Satan-worshipping, pedophilic, baby-killing cannibals! I also choose not to debate the assertion that one avoids responsibility for spreading this nonsense because she "was allowed to believe things that weren't true," or that the damage done by such lies should be excused because "they were so outrageous that no reasonable person would have believed them!"

The popularity of authority figures such as political commentators, politicians themselves, plus mass news media and almost universal access to the Internet has recently resulted in the deliberate proliferation of these and other completely outrageous lies by sources we have historically been able to trust, such as our religious leaders and our former President. In the words of Stephen Colbert, "He lies about everything! He lies about crowd size, voter fraud, 'til death do us part...'" For the record, one of the crowd size lies that Mr. Colbert was talking about is shown in the introductory picture. It shows more people on the left than on the right, regardless of what anyone says or believes.

In the introduction to his book "Scatterbrain," the science fiction writer Larry Niven suggests that Alzheimer's Disease tends to make us wary of too much reliance on the authority of the elderly. If old people can be trusted implicitly, we might tend to base our beliefs on what they tell us in preference for thinking and learning for ourselves. If they are known to have a measurable probability of not knowing what they are talking about, those of us who are willing and able to learn on our own have an enhanced survival value from relying on our own, rather than unreliable authoritative, information. That's Niven's theory of why Alzheimer's has survived. Think of it as evolution in action.

Perhaps the best way we can distinguish between what is true and what is not true is to use our intelligence, and its combination with previous experience known as education, to test whether a particular assertion is true or what I call "imigongo," or sometimes "bullshit." Otherwise we cease serving what my Scripture calls "The Spirit of Truth" and become a servant of the "Father of Lies." We also become identified with proliferating numbers of increasingly stupid people, which I find embarrassing and insulting, to say no more. I discuss this elsewhere, so I won't do it here. We are urged to "share our faith," as I'm doing now; but if "our faith" is based on bias and ignorance, not to mention outright lies, we probably would do well to keep it to ourselves.

Fortunately, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States prohibits most government restriction of freedom of expression. This emboldens fools and liars to make themselves known so we can recognize, and hopefully avoid, them.

Of course, most religions (including mine) rely at least in part on belief in ideas which have no impact on our senses at all, such as the possibility of life after death, or that what has all the appearances of a piece of bread is actually a living human body. Indeed, the word "faith" is sometimes defined is "belief in what cannot be seen." As long as those ideas actually have no impact on our relations with the visible universe, it doesn't matter what they are. But that is rarely the case. Religious faith is supposed to have a major impact on our daily life and relations with others, which is usually why it is held, preached and practiced. It has the ability to make us happy or sad, to enrich our lives, or kill us! For example, Archbishop Brennan's belief that there is some sort of moral opprobrium for drawing the good of saving millions of lives from the evil of a baby killed long ago is not just a private belief. It motivated his authoritative actions, which, if not mitigated, are likely to kill a lot of people whose gullible piety surpasses their ability to reason and learn the truth by researching what his and their own religion really teaches.

Christian Science is a religion that eschews modern medical practices and holds that one can get and stay well through prayer. Adherents tend not to take advantage of medical science. Their numbers have declined from a membership of 2,098 per million United States residents in 1936 to a reported 162 per million in 2009. That's a 1300 percent decrease! Today there are estimated to be only about 1249 Christian Science practitioners, who correspond roughly to clergy in other religions, worldwide, a perfect demonstration of evolution in action!

This demonstrates the need for great caution when relying on religious authority figures. They often suffer from amblyopia prophetis, a form of intellectual blindness that is an occupational hazard for all speakers for God, especially those who do not have wives to confront them when they're preaching nonsense! It is often caused by oculitis trabis, irritation of the eyeball caused by having a plank in it! (Matthew 7:5, Luke 6:42) If your religion teaches you that you should love each other and get along with your fellow man and respect his beliefs, goals and ambitions, he is probably not going to be motivated to kill you. On the other hand, if your religion teaches you to make yourself obnoxious to people who don't believe as you do, to force others to live by your values, that you can get away with anything you want as long as you Take Jesus Christ As Your Personal Savior, you are probably more likely to get yourself in trouble than will the good neighbors. Think of it as evolution in action.

And if you believe that you cannot vote for "pro-choice" candidates (whatever they are) no matter how morally bankrupt and unfit for office the opposing candidate is, that illegal trafficking in firearms or messing with poisonous snakes are virtuous acts, that refusing to be vaccinated against a deadly, worldwide disease, or deliberately exposing yourself to it, are necessary moral acts, or that committing suicide will take you to a higher plane of existence on a spaceship hiding on the other side of Comet Hale-Bopp, you are going to die quicker, on the average, than the smart people. As a result, you will tend to have fewer progeny and the average intelligence of the human race will increase. Maybe that's why the crazy religions and their leaders proliferate - evolution in action again!

Of course, the easiest way to learn what is true and what is not is to perform an experiment. This is what science is all about. You can philosophize and quote Scripture all you want about how many teeth a horse has, but you can save a lot of time if you get a horse and count its teeth. (It turns out that horses have teeth in the back of their mouths that are hard to see, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.) An application of this method can be used to debunk a "bible study group" the leader of which recently invited me to participate in "bible study" of "Mary, the Queen of Heaven."

At the risk of sounding uncharitable (but not untruthful), that's demonstrably a bunch of crap! There is nothing at all in the Bible about "Mary, the Queen of Heaven" (which is nonetheless admittedly an element of Catholic faith not found anywhere in the Bible). The last time Mary the mother of Jesus appears in the Bible is at the Crucifixion, in John 19:25. Luke mentions her in passing in Acts 1:14 as having "continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with [the apostles], the women ... and with his brethren." There is a Mary mentioned in Romans 16:6, but that appears to be a different Mary. There is a "queen of heaven" mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah (7:18, 44:17-19), about 600 years or so before Mary the Mother of Jesus was even born (probably not to people named Anne and Joachim). That "queen of heaven" is probably the pagan goddess of fertility, Astarte. Offering sacrifices to her is not spoken well of at all by the Hebrews' bible!

One source of faith-based imigongo that I, as a military veteran, find personally offensive (as well as demonstrably untrue) is the claim that "the government" is "taking away our freedoms." The supposed "freedoms" in such cases are the refusal of "the government" to prevent others from exercising their freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution to do things Catholics consider sinful, such as having abortions or shopping on Sunday, or simple ignorance of what the law requires, prohibits, or actually is. The First Amendment to the Constitution specifically forbids taking freedoms away from only Catholics (as well as engaging in political activity by a tax-exempt religious organization), but there seems to be a belief among some of them that the it is basically a work of the devil and anyone who supports it is an agent of Satan bound straight for hell.

For instance, a clergyman friend recently emailed me a number of references retrieved by a "search on prayer denied in the military" that reported a completely fallacious military conspiracy to restrict Christian prayer. Not surprisingly, the references were all on prayer denied in the military, precisely what he specified. I would bet that he didn't read any of them, since they were all basically a bunch of obvious imigongo. That was proved by actually researching the references themselves. I performed an experiment by googling "End of the World September 23, 2017" - equally imigongo, and got about 11,500,000 hits! I got 467,000,000 results for "Government Support for Religion," 31,700,000 for "There is no God," 23,600,000 for "Jesus is a Myth," and 553,000 for "Pope the Antichrist." This demonstrates that search engines tell us what has the authority of popularity on the Internet, not what it is demonstrably true. Popularity does not imply veracity! My feeling is that preachers of the Gospel should know that!

Not realizing that I was being played, I replied that because he was my friend, and a minister of the Gospel, I intended to research each one of these and show him that they are all crap! He took it ill, but a promise is a promise, and there are others who are obviously similarly confused - like former Navy convict, lieutenant, chaplain, and expellee Gordon Klingenschmitt, the source of much of this misunderstanding. They just may benefit from the clear, penetrating light of truth if they are not blinded by their own desire to believe lies.

The fact is, the military chaplaincy is based squarely on the rights guaranteed by First Amendment, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," [Establishment Clause] "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" [Free Exercise Clause]. Many Catholics and people of other faiths believe that these two clauses are incompatible, that "the government" must follow one or the other, but they are wrong. Realizing that military personnel may not have the opportunity to fulfill their religious obligations as civilians do, the military provides chaplains of the various denominations to serve their religious needs, in support of the Free Exercise Clause. The chaplains represent the religions in this regard, which is why they are all denominationally recognized clergy.

The military also recognizes that its environment and mission could inadvertently prohibit the free exercise of each member's religion or, alternately, could coerce somebody to engage in a religious practice against his will. One of the functions of the chaplain is to advise the commander to make sure that neither of these things happens. The chaplain is therefore a commissioned staff officer to represent "the government." Potential conflicts of interest are occupational hazards the avoidance of, or solutions to, which are taught in chaplains' school. Civilian clergy rarely receive this training, and not all military chaplains graduate at the top of their class.

The first article was entitled, Military Chaplains Banned From Using Jesus' Name, Reciting Bible; Lawsuit Filed in Calif. The Conservative Baptist Association of America filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of a retired Army chaplain and a Navy chaplain who withdrew, or were dismissed for disruptive behavior, from a class for potential Veterans Administration chaplains. The position of the VA is that the two students bullied and were disrespectful to the students of other faiths (not an uncommon occurrence with some conservative clergy who believe that only they speak for God) and that the VA representatives correctly followed VA guidelines. The plaintiffs' attorney suggested that the issue had something to do with the assertion that "you can't pray in Jesus' name," but this did not appear to be the matter at issue. The two former students did not receive the relief they sought in the lawsuit, which found in favor of the VA.

The next article was Military chaplain fired for praying in Jesus' name By Julia Duin, The Washington Times, December 21, 2005. I don't know whether the website, "www.jewsonfirst.org" is an Abbott and Costello put-on or not, but the text demonstrates the well-documented confusion of the aforementioned Lieutenant Gordon Klingenschmitt regarding the responsibilities of a Navy chaplain, which he was. According to an article in the Washington Post, Chaplain Klingenschmitt violated a direct order not to wear his Navy uniform to a public rally, as a result of which he demanded a court martial that found him guilty and ordered him to pay a fine of $3000 (later rescinded). He was subsequently discharged from the Navy. He was quoted as saying "I am a Navy chaplain being fired because I pray in Jesus' name," but that is a shameless and undisguised lie. What he was "fired" for was disobeying a direct lawful order not to wear his uniform at a political rally. Doing that potentially gave the appearance that his presence at the rally, whatever he did, had the endorsement of the Navy, which it did not, which is why he was ordered not to do it.

The article Navy dismisses chaplain who prayed "in Jesus' name" is accurate, but misleading. In spite of Chaplain Klingenschmitt's contention that the matter at issue was praying "in Jesus' name," he would have been equally guilty if he had prayed in the name of anybody else or not prayed at all. He was certainly not the only Christian chaplain to pray "in Jesus' name," but he was the only one to disobey an order and get in trouble because he did that. Chaplains are allowed to evangelize members of their own religion but not to use their official positions as military officers to proselytize others, which is what he was found to have been doing. Obviously, Bob Unruh, the author of the article, does not believe the government's stated position, but not believing it (especially by Bob Unruh) doesn't make it untrue.

Similarly, the article House Panel Rejects Military Chaplain Prayer Limits has nothing whatever to do with praying in Jesus' name, but rather addresses the events at which they can offer public prayers in the name of whoever their deity happens to be. This is admittedly a slippery slope, balancing the rights of chaplains and the congregations they serve against the very real potential for abuse of their positions as officers and the possibility of coercion of their subordinates. What the ultimate result, if any, of the House committee vote will be is unclear, but it does not have any impact whatever on the name of, for, or to whom the prayer is offered. For an authoritative discussion of the subject, check out "The Ethics of Military Sponsored Prayer" by Chaplain (Commander) Charlotte E. Hunter, Ph.D., U.S. Navy.

While Religious Services [were] Denied to Military Personnel Due to Gov't Shutdown; [and] Priests Could Get Arrested for Volunteering is factually accurate (but grossly misleading), this is a contractual issue, not a religious one. Because not enough Catholic priests are willing to serve their military congregation as chaplains, military commands, such as Keesler AFB hospital, for example, occasionally contract with available civilian priests, including Franciscan monks, to fill their Catholic chaplain vacancies. This is a valuable source of revenue for the Franciscans, who are all bound by the vow of personal poverty. This is also sometimes done with civilian Protestant clergy temporarily to fill Protestant chaplain vacancies as well. In certain cases, the federal laws governing the contract prohibit performance of whatever services the contract specifies if the government temporarily is not legally permitted to pay for them because of late budget legislation. Theoretically, a priest, minister, rabbi, imam, witch doctor or other religious leader performing such services in a venue under government jurisdiction, could be prosecuted for violation of contract law. The priests concerned wisely chose the prudent course of action and practiced their ministry "in Jesus' name" somewhere else, accessible to the public, until the crisis was past.

The article Military Chaplains Sue After Being Ordered Not to Quote Bible, Pray in Jesus' Name is a different report about the two disruptive VA chaplain program students refiling their grievances through the Military Veteran's Advocacy (MVA) in Slidell, Louisiana after losing their previous suit against the VA. The men also allege that they were informed that chaplains "do not belong in this program" who "believe your beliefs are right, and everyone else's is wrong." Given that they have to work harmoniously with, and minister to, all faiths, that is probably a true statement. They can pray all they want, to whomever, but the VA does not want or need stiff-necked, argumentative, "holier-than-thou" chaplains. According to a spokesman for the MVA, "the Army guy was hired, and the Navy guy went back on active duty." Hopefully they were better men as a result of their experiences.

I received a totally unrelated "Humor & Whimsy" page when I tried to load ACLU Sues to Prohibit Military Prayer? However, this theme pops up occasionally in various forms from people who don't like the ACLU. There is a Snopes article about it. Like an earlier e-mail about the alleged removal of cross-shaped headstones from cemeteries, this item is a fabricated exaggeration of the stance on the overlap of government and religion taken by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The reason it is called that is because it is a union dedicated to protecting American civil liberties against whoever seeks to abolish them, including representatives of religious organizations. What's not to like? The title does not represent either a real event or a position the ACLU has taken, and the supposed spokespeople quoted do not exist. The ACLU is not pursuing (and has never filed) a lawsuit seeking "to end prayer from the military completely." Navy chaplains also are not prohibited from mentioning Jesus' name in prayer, nor has the ACLU engaged in any effort to bring about that result.

The Military chaplain - Wikipedia article is about military chaplains in general. It notes that in Canada, "When offering prayers during parades and ceremonies, it is customary that the order to remove headdress be given to those on parade." In November 2004, Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada ruled that this order was "not lawful" since it unjustifiably required all attendees to show participation in a prayer that may not believe. Following this ruling, non-believers are now permitted to retain their headdress just like Jews and Sikhs do in accordance with their faith.

The search - rightfromnewfalluja.blogspot.com/2006/01/navy-chaplain-not-allowed - did not match any documents in Google, but it appears to address the discredited contentions of former chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt.

Chain email claims ACLU sued military to block prayer received Politifact's "pants on fire" rating. This email has been widely circulated, but "there is no such ACLU lawsuit of this kind pending, nor do we intend to file one," spokeswoman Molly Kaplan said via email. "The ACLU vigorously defends the rights of all Americans to practice their faith, and the rights of chaplains to serve our armed forces. Military chaplains are certainly allowed to practice their specific faith when conducting specifically sectarian ceremonies and to serve in non-denominational roles when ministering to service members at-large, according to their training."

The "pants on fire" award could also be given to the article Obama Administration to Court Martial & Punish Christian Military who Share Their Faith. This is a false, and extremely biased, interpretation of a Pentagon restatement of its long-held policy that military members (any members, not just chaplains) can "share their faith (evangelize)" but not "force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others ... to one's beliefs" (proselytization). Unfortunately, there are some religious sects (Westboro Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists come to mind) whose main religious activity is precisely to "force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others to their own beliefs." This may be why none of their representatives are military chaplains. For a more complete discussion, see the Politifact article, Court-Martialed for Sharing Religious Faith? By D'Angelo Gore.

Frankly, I find it difficult to understand people who choose freely to put their faith in what they want to believe rather than being open to what is true, whether it is "the government's limits on how we may pray," the date of the end of the world," "the adventures of Saints Anne and Joachim..."

...or who was elected President of the United States in 2020.

John Lindorfer