Spiritually Transformed Fire Arm Of Jesus Christ

The good folks over at God's Own Party have an interesting and sort of frightening post about christianity and the United States military. It seems like there are a lot of fundamentalist non-commissioned officers in the military who, in direct violation of current military policy, are still intent on proselytizing among their troops and turning the conflict in Afghanistan into a religious war.

And feeding into this illegal and dangerous situation is an American manufacturer -- Trijicon, based in Wixom, Michigan. Trijicon makes high-powered rifle sights for the U.S. military. They have a contract to provide 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and another contract to provide sights for the Army. Unbelievably, since 2003 they have been inscribing abbreviations for Bible verses on the rifles (such as 2COR4:6 for Second Corinthians chapter 4 verse 6 in the New Testament of the Bible).

This has emboldened some NCOs into trying to force their own dominionist and fundamentalist beliefs on their troops (a clear violation of military policy which says the variety of religions or no religious belief among troops is to be respected -- proselytizing for any religion is not allowed). This is scary stuff -- how do you tell a person who has complete authority over you in a war zone that you want no part of his religion?

Some NCOs have even started calling the rifles that have Trijicon sights the "Spiritually Transformed Fire Arm of Jesus Christ", and when it runs out of bullets it becomes the "Spiritually Transformed club of Jesus Christ". They seem to forget that the same Jesus they supposedly revere urged his followers to turn the other cheek rather than strike back at their enemies. I guess they've created their own version of christianity, because they say the rifle's purpose is to kill all hajis (muslims) they can find.

This kind of ridiculous action makes Afghanistan more dangerous for the soldiers we have sent over there. Afghanistan was a muslim nation when we arrived there and will be a muslim nation when we finally leave. This is not supposed to be a religious war against muslims -- but an effort to help the muslims of that country fight and get rid of the terrorists that pose a danger to everyone.

When it is made into a christian against muslim fight, why should the non-terrorists in Afghanistan support and fight with us? How can they trust soldiers that want to either kill them or force them to be christian? This is the kind of nonsense that makes the war harder to fight and win (if winning is even possible even more).

The Trijicon company needs to be told to stop the christian inscriptions on military property, or lose their government contracts. Then the military leadership needs to step down hard on proselytizing in the military and efforts to make the conflict in Afghanistan into a religious war.

Anything less will just lead to disaster and many more dead American soldiers.