Believe it or not, you’re not the first person to see the potential for a de facto “non-sectarian state religion” replacing individual faiths in government service.

I don’t know about the other two, but if you look at Chaplain Hornok’s original commentary (linked in the article), there is a sarcastic comment from US Army Major Laurel Williams at the bottom. She provided the other comment on the original Facebook posting that is not repeated here.

For reference, she is an outspoken critic of religion in the military. She has appeared in association with the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers as well as the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, speaking on “fundamentalist Christianity” and attempts to “Christianize” the military.

I think they may have added some more to the post, as the following is now also included:
“Thank you to the many fine Chaplains who are serving our soldiers. Please help rout out those who do not uphold just standards of practice. Tax dollars are not paying salaries to further any religions. You are there to serve soldiers in faith matters, not to serve religions.”

Regardless, the critic Marty implies that personal beliefs do not belong on a Chaplain’s post. If that were the case, then the Chaplain would be restricted to communal beliefs. The next step means that the Chaplain would be faced with two choices: neglect his job and refuse to talk about spiritual matters or violate the Constitution and create communal spiritual beliefs.

I’m assuming Marty wants all Chaplains to limit their public comments to the secular communal beliefs (such as Integrity, Service and Excellence). The next step is to compare a secular-only spiritual message to the personal belief statements of an atheist. Not much different. You could make the case that secular-only messages establish atheism or popular science as a religion. The only counter to that is sharing personal beliefs and qualifying those statements as personal. The Chaplain makes it clear that he believes his statements of happiness, but allows other people to belief something other than himself.

Finally, I wonder if Weinstein and Marty used the ‘comment’ section of the base’s webpage? If so, I didn’t see it. Likewise, I’m contemplating putting a post on Weinstein’s page….