It seems atheist Jason Torpy has an Australian ideological doppleganger.

Reports from Australia indicate the commission in charge of the Australian War Memorial had quietly planned to remove the phrase “known unto God” from the tomb of their unknown soldier:

The sandstone war memorial opened in 1941 to commemorate Australians killed in World War I and is among Canberra’s most popular tourist attractions.

[Memorial director Brendan Nelson] had proposed replacing the phrase “known unto God,” attributed to British writer Rudyard Kipling, with the inscription: “We do not know this Australian’s name, we never will.”

While some complained it was an intentional effort to “de-Christianize” the memorial, the commission said it was an attempt to memorialize a speech from an Australian Prime Minister in the 1990s.

A “compromise” now involves adding an inscription in another location:

The memorial’s governing council has settled on a compromise that will include Keating’s 1993 words — “He is all of them, and he is one of us” — being inscribed in the stone surrounding the soldier’s grave.

For his part, Jason Torpy — a former Army Captain and current atheist — is offended by all public displays of religion, even if he only reads about them on the internet.  Still, he is one of the few with the intellectul consistency to demand that such displays be removed everywhere — even from Arlington National Cemetery.

Via the ADF and the Star-Telegram.

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