Last week, a few West Point cadets got a break from the daily grind and took a drive to Jersey City, where they visited a variety of religious organizations.\u00a0\u00a0 According to several news reports, the sights included\u00a0Christian, Coptic, Hindu and Islamic religious facilities.\u00a0 The\u00a0cadets slept on the floor of the mosque\u00a0in sleeping bags for two nights.<\/p>\n
The trip was part of a “Winning the Peace<\/a>” class, whose objective is to help the cadets understand that decisive armed combat is not necessarily solely responsible for “victory.”<\/p>\n The US Military Academy should be lauded for exposing young officers-to-be to the cultural elements (including religion) they will experience once commissioned.\u00a0\u00a0The USMA cadets demonstrated mature, independent and critical thought, even when at least one of their speakers\u00a0espoused political views.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, Michael Weinstein’s Military Religious Freedom Foundation\u00a0claimed pictures of US soldiers with Christian imagery contributed to the Islamic world\u00a0believing\u00a0that the US was on a “crusade,” which therefore justified “jihad” in\u00a0“defense.”\u00a0\u00a0 It is unclear whether Weinstein will add this cadet exposure to religion to his lawsuit (as he probably would if the cadets had bunked at an evangelical\u00a0church), or if he will take the opportunity to defend the US military by publishing these most recent pictures as widely as he did the first.<\/p>\n After all, the Times Herald-Record<\/a> shows pictures<\/a> of uniformed cadets bowing toward Mecca.<\/p>\n Also covered\u00a0by Anderson Cooper<\/a>, the New York Times<\/a>, The Pew Forum<\/a>, the Journal News<\/a>, and as originally highlighted by The Religion Clause<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, a few West Point cadets got a break from the daily grind and took a drive to Jersey City, where they visited a variety of religious organizations.\u00a0\u00a0 According to several news reports, the sights included\u00a0Christian, Coptic, Hindu and Islamic religious facilities.\u00a0 The\u00a0cadets slept on the floor of the mosque\u00a0in sleeping bags for two nights. The trip was part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4,2,10],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-academies","tag-churchandstate","tag-military","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}