Particularly the “diversity crowd” has been on happy high alert lately over the fact that the Air Force Academy has provided a new and more accessible site for the Wiccan-professing students to hold their worship or – if not worship – meetings. This has given a new legitimacy to witches and, one supposes, magic. Actually, the site is comprised of little more than a number of small boulders configured in a circle, so the betting is certain that the ACLU will be demanding a chapel of sorts to match the one obviously devoted to services in the Judeo-Christian mode. The academy also provides facilities for the Buddhists and Muslims.
To criticize in this area is to be too politically incorrect for words but a bit of mild nay-saying might not be too bad. Followed to its logical conclusion, the demands for service or worship facilities for every other religion could mean setting up conclaves for everything from Satanists to Moonies to no telling what else. Would an altar for chicken-beheading or a building for peyote-smoking be appropriate, for instance?
The AFA is a government institution, lock, stock and barrel, so eligibility for whatever happens there should depend entirely upon government instruments for definition and methodology. The primary document with regard to the deity of definition, of course, is the Declaration of Independence, wherein the only God mentioned is the Judeo-Christian God of Abraham and Jesus. Observing the requirements of the First Amendment, neither God nor any other deified entity is properly not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, though worship of any entity or none is neither abridged nor required.
Subsequent to the formation of the nation has been the installing by Congress of the name of the Judeo-Christian God on governmental entities ranging from buildings to Congressional hearing- rooms to money, both coin and paper. Not installed have been any references to Buddha, Allah, the Earth or any other entity presumed to be divine or otherworldly or supernatural or whatever. Presidents most always end their speeches with “God bless America,” not invoking any blessing from anywhere or anything else. George Washington even added the phrase “So help me God” to his affirmation of the oath of office. He was not invoking Allah or Confucius or “the man upstairs.”
In other words, by definition the only God endemic to any function or agency of government is the Judeo-Christian God, never mind whether or not any other “faith” has tax-exempt status, as the Wiccan organization and, presumably, the Muslim branches, have. So does the Red Cross, other denominations and other non-governmental agencies, for that matter! The obvious conclusion is simply that neither the Wiccans nor Muslims nor Buddhists should expect or receive any recognition, tangible or intangible, since the only Deity recognized by the Declaration and acts of Congress is God.
The hue and cry to be raised over that position will accrue to discrimination or some perceived violation of the First Amendment, notwithstanding that no restrictions are placed on the members of the military to observe spiritual elements any way they like as long as their actions do not adversely impact others. This may sound harsh, but the warm-fuzzy, can’t-we-all-get-along approach does not apply across the board, especially in the military, which commissions and supports chaplains to minister to GIs, who are often in areas where traditional worship and counseling are not possible.
It’s not unfair to mention that Muslim Major Nidal Hasan of the U.S. Army, the butcher in the Fort Hood massacre in which he killed 13 people, had been very much in touch with his Muslim mentor in Yemen and made no secret of the fact that he wanted no part of fighting against Muslims. That latter, however, had nothing to do with his wanton killing of innocent people, so the only explanation had to do with his religion, which has as a requirement that Muslims kill infidels (anyone not Muslim) at every opportunity.
Only a handful of Muslims, probably not any in this country, will own up to that, but the governments that are Muslim-controlled recognize that facet of their “faith” as binding, Iranian President Ahmadinejad even promising the annihilation of Israel in the name of Allah, perhaps as the trigger of the holocaust his belief requires to happen before the advent of the Twelfth Mahdi, for whom he’s constructed his own mosque, to reign for eons over Muslims and enslave infidels.
Gavin and Yvonne Frost, immigrants from Great Britain, co-founded the Church and School of Wicca in 1968 in St. Louis, and wrote among other things, The Magic Power of Witchcraft. Translated: Wicca is a cult. Islam is the seventh-century product of Mohammed, an illiterate Arab. It, too, is a cult, though a much larger one. Whereas on 18 November 1978, 912 followers of American cult leader Jim Jones ("Peoples Temple") committed collective suicide, for the most part, in a remote South American jungle compound called "Jonestown" in British Guyana, many followers of Mohammed do the deal through suicide/homicide/terror, killing others in the process.
By contrast, the God of this nation, as established by the founders, is the God of the Holy Bible and the worship of God goes back to the beginning mega-millennia ago. Awarding either Wicca or Islam a place in or on a government institution is what might be called secular blasphemy. None of the military academies should accommodate any religion but Judeo-Christianity, the latter deriving from the former and overwhelmingly well-documented by both scripture and history. This is not to suggest any restrictions on how others express or not express religious beliefs, only that the God of the nation is the God of Holy Scripture and that all other religious entities are not to be revered, recognized or accommodated.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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