Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity reads the Truth Out headline.

A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

The complaint, filed in US District Court in Kansas City, by the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), on behalf of Jeremy Hall, an Army specialist currently on active duty in Speicher, Iraq, alleges that Hall’s First Amendment rights were violated beginning last Thanksgiving when, because of his atheist beliefs, he declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony commemorating the holiday.

“Immediately after plaintiff made it known he would decline to join hands and pray, he was confronted, in the presence of other military personnel, by the senior ranking … staff sergeant who asked plaintiff why he did not want to pray, whereupon plaintiff explained because he is an atheist,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to Truthout. “The staff sergeant asked plaintiff what an atheist is and plaintiff responded it meant that he (plaintiff) did not believe in God. This response caused the staff sergeant to tell plaintiff that he would have to sit elsewhere for the Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, plaintiff sat at the table in silence and finished his meal.”

If you think the accusation of ‘mandatory Christianity’ in the US Armed Forces sounds far fetched, it really isn’t. Long-time readers of both my blog and Dark Christianity know that I’ve been observing and writing about the hard-line evangelical Christian takeover of the US armed forces for years now. Other writers here at Scholars & Rogues have also reported about this growing problem as well. And while serving in the USAF, I experienced some of their harassment and sabotage first hand. It eventually cost me my military career. Hard-line Dominionist Christians have been slowly filtering into the chaplain corps, edging out the moderate and liberal and inclusive chaplains, and permitting outside churches- particularly facets of the Assemblies of God and other highly coercive Christian organizations free access to our troops- from the lowliest recruit to the highest officers. Full Story »

September 11 was the birthdate of at least three of our staffers. The cake was waiting, but it, along with everything else- was abandoned when the Governor decided to close our offices and send us home. I was holding the state seal in a conference room we were clearing out for renovation when we got the news: Go home. Now.

I remember how clear and achingly beautiful -and silent- the skies were- until the jet fighters flew over. It was strange to see a military formation of aircraft circling our city, while a long queue of commercial planes lined up to land at our airport. We counted 26 planes parked on the parallel runway, and people drove by the airport to pick up stranded strangers and offer them a bed for the night, since our hotels were full up. Hey, we had a reputation for Southern Hospitality to maintain.

I think that the thing I remembered the most- and what sticks to me this day- is that September 10 was the last day of Old America. Remember Old America? It had its problems, and a bumbling, somewhat clueless and vacation-happy new president, but we had our freedoms, rights, and hopes. We were in Old America, a good place to be, especially if you were rich. Full Story »

I learned a new word yesterday: “Data Shadow”. It’s the footprint your activity data makes on the infosphere- your credit, cell phone and banking records, and your tracks on the Internet. I’ve been online for over 15 years, so my Internet ‘data shadow’ is quite long, I’m afraid. There isn’t much I can do to make it go away, as a lot of that information is stuff I can’t get my mitts on, as it’s squirreled away in databases of credit companies and banks. It should stay there. It should not escape, or be ‘mined’ by people who want to ‘profile’ me. We exist in a delusion that we have privacy. We do not. The Quechup debacle that is making its rounds on the web is a prime example of spamming and privacy violation going nuclear. Quechup asks you to provide your email address and password (!) to find your friends online.

Woops. You should never ever give some marketing firm the keys to your contact book. They’ll raid it every time. That information is gold to them. (It’s too bad we can’t make them pay dearly for it. Instead, they steal it from us.)

Full Story »

I recently had an interesting discussion with an online acquaintance. We were discussing a tagging project she’s doing for a thriving Live Journal community I referee moderate. She found the project to be very productive and educational, and I was happy to let her use her considerable skills as an organizer and archivist to clean up the hundreds of tags the community has generated in its four years of existence. She told me that I seemed to be very comfortable operating in the digital world and that my work-style and behavior was that of a ‘digital native’. She then asked me my age, and was surprised when I told her. I’m 46- a ‘cusp’ of the Baby Boom and Generation X. She’s almost thirty- a genuine ‘Generation Y’.

Why the surprise? And why the significance of ages? It appears that folks of both Gen-X and the earlier Baby Boom generation are considered by certain scholars to be ‘digital immigrants’ while people of her generation, who were born in the late 70s and beyond- are considered ‘digital natives’ because they’ve grown up with all the wonderful digital toys we now take for granted. I had Merlin, she had Nintendo. But she was the person who introduced me to the idea of ‘digital natives’- and she paid me the compliment that my online behavior was like that of a ‘native’.

Of course, I was intrigued, so I went digging, as I tend to do when introduced to a new idea. There are lots of interesting articles about the cognitive and methodical differences between ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants’ and how they apparently have a hard time speaking to each other. The “immigrants” come out looking like clueless, often wrinkly lamers. What gets forgotten in all the labeling is that folks of my generation helped to create, build, test, and perfect all the lovely toys that the ‘natives’ take for granted today. Full Story »

Apple wants me to be a Pod Person. Seriously. According to them, I’m the frumpy, square, humorless, uncreative, stuck in biz-mode PC guy in the ads. I’m the one not wearing the coveted white earbuds with a microscopic music player clipped to my collar. And I’m not part of the crowd breathlessly waiting for the iPhone. And while I’ll ooh, and aah like any True Geekâ„¢ over an iPhone or any other juicy gadget that comes into range, I won’t buy one.

Why? Price and tinker-ability.

It was price, really, that put me on the PC side of the Apple/PC divide. Full Story »