The Gospel of Christ in a Gun Sight
Jan 19th, 2010 | 8 responses
This gives a whole new meaning to “Kill a Commy an infidel for Christ.”
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
“G** forbid we offend people before we shoot them,” growls Armed Liberal. Yes, and God forbid we should be so disrespectful as to spell out the word God while opining about killing people literally in God’s name.
A.L. does get over his snit sufficiently to acknowledge the problem with confirming the Al Qaeda and Taliban narrative that the United States is engaged in a war against Islam (emphasis in original):
I really will hate to see some kind of fire drill resulting from this that will put our troops at risk. And I’ll say that acknowledging that the real reason I’m annoyed at Trijicon (and the reason I may have just switched my purchase decision on an optic for my M1A to Aimpoint) is that by doing this, they have put US troops at risk. There’s no good answer here, except to give a solid attention slap to the procurement officers who had to know about this and let it pass.
Plenty more commentary at Memeorandum.
8 Responses to “The Gospel of Christ in a Gun Sight”
i've never understood why people self censor the word “god” in posts and whatnot.
i mean, for serious. i completely do not get it.
dmf, it's because of a tradition (at least in Judaism) of not uttering God's name, not saying it out loud. It's not a rule or a dogma, it's a kind of mystical or spiritual tradition. So, for example, very religious Jews will use the Hebrew word “HaShem” (literally, “The Name”) when referring to God, or Adonai is another word for God.
The thing is, “God” is not the sacred name of God, either. The sacred name of God is actually unpronounceable; it consists of four Hebrew letters which transliterate as “yud, hey, vav, hey.” In English letters, it looks like this: YHWH.
This is all fairly esoteric stuff, but suffice it to say that when people write “God” as “G**d” or, in this guy's case, G***, which I've never even seen before, they are doing something that is completely unnecessary. That doesn't mean it's wrong — if it's meaningful for them, fine. But it's not religiously required. “God” already IS an alternate name for the One whose name cannot be spoken.
And the whole exercise is hypocritical when the sacred name you're trying so hard not to say is inside the sight of a gun which you look through when you're about to kill another human being.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk
classic Monty Python bit about uttering “Jehovah”
thanks, kathy. i am actually aware of the judaic tradition. but, as you say, the english word “god” uttered by a christian is so tenuously related to the hebraic unpronounceable that i guess i didn't think that was where they were really going with that…
as you say. esoteric.
however, the hypocrisy doesn't really surprise me, given how so many american christians seem to be so preoccupied with eliminating those who disagree.
Yea, I saw this yesterday elsewhere and found it incomprehensible. It is amazing how American Christians like to point to the other side, lumping the whole middle east in the those ” crazy Islam-fascists” when our side to has its “uber” side. Let the law suits begin.
i am actually aware of the judaic tradition. but, as you say, the english word “god” uttered by a christian is so tenuously related to the hebraic unpronounceable that i guess i didn't think that was where they were really going with that…
Well, to be honest, I had the same thought when I saw Armed Liberal use that construction, since I did assume he's Christian. Usually when I see that, it's in a Jewish context — but I guess maybe some Christians are picking it up, too, in an attempt at faux piety.
Hi, it's A.L. here…actually I'm, neither Christian nor Jewish…somewhere between Deist in the old Founder's traditions and agnostic. I do the asterisk thing on some words (I did it on “ass” in a movie review yesterday) because I have a bunch of readers behind various corporate and government firewalls that block “baaaaad” words, and I'm tired of them messaging me to complain about it…
Marc
What I understood from reading the actual news article was that there is no reference to God or Scriptures inside the gun sight. Therefore the issue of staring past the name (or stand-in name) is null. There is merely some numbers and letters mixed into the serial number on the casing, which I was hard-pressed to decipher without knowing what I was looking for. It is no wonder they have been manufactured for decades without complaint.