Just Flap Your Wings and Fly

From today's New York Times:

"An Air Force panel sent to investigate the religious climate at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs found evidence that officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian beliefs and failed to accommodate the religious needs of non-Christian cadets, its leader said Wednesday.

But the panel said it had found no "overt religious discrimination" - only "insensitivity" - and praised the academy leadership for working aggressively to confront religious problems in the last two years."

The article continues,

"Among the incidents highlighted in the report were fliers that advertised a screening of "The Passion of the Christ" at every seat in the dining hall, more than 250 people at the academy signing an annual Christmas message in the base newspaper that said that "Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world" and an atheist student who was forbidden to organize a club for "Freethinkers."

Freethinkers? What was he thinking? He's in the military for pete's sake.


But let's not get carried away. We need to get this in perspective:

"The group found that several incidents widely covered by news organizations were overblown. The report said a chaplain who reportedly exhorted cadets in a worship service to tell their classmates to accept Christ or "burn in hell" was merely using language "not uncommon" for his Pentecostal denomination."

Though the fact that he was waving a canister of napalm around lent his threat an immediacy it might not otherwise have carried.