We have to decide what world of belief we live in — the belief we are animals, biological machines, and that everything is about physical survival, or that we are PEOPLE, with emotional, psycholigcal, and social needs.

And if we are PEOPLE, we must decide if we have meaning and purpose. The belief that the emotional, psychological, and social realms are dictated by biochemical and Darwinistic processes is a legitimate viewpoint. I not only respect it, but cannot deny that neuroscience is giving us more and more concrete understanding of consciousness itself. The real question is if consciousness if an illusion of neurons or if neurons are the tools by which consciousness can manifest from without. That is another topic for another time.

But if you choose to have meaning and purpose — that there is a will behind your mechanations of being, then feeling, community, and the workings of the mind are the nature and result of what we call the Spiritual. And if we believe by extention that perhaps there is a will — a purpose, a meaning — behind the discoverable, empirical universe, then we call this Theism.

• April 14th
• August 11th
• September 29th
• October 27th

Please note we are still looking for pantries / soup kitchens that serve food in the late afternoon or evening.

It is no random chance that people in all cultures have memorials.  It is the human condition that what we remember what we cherish, and what we cherish, we remember.  It is those memories that become the foundation of a society we give to our children.

The strength of our country is dependent upon which things are remembered, because our weakness is in those things we have forgotten — lessons we have NOT learned.

We give deep condolences to the families of those who have been lost, and deep respect to those who gave their lives to save others.  We are still shocked.  It is hard enough to accept casualties of war, pictures of our sons and daughters in uniform on a post office wall or a church bulletin.  But this was different.  The people in the towers and planes were not soldiers.  They were not politicians.  They were NOT targeted because they were Christian or oil monopolists or financial backers of the Israeli regime.  They weren’t even targeted because they were Americans, because many of the victims were foreigners, some from the same countries as the hijackers.

No, the truth is more shocking: They were targeted because they were human beings. There is no reason for it.  There wasn’t supposed to be.  Evil is done simply because it can be done by those who are evil.  The tools were not box-cutters and planes but hatred; the goal was not even death, but fear.  That is the absolute definition of the word TERRORism.

There is no defense against hatred.  Scanners and pat-downs will never save us.  There is only the choice to play by their rules or not.  And that means what we choose to remember, or not.

Look at our enemy.  Some elusive “they” have forgotten we are their brothers, their sisters, their neighbors in this ever-shrinking world.  “They” have forgotten the bridges, figuratively and literally, that have been built, the openly shared opportunities of America and the Free World.  They have forgotten that for every bomb we have dropped or plea for help we have ignored, there are many more of us feeding a hungry child a world away, or building a school for children eager to learn because they never had the chance before.  They are not thier extremists; we are not our government.

But what have we forgotten?  In fighting the enemy, have we become them?  “They” will not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty, but will we?  Are we willing to accept the extremist world view that anyone not for us is against us?  Or are we willing to remember that two centuries of our nation’s warriors sacrificed in some part for the right to be different, protecting ourselves not from our differences, but from those that would use them against us.  The forgetfulness that we are all in this together, making exceptions for those associated in our minds with evildoers not deserving of that right, is the root of all bigotry.

When you rip off the labels of “Radical Islam” or “American Imperialism” or “White Power” or “Zionism”, you find countless people caught in the crossfire of judgment.  The crimes of the few become the excuse to forget the self-evident truths our Forefathers demanded be recognized.

That we all have a right to exist.  We all have a right to be free.  We all have a right to pursue happiness, and the only way this is possible is to remember we are all in this together. 

These are not rights that the government can give to us.  They are not ones we can steal from our better-off countrymen.  They are rights by which we either grant to each other unconditionally, or we do not survive. 

Have we learned this lesson, or something else?  What we choose to remember is what we choose to have learned.

From that fateful day, do we remember fear and outrage, or compassion and courage?

Just as people from every nation in the world suffered captivity in  the concentration camps of the Holocaust, people of every race and creed poured themselves hope-filled through smokey stairwells, or found the only freedom they could by slipping through an office window, so high above the streets of Manahattan.  There was not a single Church, Synagogue or Mosque nearby that did not find one or more parishioners missing the next Sunday, Shabat, or Friday Salah.

Not just as Americans, but as human beings, we have shared in the loss and suffering of 9-11.  We stand united so much as we remember this; we are divided so much as we forget.

One of the main purposes of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is to preserve and educate people about the heritage of our ancestors. We can wave the Battle Flag or the Bonnie Blue; we can speak of Southern hospitality and maybe do it in a Southern drawl; we can argue the right of self-determinism and place in a more accurate context the evils of slavery and the part it played in the culture. But what of our spiritual heritage?

We can easily find the word “Christian” on our lips, but what does it mean? Was the soul of the South a matter of denominational affiliation and particular belief? After all, such things divide us amongst ourselves, no matter how small the group. The South could very much be describes as “Christian” — as could the North — but there were two primary differences. Here’s a brief history lesson:

First, there was a theological difference. In general, Northern preachers concerned themselves with social justice issues more than individual salvation; in the South, the opposite was true. In other words, the balance was different between altar calls and charitable good works, though both were found throughout. Originally, this was not about liberalism or conservatism, Catholic or Protestant. But in one way it was a denominational issue. Over the 15 years preceding the Succession, many of the larger Protestant groups had already drawn lines between the “Northern” and “Southern” church communities. To this day, though no longer geographically exclusive, we still talk of such things as “Southern Baptists” and the “Missouri Synod” Lutherans.

Secondly, the Southern denominations didn’t work as well together as in the North. There was no Christian Commission south of the Mason-Dixon line, except for the smuggling in of scriptures and leaflets to Southern soldiers by Northern Christians. And there certainly was no Sanitary Commission (its secular counterpart) in the South, as unchurched as was a significant percentage of the population. This didn’t mean denominational confrontation necessarily, but perhaps more autonomy, which hints to a context truly within “Southern” life and values.

The regionalism of such a large country was primarily economic, and naturally heavily influenced by geography. The South was more agrarian because it made sense in terms of climate. There were more ports in the North, which better accommodated merchants and manufacturers, not to mention larger, more concentrated populations. The point is that such things affect culture, and the needs of the people in the South were different of those in the North, economically and otherwise. The North had a larger influence over national policy, which included tariffs and other laws that detrimented the other regions, in particular the South.

Southerners saw the need for state’s rights when the union (in the pre-war sense) did not serve well the locals. It is possible this dissatisfaction spread to religious circles, where Southern something-ists or other-arians were a minority in their own religion. Even at the time of the war, many Southern chaplains had received their education in the seminaries of the North because that is simply where they existed. If the cultures of North and South drew apart, and the animosity of the situation grew stronger, it would make sense it would manifest itself on a religious front before coming to a head in the more formally mechanized political medium. The South wanted out as a people, and they had more freedom in their churches than in their federally-subservient state capitols.

So to preserve the religious heritage, at least in memory (as it has changed quite much in myriad ways since then), we must look for those interdenominational values that were tied to all other aspects of Southern culture. I’m not of Southern decent, so I am wiling to stand corrected, but I believe these values are centered around a personal relationship with God in a way of your own choosing, yet still with a respect for your kinfolk and countrymen. It means you still take your hat off in a church and appreciate grace before meals even if you might not want to be the one giving it. It means you have an old-fashioned sense of right and wrong, even though you don’t always follow it and need a little forgiveness now and then. It means being a sinner, yet saved. And it means that Christian majority or not, you have a right to your way of life and be proud of it.

A man can be a Southern gentleman without being racist, a Christian without imposing his beliefs on others, and be public about who he is without having to apologize. Let us honor these values for what they are, and in a way we can all respect and admire.

We live in a time of televised war and constant bombardment of media reports of conflict in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Like a soldier in the field, the citizen may try to set their mental sights on who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and rally a battle cry from the home front. But our scope lenses are fogged: we have neither reliable intelligence from the huge field of world politics, nor the inborn training to tell friend from foe thousands of miles away.

We fire into the dark. Our prejudices reduce our accuracy, and our hate takes away any chance — or desire — at precision. We don’t even know who or what we have hit with our words and actions after a volley is released. Those injuries of hearts and deaths of ideas are not our concern, forgetting they may have been casualties of our own friendly fire.

Let’s pretend you are at Antietam or Gettysburg. Is your second cousin on the other side of the field the enemy? You were raised with a common national history that only divided a short while ago. But they stand for something else now, represented by the banner your cousin carries. Is the banner the enemy? Is the population living in the land represented by it the enemy? Is his commanding officer the target of our wrath? Is the politician who rallied the cause to be brought to account? There are no easy answers, but in the immediate needs of warfare, yes, your cousin is the enemy.

Now let’s look at today’s American “War on Terror” — not politically, but in terms of warfare. There is no battlefield. There are no uniforms or other way to identify the enemy apart from potential threat assessment. There is no land to be gained or lost, and the enemy has no nation or territorial boundary. It is violence for its own sake. There is no measurable or even rational goal the aggressors can achieve. They cannot lose, but there is nothing to win.

We can call this mindless and amoral, yet we suffer this insanity in small ways in our own lives. We lash out in anger at people who don’t even know why we are upset. We put a face on our problems by picking a skin color or whether or not someone is wearing a turban. It doesn’t matter if they are a pacifistic Hindu; it catches our eye and we pull the trigger before looking though the scope. We are not at war. It’s about controlling the human capacity of violence. We will most likely never lose our life or liberty by giving someone different a (reasonable) benefit of the doubt, not to mention the ideals our ancestor’s fought for, which including the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. When we play terrorist by bashing an ethnic, religious, or political group, what do we hope to achieve? Is is violence of sorts for its own sake and will have its own end.

There is evil in the world, and we are anxious to confront it, verbally or by vote, maybe even arms. We need to feel we are doing something about it, even if it’s the wrong thing. We need to believe it will end with an arrest or military conquest, but it is the nature of man which we cannot expect to change by any amount of force. We convince ourselves we have all the answers about who is to blame because to admit that we don’t makes us feel powerless.

In other words, we shoot at almost everything that moves and don’t even know if we felled one legitimate target. Let’s be easy on each other. Ask questions first, not later. It’s pretty certain the other person — sometimes someone we don’t even know or have met — has a life, a family, and dreams like you do. If your weapon is a tongue, a pen, or a gun, the wisdom is the same. Think before you aim. And aim before you shoot.

I am not my religion. Religion is something I choose to practice. It doesn’t even have to be something to believe or not believe in … let other people argue over that stuff and be all smug about being right when everyone else is wrong.

Also, theism and atheism are not religions. They are viewpoints around which some people build religion. And because they are viewpoints, they are not exclusive of each other. I have a personal relationship with a divine other whom I anthropomorphize, so that means I’m a theist, and yet I can understand the universe without it, so I’m also an atheist? Whatever …

What is real — REALLY REAL — cannot be expressed in words or conceptualizations or all the grandiose philosophies of mankind. But in a way they do: they all point to the truth, but are (by most) mistaken for the truth.

But to answer the original question, I practice Roman Catholicism, though I used to call myself a Christian Taoist. In the end, I am just me.

To each man, their own religion. Let’s share and enjoy such things as if we were trading recipes or swapping stories. It’s all good.

A military Chaplain could be compared to a parent. They pray with you, encourage you, equip your soul with any good thing it can carry, then send you off into the world of battle or the battle of the world. They’re there afterward to help put yourself back together, or maybe even help drag you off the field when you’ve been knocked down. Maybe they even fought by your side once or twice, but their place is ultimately to support you as they can, and then back off and let you do what you’ve been trained for.

In everyday life, sometimes we are chaplains and sometimes we are soldiers. As soldiers we stand by one another, cover each other’s backs, and wave the flags of victory or surrender. As chaplains, we can’t fight other people’s battles or protect the whole world from every evil. That’s a hard lesson for some, including myself. A good boss wont sit over everyone’s shoulder all the time, and a good parent learns to let go.

We’ve all been there at some time. We’re on the team but not in the game. Maybe we have a disability or lack of certain skills to carry on the tasks our comrades seem so fit to execute. Maybe we don’t feel as strongly about a cause as others but still love the people who believe. We want to do more, and don’t realize how sorely we would be missed if we weren’t around.

If you’re not quite a soldier — at work, at home, or among friends — maybe you are a chaplain and don’t know it. Maybe you wear other titles, such as “facilitator”, “peacemaker”, “supervisor”, or “parent”. And even without a title, these roles are not without purpose or honor. If there is a lesson a chaplain can teach you, let it be this: You can’t be a soldier all the time in all things, and that’s okay. No army moves without the support of many, many people not on the front lines. If you don’t have the opportunity or will to fight for a good cause, support those who do, and know that is just as important.

Peace to All,

Ken

To each you give a burden they can carry, and share the yolk invisibly next to us.

Of broken heart, I see the sky is blue, the breeze gentle.

Anguished and pensive, you find work for my hands and thoughts.

A great injustice against me may not be the outcome, yet fear of it eats at my soul.

You have provided a helpmate for just such a time.

I know I am only your instrument of your will, nothing more, powerless without you.

Feeling your quiet breath upon me, I trust in you to touch and change hearts that I cannot.

I ask the cup to pass before me, but know if I must drink, it will not be without reward.

Not my will be done, but yours.