A colleague forwarded me a news article the other day written by James Dao of The New York Times. My friend kept his own comments brief. “This is not a parody,” he wrote. I was intrigued. After all, this was the Times, not the Onion, why would he need to qualify it in that manner?
The piece was titled, “Atheists Seek Chaplain Role in the Military.”
I quickly understood the context of my friend’s note.
“Strange as it sounds,” Dao wrote, “groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.”
Existing chaplains are generally opposed to the idea, for obvious reasons.
