Ritual sex? I might be persuaded to convert.
You may choose to believe that, but you are simply engaged in the sort of uninformed claims that many Christians lodge against beliefs outside the three Abrahamic religions. You are free to spout it, but we are under no compulsion to believe your polemics any more than you believe theirs.
The most obvious reason being that they are simply invented.
Isn’t the actual military guide a DA or DOD pamphlet that merely a compendium of what various faith groups have informed the military regarding what said faith groups (a) assert about themselves and (b) what the current requirement set by said faith groups are for their services?
You got the drivel comment because your post was, in fact, drivel. You simply made up the stuff you asserted about military chaplains. Don’t like having drivel publicly called drivel? Don’t post drivel.
I was just about to ask if there is some kind of standard answer that Christian military chaplains come up with when asked about the whole “Thou Shalt Not Kill” business.
I decided to google it first, though - and in the process, stumbled upon this ten-year old thread, from right here on the Dope.
A rather interesting discussion, though rather short. An ex-chaplain pops his head in at one point.
Total hijack and unrelated to the subject at hand, but I’ve long wondered about this:
On page 101 of Hugh Urban’s Magia Sexualis, he writes that
However, Peter-Robert König states here that:
So… Which is it? VII° is theoretical sex magic - VIII° is, well, what exactly? - IX° is sex magic in practice?
Or is it that the whole sex-magic-starts-at-VIII° is a Crowleyan addition to Reuss’s original scheme, after Reuss’s death?
No idea. If so, I’d sure like to see the entry for Scientology, too. They’ve got the best origin myths this side of the Mormons.
The three COC functions I identified are not restricted to any religious belief system, Abrahamic or otherwise. The PSYOP identifiers are (1) a codified inhibition against taking another human life [with or without “justification”], and (2) fear of the consequences of one’s own death, both in terms of survival/obliteration of the self and in posthumous reward/punishment if it survives. Very simply, if the Army were to allow each soldier to make his/her own decision concerning obedience to orders on either or both bases, its combat reliability and effectiveness would evaporate. So, as far as possible, the first must be removed from individual prerogative and responsibility, and the second must be neutralized through ideological and ritual belief reinforcement. There is no great mystery here. Function #3 is just a peripheral task stemming from both #1 & #2.
Again, the original question of this thread was whether or not non-conventional religions such as Wicca could be represented by military chaplains. What I am contending is that for these functional realities, many if not all of them can’t. Wiccan priests and priestesses do not remove or sublimate individual ethics or responsibility; they insist upon it. Nor do they demoniza or subhumanize nonWiccans. You can look back through all of human history and not find a Wiccan pogrom, crusade, extermination/conversion, or similar action. Trying to indoctrinate and control Wiccans compares favorably to herding cats.
As for the three Abrahamic religions, the simple, and again historical, fact is that they are traditionally authoritarian including to the eclipse of the individual. Doctrine and dogma supersede personal judgment. This is still most pervasive in the Islamic branch of the three; the disagreements are over who gets to be the authority.
Christianity’s “trip to today” is quite a story. From my MindWar book:
"… The fall of the Roman Empire (an increasingly uneasy marriage of Hellenistic religious multiplicity and political pragmatism) and simultaneous ascent of institutional Christianity eclipsed the concept of the morally-defined and -sustained polis (of which republican Rome was arguably the last gasp), replacing it with a political order ordained by the Christian God [the ‘City of God/City of Man’ concept articulated by Augustine (354-430 CE) and later codified into a stratification of Eternal/ Natural/ Divine/ Human Law by Thomas Aquinas (1225-74)]. Thus an externally-proclaimed, but intellectually-unintelligible [and unquestionable] morality governed humanity and its social institutions. This is the situation which persists today in the world’s surviving theocratic cultures and states, such as those of Islam and Israel.
"The cataclysm of the Protestant Reformation (1515-1648) and Catholic CounterReformation (1545-63) saw the effective elimination of theocratic political morality in Europe. It was replaced first by the Age of Absolutism (1500-1789), demarking the strongest secular monarchies, and then by the intellectual and militant revolutions of the Enlightenment (late 17th & 18th centuries). The Enlightenment proposed to replace secular monarchies with competing concepts of purely-human ‘social contracts’ forcibly established (Thomas Hobbes) cooperatively negotiated (John Locke), or arising from public sentiment (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). The Lockean model was that adopted by the Founding Fathers of the United States, while in the much more cynical and harsh model of Hobbes were the seeds of modern utopian socialisms, as well as Marxian communism.
“The social-contract theorists of the Enlightenment held a vague, general disbelief that God, if he were presumed to exist, would disregard the operation of natural laws to take an interest in the behavior of individual human beings for better or worse. Generally termed Deism, this belief-system included such Founding Fathers as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. They therefore designed ideal governmental systems in which human reason was preeminent, with traditional Judæo/Christian divine influence being relegated to a ceremonial and symbolic role in actual political decision-making …”
The further below the intellectual elite you go, the less Deistic and more literal Christianity becomes, hence the need for “flocks” of various kinds, including those within the armed services, to remove #1 & #2 responsibilities and fears from those incapable of or unwilling to handle them themselves - or whose uncontrolled exercise of them would jeopardize the combat efficiency of the organization. As R. Lee Ermey so eloquently summed it up …
I will conclude with another personal story. A few years ago there was a very nice Army captain on my staff who wanted to save my soul for Jesus. I appreciated his concern, but wound up teaching him much more about Christianity than he had ever known. 
But there was this one curious incident: I noticed that the local PBS television station was about to broadcast the complete John Romer Testament, an outstanding history & onsite-tour of how the Old & New Testaments of the Holy Bible came to be assembled from preexisting sources and then added/subtracted/modified over the centuries. I thought the captain would find this as fascinating as I did. A couple of weeks later, when I happened to ask him, he said that he had stopped watching after the first few minutes. In short, he was completely traumatized by the Bible being anything other than the “literal/revealed word of God”.
Michael Aquino
I either could not agree less, or I’m misunderstanding your point.
Chaplains don’t need to be of the faith their soldiers are to make sure they have the tools and space they need to do their religious/spiritual work. They don’t need to be of the same faith to provide therapeutic or religious counseling. If they did, then Lutheran Chaplains couldn’t minister to Jewish soldiers, and vice versa.
My stepmother is a hospital chaplain who is also a Pagan. She is not a pagan chaplain. She is a chaplain, who happens to be Pagan. She’s very clear with her patients that her religion isn’t relevant to their problems, but their own religion is. She’s got a Master’s in Divinity and all the same training that any other hospital chaplain has. She took her classes with Catholics and Protestants and Jewish people and one atheist. She’s well versed in most of your major religions and can answer questions from their perspective. Whether those answers come from a book or from the person’s own mind, most often, most people will find the answers that keep the army happy, and that includes Wiccans in the army. The exceptions are those who experience conversions after enlisting, as mentioned in that linked thread, and those are few and far between, Christian or Pagan.
You don’t have to be a Catholic to give the answers the Catholic church would give. You just have to know what the Catholic church would say.
Q.E.D. That chaplain’s comments represent the more passive approach: changing the subject into “teamwork”, “taking care of your buddies”, & etc. If that doesn’t work, the discussion changes to “conscientious objector” consequences, which are stigmatic and intimidating. The obvious extremism of this tactic is that it recontextualizes the soldier’s problem from one of personal decision-making in each discrete situation of potential violence to an absolute rejection of all violence, even in the protection of oneself or others. This of course carries with it the connotation of cowardice, which is what is expected to knock the soldier back into unquestioning obedience.
You, however, went beyond putting forth that belief of yours, expanding it to a claim of the “mission” of chaplains.
If you stick to explaining your beliefs, you are probably on safe ground. When you try to impose your beliefs on others and explicitly claim such are “missions” of others, you are simply not connected to reality.
As a personal opinion, that is fine. However, “many” does not mean “all” and it seems more likely that the military, requiring sponsorship for all chaplaincies, has simply never found a recognizable organization to provide such a sponsorship. The military does recognize various pagan religions, providing training to all chaplains as to how to counsel them, and there are several thousand members who hold such beliefs.
You are welcome to continue to offer your opinions, (this is the forum for witnessing), but when you step outside your beliefs to discuss others, other members are free to point out your errors.
Let’s see … How can I put this delicately? The VII° involves admiring your phallus, the VIII° autoeroticism, the IX° heterosex. The X° is purely administrative (a national head of an O.T.O. branch). The XI° (symbolizing the reverse of the IX°) is homosex. The secret meaning of the O.T.O. initials is that of the phallus and its neighbors, and I’ll leave identification of the “eastern temple” to your imagination.
All of this is not just to have fun, of course, but for magical operations and divine illumination, which may or may not be just another line to get laid. Reuss met Crowley in 1911 and turned him on to the O.T.O.‘s simplified sex magic at that time. Previously Crowley, though sexually frisky, had oriented his 1907-founded A.’.A.‘. more along the lines of an Æon of Horus-themed Golden Dawn. He found the O.T.O. much less ponderous and more fun, particularly organizationally. With Reuss’ blessing he proceeded to rewrite all of the O.T.O. grade rituals and instructions, which later slipped out here. Certainly it is a choice example of Crowley’s sexually-metaphoric writing skill. To this day you can find solemn & sincere Thelemites on YouTube performing the Gnostic Mass by using a ceremonial spear to part a gauze veil held up by a priestess. 
In the 1980s, during the ferocious anti-occult witchhunts of that decade, the O.T.O. took formal action to redesignate itself as a “church” to bring it under legal First Amendment protection. [= Same thing Scientology did earlier when it was being harassed by the IRS.] So if you’re in the O.T.O. and the military, you can probably ask for equal post chapel time too. But you’ll probably have to keep your Gnostic Masses spear/veil-tokenistic.
Well, Scientology originated with L. Ron Hubbard, who was originally a member of Jack Parsons’ O.T.O. Lodge in Pasadena. LRH went on to write sci-fi; his agent was my longtime friend & Honorary Setian Forry Ackerman. LRH wrote a story including the fictional concept of “Dianetics”, which got him so much fan mail that he decided to create an organization around it, hence Scientology.
In 1977, after the original Star Wars movie came out, I wrote a sequel for friends, The Dark Side, which Forry published in his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Shortly thereafter a friend called me, said, “No, no, Mike, you’ve got it backwards - first you write the sci-fi story, then you start the religious cult based on it!”
I always thought the Mormons (kind of the 19th-century Scientologists) were fun. Joe Smith figured why should the Old World have Jesus all to itself, so he brought him over here, along with all the wives you can stand and union suit undies. Plus they had the spookiest Boy Scout religious medal: a steer skull. The Catholics & Protestants just had, you know, crosses and stuff.
I suppose if I were going to be a Christian, I’d go Catholic, just because their stuff is all Gothic and scary. My Dad came from Italy where everyone’s Catholic, but they take their Christianity with Italian zest. The priest in Cosenza was a Marcello Mastroianni hunk who had a fling with my grandmother; he remained a good friend of the family and visited us in Santa Barbara shortly before he croaked.
Back in 73 I spoke extensively with Father John Nicola in Washington about The Exorcist, which he was tech advising. Here I was as a Satanic Priest trying to talk him out of all that gross Regan behavior! If it had been my choice, I would have said, “Have the Devil possess Hunter Thompson.” Then again, no one might have noticed any difference.
When acting/advising in a “generic” capacity, chaplains are nothing more than friendly, sympathetic advisors [being paid for it, of course]. They are not acting as sacred vessels of God/gods. This is just one more indication of the plaything contempt that Western culture has toward religion since the Enlightenment: “One faith is just as good as another”, “All paths lead to God”, generic/convenient religious holidays, and so on.
This works expediently in the military chaplaincy for exactly the factors you highlight here: America has a multiplicity of conventional faiths & denominations, and obviously nowhere near enough specific chaplains to go around. So it’s “one size fits all”, with both soldiers and chaplains expecting nothing more or less.
What’s wrong with this picture is its overall phoniness: it’s just secular advice in clerical drag. I have been a Priest first of Satan, then of Set, and in both states of being it was/is quite impossible to put it on/take it off like a sport coat. It energizes and permeates every aspect of your conscious existence, inseparable and indistinguishable from oneself. And that is why I could never be an Army chaplain. Every self-conscious entity is seen by the Priesthood of Set as an immortal, divine presence for which physical incarnation is merely a vehicle for self-apprehension, like training wheels on a bicycle. Any advice I might offer to a soldier would necessarily and constantly reflect this, which is very obviously not what the Corps of Chaplains has as its marching orders.
MindWar is very much a case in point. It is not a religious text, and there is no mention of the Corps of Chaplains in it. Yet it is an operation to evolve the entire function of the armed forces from destruction to creation, from the blind nihilism of physical war to a structure and ethic of international conflict resolution that meets Setian standards of integrity and perfectionism. The question is not whether it will work; the question is whether there is the human awareness and will to implement it. As we speak here it continues to circulate within the government, and now the public as well. To finally end the scourge of PhysWar? Giving it my best shot. 
A Setian chaplain would bring this same kind of focus to any personal or group encounter, which for that individual or group would be either exhilarating or terrifying. Or, perhaps, simply bewildering. One thing’s for certain: It would not be R. Lee Ermey. Rather it would pose the question: Will you drink from the Grail of your divinity, or will you allow yourself, not even from malice but from mere indifference, to be reduced to nothing more than your personal id-monster?
So you are saying that, for your particular religion at least, that it is less a case of the military not wanting chaplains of your faith, and more a case of your faith not wanting to compromise its principles enough to fit the military mold?
It would be both, as it was during the 1966-75 original Church of Satan when I was contacted by the COC. I was not offered a chaplaincy, of course, nor would I have accepted one for these same reasons.
Anton did ask me, as an active officer, to handle any religious problems referred to the Church by military Satanists, and I routinely did this - usually just showing enough Church interest in apparent discrimination or harassment incidents to freak out the local chain of command; this sort of situation was not covered in the existing manuals.
It of course also raised the question, which continued on into the 1975+ Temple of Set era, of how an individual responsibility/ethics Satanist or Setian could interface with an institution in which instant obedience without explanation or justification is regularly expected, including in lethal-force circumstances. There is, after all, such as thing as personal subordination to the benefit of one’s community or nation; and it’s realistically impossible for this to be accomplished if everyone has a veto or opt-out option. Nor is it satisfactory for a few privileged [by religion, by principle] individuals to escape this obligation and free-ride on the shoulders of others.
While an undergraduate ROTC cadet at the University of California 1964-8, I volunteered to serve as one of the student draft-counselors, who advised students on everything from different deferment procedures to emigration to Canada. I was the only ROTC cadet to do so; it was a very sobering and stressful experience.
What we eventually came round to in the Temple of Set was something very close to ancient Hellenistic Stoicism. In one of our reference texts, the Ruby Tablet of Set, I summarized it thus:
"Stoicism was a philosophical system holding that it is man’s duty to freely conform to natural law and his destiny, that virtue is the highest good, and that the wise man should be free from passion, equally unperturbed by joy or grief. First introduced by Zeno, a somewhat mysterious Phœnician/Egyptian (336-264 BCE), it was later espoused by Chrysippus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius of Rome.
"Stoicism too was pantheistic: The world is the embodiment of and is governed by the Logos Spermatikos (seminal reason). All the universe is essentially one, but matter is dynamic. The universe goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, development and dissolution. “God” is this entire process, not a being apart from it. He is the “soul” of the universe, so to speak. Man is a microcosm of the universe. When he dies, his soul survives death as an impersonal energy. Ultimately this will be reabsorbed into the universal energy.
"Stoics denied the Skeptical contention that no objective knowledge is possible, holding rather that a wise man can distinguish reliable impressions (kataleptika phantasia = “grasping impressions”) from ethereal ones. Hence the Stoics thought it possible to identify the universe as a single, integrated substance in which human existence and behavior partake. Knowledge arises through the senses, which are also the final test of truth. Experience does not always lead to knowledge, for perceptions may be distorted by passion and/or emotion. Reason is the supreme achievement of humanity.
"Since humanity is integral with nature, goodness is cooperation with nature. It is not the pursuit of pleasure, which would subordinate reason to passion. If evil comes to the good man, it is only temporary and not really evil, since in the greater sense it is natural. The Stoic thus accepts all fortunes and misfortunes of life calmly. He seeks an absence of feeling in his thoughts and conduct.
“Nevertheless Stoicism does not excuse all events as deterministic. The individual is still responsible for virtuous or vicious choices, measured against a natural approximation. The Stoic considers the “average man” a dangerous fool governed by passions and emotions rather than by virtue and reason. The Stoic disapproves of war and slavery, and believes in humanitarianism and equality of all humans as elements of nature. But he does not advocate violent social revolutions or drastic policies to attain these ends. Change must come “naturally”, not artificially. Stoics sought harmony in society, which - unlike Epicureans - they acknowledged as natural. The Stoic ideal was a “world society” (cosmopolis) transcending regional divisions: one of Alexander’s goals for his empire.”
This is good as far as it goes, but it still has some conflicts with the intense individualism of Setian philosophy. Nevertheless when nonSetians ask me for a good, solid life-orientation, I often suggest Stoicism to them. A particularly good introduction is this.