whose water?

[cellio]

There's not much water available in the Iraqi desert, of course, so most soldiers haven't bathed in a long time. According to this article, there's an army chaplain in Iraq who has a large pool of water for use by the soldiers, but there's a catch: they have to get baptised first.

Unless that chaplain personally collected the water without using any army resources (including protection), I hope they kick him out of there. Because in any other case, it's not his water; it's the army's water. And yes, my reaction would be exactly the same if it were a rabbi who required everyone to pray the daily service first, or a Republican who required you to change your voter registration to his party first, or anyone collecting a fee.

I'm all for having folks along with the army who aren't part of the effort but who do provide support services valued by some members of the unit. But when support staff become parasites, it's time for them to go.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

There is an open question here of exactly what is going on, and (based on my limited experience) no reason to believe the article characterized it completely correctly. Many branches of Christianity practice baptism by immersion. It's a one time thing, and calling it a "bath" is a pretty substantial exaggeration, although to anyone who had gone several weeks maintaining minimal hygine, any even momentary dunking is probably meaningful in an a not strictly spiritual sense. If that's all that's happening, and he's "advertising" this by emphasizing the fact that you get dunked rather than the spiritual value, it's a lot different than if he's saying you get a pool pass for the day and all you can drink if you get baptized. Still too much the "OK, I'll give you a WHOLE LOLLIPOP if you'll go to Sunday School" approach to reconcile fully with my sense of honest Christianity, but some of the writeups on this are, I suspect, giving him credit for a lollipop that is much bigger and less neccessarily implicit in baptism anyway than what's going on, on the strength of a journalist who's motivated to get cute with his angle so that a fluff piece with no real bearing on the news would sound interesting enough to get published.