Few nights ago, ABC news reported that a weapons manufacturer in Michigan, Trijicon was encoding references to Bible verses in high profile rifles. Some of the verses are, 2Cor: 4:6 where Jesus is described as light in darkness and John 8: 12 where Jesus is called the Light of the World. The founder of Trijicon,Glyn Bindon, was reportedly a Christian. The pentagon has a multi-year contract with Trijicon for years. Apparently the Pentagon was unaware of this practice of inscribing rifles with Bible verses.
This is wrong on many levels. First of all, it is a breach of the separation of church and state. These rifles used in Iraq and Afghanistan can only help inflame anti-Christian and anti-American feelings. But more importantly, it is a perversion of Christianity. This is done in the name of the Prince of Peace!It is totally contradictory to the message of Jesus who died on the cross.
In an opinion column in the Miami Herald on 1/24/10, Leonard Pitts expressed this perversion so powerfully: "We specialize in cheesy expressions of faith here in God's favorite country. Indeed, you could build a tower unto heaven itself out of all the roadside Jesuses, prayer cloths, Ten Commandments rocks, and other trinkets of a cheap,disposable faith that says nothing, costs nothing, does nothing, risks nothing, that speaks not of God, external and eternal but only of the grubby, temporal perspectives and fears of ground bound women and men.
"Mother Theresa's faith drove her to foreswear material riches and spend half a century working to uplift the wretched poor of Calcutta. Martin Luthter King's faith drove him to gamble his very life in a dangerous campaign to win human and civil rights for African American people. And then there is Glyn Bindon, whose faith led him to inscribe coded Bible verses on his gun sights.
And how sad that is!
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