Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Washington Nationals Fire Chaplain

The chaplain of the Washington Nationals recently "brought hate" into the baseball team's clubhouse when he responded to a players question regarding the fate of Jews.
According to an article published Sunday in The Washington Post, Nationals outfielder Ryan Church said he asked [Chaplain] Moeller if Jews are "doomed" because they do not believe in Jesus. Church said Moeller nodded, the Post reported.

"The Nationals did a good job about bringing hate into the locker room," said Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who leads the city's oldest Orthodox synagogue, Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah.
That's it? That constitutes HATE these days. A protestant clergyman agreeing that if a Jewish man does not believe in Jesus Christ then that Jewish man will not be in heaven. How was he supposed to answer? Reasonable people should be able to see that Christianity is mutually exclusive from every other religion in the world.

On the same hand, so is Islam and every other religion. I wonder what would have happened if a Muslim chaplain (do they have those?) had been asked the same question in the same setting? He would have had to have said the same thing, wouldn't he?

How would Rabbi Herzfeld answer the question about Muslims or even atheists? How "hateful" would he be? I guess it depends on how orthodox he truly was - how far has he abandoned the faith given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? The God he claims to worship also commands him "Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." Unless he believes Allah and YHWH are different names for the same Divine Being, then he wuold have to "bring hate" into the equation as well.

3 comments:

Jim Pemberton said...

It just goes to show that political correctness is also a mutually exclusive religion in denial.

Anonymous said...

Oh give me break. Political correctness isn't a religion and certainly isn't one in denial. If you want to talk about denial you should look in a mirror, if you would come down off of that throne on your pinnacle of sanctimony long enough to understand what goes on in the real world you might see that what you right-wingers have done is demonize kindness and sensitivity by assigning it a pejorative term like *political correctness*. If this *chaplain* had been of any other faith you would be applauding the bravery of the management in banning him from the locker-room. I hope that someday you'll see that you're not the arbiter of right and wrong and that *Christian* chaplains without other alternatives for the players/employers have no place in the public sphere. If you want to waste your time studying mythology there are plenty of places you can attend on Sunday, this kind of narrow-minded, judgmentalism shouldn't be forced on people in their places of work.

Jeff A. Spry said...

Hi Orson. Angry much. As I understand it, meetings with chaplains are not "forced" on anyone. Players come voluntarily. Besides, this chaplain was merely responding to a player's question. Can't quite find the vast right-wing conspiracy here to subjugate everyone to our brain-washed mythological demonization. What about the Rabbi who said that the chaplain's religious view was "hate." Is that not doing the very same thing you claim for the chaplain?