What’s the Opiate of the Masses Again?

Oh, thank heathens. Once liberals have forged the Great Society among the grunts, they can take another crack at Nam.

A noteworthy excerpt from the article tweeted above:

Mother Jones: One of the most prominent military humanists has to be Pat Tillman, the NFL star turned Afghanistan hero whose death by friendly fire was the subject of a government cover-up. But his religious convictions, or his lack of them, seems under-reported.

Jason Torpy (president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers): Pat Tillman was a hero and an inspiration to the nation. It’s unfortunate that there’s a certain type of hero worship that goes on, where we decide that a person is good and start heaping extra good qualities on him. That sort of hero worship was attempted to be put on Pat Tillman a little bit. But in all the 9/11 anniversary retrospectives, Pat Tillman wasn’t brought up a lot. I think people realized that he’s not their perfect Christian warrior. He was an atheist. You know, he was one of us. We revere and respect Pat Tillman very much. But the family has not reached out to the movement, and we want to respect them.

That having been said, we plan to name one of our new donor societies after Pat Tillman, based on his example, showing secular values, secular commitment, secular patriotism, and his own status as a great scholar-warrior.

Is that really what happened to the Pat Tillman epic? The mean old Christians suppressed it? Or was it a casualty of the inconvenient fact that Tillman was killed by his fellow soldiers? The Pentagon covered that up and stop-lossed Tillman’s corpse for propaganda purposes; I guess Jason Torpy and company are going to call it up again.

Just one question for Jason Torpy: What would Iraq War–opposing, Noam Chomsky–reading Pat Tillman think of being used as a Lee Greenwood for the godless set?