The Acquittal of God: A Theology for Vietnam Veterans [Paperback]

Uwe Siemon-Netto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1990

Many Vietnam veterans felt--and still feel--not only rejected by God and their church but also betrayed by their nation and even their families. Using themes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology, Siemon-Netto explores the veterans' situation and argues for God's acquital of the charge of abandoning the veterans during and after this war.

Product Details

• Paperback: 107 pages
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press (December 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0829808337
• ISBN-13: 978-0829808339
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 4.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,645,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars the gutter balls of American religion and politics, December 15, 2011

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Acquittal of God: A Theology for Vietnam Veterans (Paperback)

Unrepresentative of godless Commies.

Survivor trying to comfort Vietnam veterans as fellow Americans surfing toward an emotional wipe out called salvation.

I wrote to the author of The Acquittal of God (1990) in November, 1990, sending him what I called slow thoughts of a medicated mind. At the time I still considered religion as it was, a social mechanism for making community possible by changing the subject to God whenever there was conflict arising from a future that today is totally different from the future we imagined yesterday. Even the report of atrocities on pages 34-35 of The Acquittal of God called the daily Saigon press conferences the "five o'clock follies."

World War Wit has become such a feature of the counterintelligence that makes anyone with a military mind think:

Let's go to your room

whenever there is an opportunity to engage in some conduct which is not allowed in public, the illegality of marijuana as a substance that might be associated with sexual conduct reminds me of someone smoking dope in Nam saying:

This is Vietnam. This right here.

As the American economy became a tool manipulated by people who thought we never had it so good as when everybody was willing to lend us money, the use of cash as real money shifted to the kind of transactions which the police attempt to discover like a group of Presbyterians telling each other:

If you really want to officially designate some

women as whores,

you could probably work for the

Saint Paul Police Department.

They certainly do that kind of work.

I mention Saint Paul, Minnesota as a place that has attracted a large number of refugees living together in the disharmony produced by many languages which other people do not understand. Jesus might have been produced by a Roman soldier sex crime in Galilee, covered up in the Bible like an investigation of throats slit by American Marines in Haditha in 2005 was highly classified fuel for junkyard cooking fires in 2011 until the papers were disclosed by some reporter for The New York Times and posted in an article in December, 2011.

The Acquittal of God sympathizes with five Vietnam veterans who left the church after hearing "goofy sermons":

In every one of these homilies the soldiers fighting in

Vietnam were accused of committing atrocities. (p. 55).

In another incident,

this former Marine

overheard two fellow

ministers talking about him.

One said to the other,

"There goes the baby killer

who thinks he is a priest."

(p. 55, quoting The Olympia Churchman

July/August 1985: p. 6).

In a highly classified World War Wit set of organizations seeking to preserve the dignity of churches who think they are Christian because they adhere to certain policies created by Saint Paul as a set of doctrines for establishing religion, comedians of the ascetic ideal pop up with creative thinking that is considered disruptive because it hinders the growth of organized religion in a society in which people are inclined to ride cosmic pogo stick ups of their own desires to their individual doom instead of the collective sacrifices that allow institutions to pretend to control time and space.

Time is a matter that seems to disappear in slow thoughts of a medicated mind. In November of 1990, I had survived ten years since the death of Walter Arnold Kaufmann (an expert in military intelligence from the British point of view at the end of World War II) but I had only been taking lithium for one year to reduce mood swings associated with an overly perverse knowledge of queer theory as it applies to everything Americans do in an official capacity for government, religion, or the military. My shrink had an opportunity to tell me that I was the most intelligent person he had ever met, but Noam Chomsky hardly knew how to tell me what was too intrusive about the duck I saw in his thinking when I tore apart his major pacification of American minds in his book, Rethinking Camelot: JFK & Vietnam.

World War Wit is a destiny far larger than anything Americans tried to accomplish in Vietnam. Expecting Americans to be able to hire police and soldiers in countries where the recruits get attacked while standing in line to serve for monthly pay is as absurd as what we always do about $14 trillion when the money has already been spent.

My letter to the author of The Acquittal of God in November, 1990, I complained about life difficulties:

It is the misfortune of

veterans to live in an age

which lives by psychology,

as the veterans don't conform

to the psychological ideal of

what people should be.

I was really complaining about society being a popularity contest. I mentioned Walter Kaufmann as a Jew from Germany whose translations I was frequently quoting ten years after he sent me a post card on which he had checked:

Give it your best shot. (July 22, 1980).

I was in Vietnam 42 years ago and have been giving my best shot on what was wrong, then and now, for 31 years. This is extremely unpopular with people who want Americans to stand for the triumph of the therapeutic or a Woody Wilson wet dream.