The microscopic examination of Edward Snowden the person continues with the Washington Post having a long piece tracing his life story from elementary school onwards. The one tidbit that caught my eye was this:
In 2004, he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit. His religion, he wrote on his Army application form, was Buddhist. “Agnostic is strangely absent” from the form, he wrote in an online post, dismissing religion as “blindly making someone else’s beliefs your own.”
Want to take bets on who will be the first pundit to seize on Snowden’s apparent godlessness as the reason why he went astray and betrayed god and country? My money is on David Brooks who never seems to miss an opportunity to psychobabble.
That is a fantastic characterization of religion.
Or Ross Douthat, who never misses an opportunity to scold America for being too liberal, and to blame every problem America faces on lack of faith, or to credit everything good about America to the contribution of churches and believers.
It must be disappointing to these scandal-hunters to fail to find evidence that he is a Julian-Assange-style horndog.
Also, about religion, would these scandal-hunters enjoy it if he claimed that “God told me to”?