Originally posted by twitch it's a prejudicial, offensive & untrue quote.
It is the third thing (untrue) if you want to take it literally (which it is not meant to be taken), and it isn't the first two at all.
Is it really that hard to understand the meaning? It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with prejudice, or inclusiveness, or exclusiveness, or the military per se as it applies other places as well but the analogy is using a foxhole as a setting (meaning more generally something like "life-threatening situation where it is not in your control whether you live or die"), but certainly the phrase has been stretched to less serious situations -- the out-of-your-control bit is more important), or even atheists per se. It means that if you are in combat and could be blown up at any moment, you are likely to be saying to yourself something along the lines of, "Jesus, get me out of here" whether you are an atheist or not. And over the years, it has come to apply to any situation where you feel vulnerable and not in control of your own destiny and you have a yearning to be "saved" by God, fate, luck, whatever. That's it, that is all it means. If you've got a stick up your butt about religion, then the image itself is probably more offensive then the title. I'm neither a theist or an atheist, btw, but I'm definitely not religious. I consider (a)theists as basically the same -- as a person that thinks they *know* the inherently unknowable.
Either way, twisting this well-worn quote with a well-known meaning into some sort of expression that "atheists are not welcome in the military" is beyond silly. Atheists may well find they are not as accepted in the military as they might like to be, but this phrase hasn't got anything to do with that. Sorry for the ranting about figures of speech in what is supposed to be a photo critique, but man, how crazy can you be? It is like complaining the phrase "That's the pot calling the kettle black" is racist (which yes, some people claim).