The person I’d like to ask is Lincoln. Was his original addition a tribute to Jesus? Or was it a recognition to the “Creator” God mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, which appealed to Christians and Deists alike.
As far as disagreeing, I’d say that you are not necessarily correct. Your argument seems to hiunge on what was in the minds of proponents of the addition to The Pledge. The only one who might even matter is Mr. Bowman.
His stated reason was a nod to Lincoln. We do not know Lincoln’s intent of those words in his speech. So we’re stuck with 1) could it be added and 2) should it be added.
If, in fact, Lincoln was referring to the God of the Declaration, and Bowman was referencing Lincoln, it then does not conflict with the First Amendment. Not any more so than the Declaration itself, which points to no one religion. So, it could be added.
Now should it be added? That’s a point of personal opinion. Is it a good thing to remind people of the foundings of the country and the humility the founders felt in the face of the Grand Creator? Does this acknowledgement foster pride in one’s country and patriotism? And is that a good thing?
Yes, we’re all familiar with the history. And if the pledge did say “under God, you know Jesus’ Dad”, then it would in fact be unconstitutional. But it doesn’t say that, and so it gets a pass.
So your position is that since the kids in the particular school at which you teach have gotten out of the habit of reciting the Pledge, it must be true for every school thrughout the United States, despite specific contradicting testimony from actual students?
Barring evidence that every one of those posters have chosen to invent their narratives, I think that I will accept your testimony under the heading of “responses vary.”
I have 2 questions, I hope it is not improper to ask in this discussion;
If one believes"In" God, and believes God is everywhere, then is it proper to just say Under God? Why not; over, under, around, in , out, etc.?
Second question; Has the USA became any more moral since" Under God" was added? To hear a lot of Christians it has gotten worse since the 50’s, so what difference does it make?
There are more Atheists in the US than there were in the 50’s or at least those who would admit to it. I do not see what good adding Under God is doing. Kids grow up and use their own minds,many Atheists that I know, were raised in strict religious homes.
I have posted no lies, no misstatements, and everything I attributed to you is quoted accurately and in full.
You said exactly what I quoted you as saying.
It is, indeed, guilt by association. Thus my argument that you are supporting mass murder is valid. (Except, of course, for the fact that your statement that lekatt is willing to tolerate violence is a lie.)
You want to play the game that way?
[ul][]You oppose the war in Iraq[]al-Queda also opposes the war in Iraq[]al-Queda are violent terrorists[]ergo, you support violent terrorism.[/ul]
Actually Christians are not getting stronger, read the early history of this country, remember the Salem Witch trials.
No one will know you don’t say the words “under God” unless you flaunt it for attention. Christianity is turning away from the “be saved of burn in hell” attitutes. Only the most fundamental still teach that. Besides you know it’s not true, God does not harm His children, so why are you worrying.
[ul][li]You oppose the war in Iraq[]al-Queda also opposes the war in Iraq[]al-Queda are violent terroristsergo, you support violent terrorism.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
The problem with your game is that Tom doesn’t benefit from al-Queda and is in fact no safer than anyone who does support the war. al-Queda doesn’t know Tom from a hole in the wall and would blow him up as soon as anybody else.
If you note, Tom spoke specifically about past problems we’ve had in this country with the majority mistreating the minority. His example of lynching works because even if I don’t personally lynch anyone, I benefit from the environment caused by keeping a certain percentage of the population cowed and in fact I welcome the ability to keep those people in their place. While I may not lynch them, I sit on the jury, I own the store, I tally the votes and unless I defend the rights of the minority, I support the violence that visits them, because that’s the method that’s being used to ultimately cow them.
The answer to that, wasn’t to tell the minority to move to another state, or another country or to take their votes and go home, was it? Were they “flaunting” for attention when they wanted the rights granted them by the Constitution? According to some at the time, they were. They should have just sat quietly on the back of the bus, they should have not voted, they should have just purchased earplugs and gone about their business.
The reason Jim Crow worked, the reason Segregation worked, the reason african-americans were unable to vote was because the majority felt that it was alright to treat the minority as lesser. In the few cases when the majority was placed on trial for killing a minority more often than not, the majority were released, because the other members of the majority found it acceptable.
What does that tell other majority members? You can do whatever you want to the minority, it’s okay. ‘We’ won’t kill them, but we won’t hold it against YOU, if you do.
Once we consider it “flaunting”, when the minority stand-up for their rights, we’ve already betrayed the Constitution.
I like your post, it makes a lot of sense. I believe the words “under God” mean under God’s authority, not necessarily where God is. Actually there is no place you can look and not “see” God. But the whole idea of the argument over the words is silly. One side attacks it, and the other defends, it’s an automatic response without logic. The words don’t change lives, actually no one really pays much attention to them. To most people it’s the “principle” of the thing that they stand on. I don’t personally care whether they are there are not. We are a bunch of control freaks, each side thinking they will be safer if they get their way.
If we felt more secure something like this would never happen. I am not surprised most atheists come from religious homes. How else would they become bitter about religion. In ways, I don’t blame them. I went through the same situation. Strong religious teachings that told me I was going to hell, and I never felt safe enough, so I became a soft atheist for over 30 years of my life. Mad at the way religion made me feel, bitter for being forced out by reason and logic. Then I had a spiritual experience, and found out there were many different paths and ways to look and think about the Creator. I am a changed person. I forgave the religionists and now understand them much better. Many of them have not known any teachings but what they believe. I have studied spiritual things for 18 years now and understand much more about life. Don’t be harsh on either side, they both are suffering for they lack of knowledge.
What the 9th circuit found unconstitutional was, first, the law that added “under God” to the pledge, and second, teacher led recitation of the pledge. So, yea, student led recitation at a football game would still be ok.
There was an amusing incident at one of the Virginia gubernatorial debates the other day illustrating this:
The abortion question is fine for bloviation, but if they actually had to make real policy, most Republicans wouldn’t touch this issue with a ten-parsec pole.
Personally, I have no desire or interest in having it removed - it just isn’t all that offnsive to me. Whether it stays or goess is not the real issue. What I find more of a problem is that both sides demand that it be all their way, that either side can simply sweep away anyone who disagrees. It’s the godhaters vs the freedomhaters and both are eeeeevul. Both sides miss the whole point. You’re free to do what you want, but you’re not free to force your way on someone else. That’s what attracted my attention to this thread.
Not at all. The divinity of the principal monarch in that part of the world (the Roman emperor) certainly didn’t weaken – not giving lip service to this concept was one of the reasons Christians kept becoming Purina Lion Chow. After the empire became Christian, it was a simple ideological search-and-replace to change “the emperor is a god” with “the emperor is God’s annointed ruler”.
Your entire post was a lie, you have completely misstated my position, and your core quote about my offense was snipped to remove the context which demonstrated that I was refering to a very specific subset of “religious” people and that I was responding to a particualr claim of warfare by lekatt.
Let’s look at the actual exchange:
You then cropped my quote to
So lekatt makes an arguable claim that we can impose religion through governmental activities on people who do not want religion and government mixed because the government was founded by “religionists.” Clearly I disagree with that position, but that is only the setup for his next claim and I did not respond directly to it.
He then goes on to declare that there is a “war” between “the seculars and the religionists.” He also takes his own argument further from the realm of reality by declaring that atheists have a religion, with the (false) implication that it is atheists who make up the “seculars.” He then claims that his “war” is one of atheists trying to impose their “religion” on the country is the source of the “seculars.”
He then wonders which side will “win” the “war” to which he has already alluded.
To this odd mix of error and wishful thinking, I replied with a specific statement that the “religionists” who are trying to impose their beliefs on the country (using his own word in quotes to indicate that I refer specifically the people he claims in his text, not the community of all believers) are the people who have most frequently resorted to violence and persecution.
By lopping off the beginning of my sentence, you drag away the context and make it appear that I am accusing all religious believers of persecution. You have then continued to falsely accuse me of that modified statement. False quotation? Quote out of context? Whatever you wish to claim about your quotation of my post, it is clearly not “full” and it is misleading, not accurate.
I have never claimed that all believers are prone to violence and you can only support your own false accusation by cropping my statement. This renders your attempts to set up parallel constructions of Newdow and communists or my views and that of al Qaida foolish–and clearly dishonest.
As to the guilt by association, I have already acknowledged that I am associating lekatt with those who will permit violence to be done in their name, but those people are not all believers or all Christians or all Right-Wing Christians, but that subset of Christians in his country who have traditionally argued that the beliefs of particular Christian groups should be imposed by the government on all groups, even non-Christian and Christian groups who do not share the same beliefs. He introduced the notion of warfare and winning; I simply pointed out where that notion has taken us, historically, and who the perpetrators of that violence have been. Since he clearly supports that conflict, it would seem that he either supports the violence or is willing to tolerate it.
This is not a claim that anyone who wishes to keep “under God” in the PoA wishes to do so violently. This is an observation that lekatt has aligned himself with those who have used violence in the past. Heck, he is even willing to lie in his thesis to support his point, claiming that secularism is an “atheist” movement when it has historically been a movement by religious groups in this country to uphold the rights of holders of minority religious beliefs. Newdow may be an atheist, but the Baptists who protested discriminatory taxation, the Catholics who wished to use their own bible translation, the Jews who simply wanted to be allowed to live in peace were all religious believers.
Polls carry far less weight than the constitutional process. The first amendment says the feds shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion(including Islam) or the free exercise thereof. This means laws boosting, as well as laws degrading. The government can not boost religious views nor can it put them down. The representatives of the country agreed on that with a 2/3rds majority in a far more rigorous process than the poll mentioned. They did so with the full knowledge that this would become binding law for themselves and everyone else. This was a weighty decision and far more thought and debate went into it than ticking a box on a poll sheet. That poll shows exactly WHY the first ammendment is in place. To keep the majority(where the political power was to be vested in the new republic) from screwing with religion, any religion, practiced in any form. The previous political power wielders in many of the nations the framers came from had screwed around with religion and, depending on which framer you asked, had either disenfranchised some members of believers(by declaring themselves “king by divine right”) or debased the religion(founding the Church of England so the king could get a divorce the Catholic church refused to grant). If one is going to make pronouncements of “the people have spoken” then it should be the person backing up their claim with a duely ratified constitutional amendment versus an opinion poll.
You can’t protect religion from the state without protecting the state from religion. Traffic in either direction screws it up. Do things with state power that elevate religious establishments(like funding Christian organizations) and you run into issues where you’re subsidizing the religion against it’s own tenets(Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s). Now a state action could foster a schism within the church between those who believe in the Christian admonishment to have Caesar’s seperate from god’s. This is interfering in religion, no matter how well-intentioned or nobly meant. You can’t keep the state out of religion without keeping religion out of the state. Compounding the problem is the question of fairness. If you have government do something for one estalbishment of religion(a Christian church, for instance) then how do you make that fair for the Muslims, Hindu, etc.? If you leave it to the majority to decide then you’ll be disenfranchising the minority religions via state action.
The only way to keep it from becoming a huge bloody mess is to avoid the whole issue in the first place.
The strength of religion goes up and down, and varies from region to region. Right now, it’s in an upswing, especially at the top.
The more liberal churches may reject the doctrine of Hell; I suspect that’s one reason why they are constantly weakening, while the fundamentalists grow stronger. The fundamentalists follow the true essence of their religion; ignorance and hatred. They will always be stronger; the liberal Christian folk will never be anything but a side note.
Most people are neither; they are largely what I’ve heard called “cultural Christians”. They say the words, go through the motions but ultimately, religion isn’t much of a guide to their behavior. That’s why they are civilized; when people do let religion guide their behavior, they do things like disown gay children. For that matter, look at the Middle East or medieval Europe.
“God does not harm His children” ? Have you actually read the Bible at all ? God has committed atrocity after atrocity; mass murder, torture, terrorism, you name it. He’s Saddam Hussein in the sky.
Have you actually read the Bible at all ? God has committed atrocity after atrocity; mass murder, torture, terrorism, you name it. He’s Saddam Hussein in the sky.