They’re references to the Christian God.
With those, we can look into the history of their creation and the written intent of the creators and those others that supported their creation.
How so? If the dollar bill said “Christ Is King” “Kneel before Yahweh” or had a Bible verse, I’d agree. But “God” is as non-specific as it could possibly be.
And would the official promotion of monotheism discriminate against any other religions you could think of?
Sure, but that doesn’t change the meaning of the word “God” to “Jesus” or “The Christian God”. Intent tells us why it’s there, but not what it means.
Yes, it does, and I oppose it on those grounds, I don’t want any religious content in my government. But what it doesn’t do is promote Christianity as the state religion.
Becaue we know, as Czarcasm pointed out, who put them in. In the instance of “Under God”, it was the Knights of Columbus.
The idea that the Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied for the inclusion of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance with the intention of it also including non-Christian gods is flat out wrong.
Christmas is a religious holiday, dammit. As everyone knows, the birth of Jesus occurred under a pine tree, some jolly old fat guy in a red suit delivered presents to all the good boys and girls using a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer, one with a glowing red nose. Then everyone made snowmen and had snowball fights with all the snow lying around what with it being winter in Jerusalem and all.
Put it this way: if I decided to follow the state religion of the United States and picked up a $20 bill to see what that was, would “In God We Trust” lead me inexorably to Christianity? No. It’d exclude polytheistic faiths, but that’s it.
The Knights of Columbus don’t get to declare what the word “God” means, though. Their intention doesn’t matter at all. If they were all pleased as punch because they understood it to mean the Catholic God, so be it. The writers of the Declaration of Independence understood “all men” to mean “certain men, with the right skin color and property”. It doesn’t change what the word means to us.
Such as? Since I’ve been alive, blue laws are decreasing, which argues that we are becoming more secular.
Secular holiday. Notice the White House has a tree, not a manger. Where I live there are tons of people in the malls before Christmas who almost certainly are not Christian.
I wish we got rid of this, but when I believe in Judaism I had no problem with them. God is such a generic term this hardly offends any religious person, and is certainly not Christian.
There are politicians who’d love to do this, but they are not the government, nor is Fox News.Even GWB didn’t establish Christianity in any significant way - in fact, based on evidence from the guy who did his religious outreach, his White House played them for suckers.
Came in here to say something along these lines. Yeah, the folks who put ‘In God We Trust’ on the currency knew what THEY meant by ‘God’, but so what? Everyone using the bill can think of ‘God’ in anyway they want…or, if they aren’t atheists with a bug up their ass (or polytheists hung up on a single ‘God’) about the whole business, not think of it at all and just use the money to buy hookers and blow, as the gods intended. 
Personally, I’d love to do away with the whole religious business, but realistically, given the disposition of the majority of my fellow citizens, that’s not going to happen any time soon. If you live in a country that’s a democracy AND has a large majority of folks who have strong religious leanings then your choices are to get out or go along and hope for small, incremental changes. Since I don’t believe that the religious aspects of our system are all that intrusive OR onerous (I even get off for stuff like Christmas, despite the fact that I don’t believe) I’ll just keep on keeping on. In my own lifetime I’ve seen a lot of changes and I expect to live long enough to see more in the future.
ta
Escluding polytheistic faiths <> Inclusive. Also != secular.
No, if it said “one nation under Jesus” or “in Jesus we trust” it would be Christian. At most, it promotes monotheism. This somewhat annoys us polytheists, but we are the definite minority and have to live with the consequences of that.
Given that in a lot of places these days I could still be burned as a witch or executed for not being properly monotheist this is hardly the worst place to be.
You do know that there are polytheists in the world?
I mean the former. The latter is sadly true in this country but not exclusive to the US- some countries such as France banning the hijab from schools.
That couldn’t have been his point, could it?
True but unlike the UK, Canada and other western countries we don’t have all these government supported religious schools.
It’s why Europeans make themselves look like ignorant fools when they demand that Middle Eastern nations become “secular”.
This is not a knock on Europeans so much as an observation that fish can’t see water and that countries don’t need to be “secular” like France, the US, and Turkey to be liveable.
That was disgusting and racist, but nothing compared to the racists in Europe and Canada who practically tripped over themselves while waging war on hijabs, burkas, and minarets.
Well, my goodness, I must assume that you are living up to your username when you ask this question. I certainly hope so as most of your posts are well-written and show the workings of a fine mind.
But, in answer to your (hopefully) rhetorical question, just off the top of my head I can name Wicca and Hinduism as two notable polytheistic religions. Or to be more precise, non-monotheistic because quite a number of Wiccans are actually more pantheistic but the distinction is not usually noticeable to those who consider monotheism to be the only ‘real’ form of religion.