Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Riddle me this.
Riddle me this. How do you divide people? Stick religion in where it doesn't belong.
Did you know that Texas has a pledge much like the national Pledge of Allegiance? Neither did I, and, I'm guessing anyone who didn't go through the Texas public school system. Apparently it is much like the national pledge. It's something school children routinely recite robotically but is otherwise mostly forgotten about. That is, until one day in the Texas state legislature state when someone decided it didn't have enough religion in it.
[link][Republican Texas state representative Debbie] Riddle filed a bill to take the Texas pledge and add, "one state under God."
The current Texas pledge:
[link]Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible.
Reprentative Riddle's amended pledge from her bill. Now with 21% more added religion!
[link]Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God and indivisible.
Indivisible? Not for long it looks like.
This is a good time to examine what secularism means. Look at these three pledges:
- Honor the Texas flag, pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God and indivisible.
- Honor the Texas flag, pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible.
- Honor the Texas flag, pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under no gods and indivisible.
The first should be as equally unacceptable as the last. The first is pro-theistic. The last is anti-theistic. The middle pledge is secular. It is on that secular middle ground where the pro-theist and the anti-theist meet. To be secular is to have nothing to do with religion, whether it be from the pro-theistic or anti-theistic side.
Governments should not be in the business of religion. They have no business specifying the number of gods their citizens believe in. If people want to believe in an infinite number of gods or none, that is their freedom and their right. But that does not extend to the government itself. The state of Texas must serve all its citizens whether they are atheists, monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, etc. That means a government should work neither to further nor hinder religion. Since a government cannot possibly speak for the religion of all of its citizens, it should speak for none.
But she does raise an interesting question. Riddle me this. Who was still using the word "thee" as late as 1933? If she really wants to change the pledge then I think she should start by doing something about the word "thee" being in it.
Thanks to the Religion Clause blog for brining this to my attention.
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The Pledge - Under God? What God? Where is Jesus?
Exo 20:4 You shall not make yourself any graven image [to worship it] or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;
Now whoever wants to argue the flag is not a graven image, look at how it is being defended, yet destruction of Religious symbols is not banned. Today I started something fresh with my child. We are hardcore Jesus lovers and non-denominational christians. Starting today she will NOT say the pledge and worship that idol, but rather sit and say the "Our Father".
Now imagine the great glory of the Holy Spirit if as parents, we can get all of our children to do the same thing. The Lord wishes this nation to raise up in Prayer before the coming of our king, Jesus Christ. We don't have to force Jesus down people's throats and we don't have to have a flag tell us we are patriots. Out with the Pledge, in with the "Our Father". Jesus said to say the Our Father and not to repeat the same words in prayer over and over (Matthew 6:7-13)
Make it real, tell your children. True Christians it is time to raise up against the adversary. For what is not clear is deception. What is deception is NOT of the true and living God and his son Jesus Christ the Messiah.
You know
You know what? You're absolutely right. That's why this country is falling into moral decline. There's no Jesus in the pledge!
It's such a simple and elegant solution to this nations problems. Once Jesus is in the pledge, all of our troubles will fade away.
Thank you so much for your valuable insight.
RE: Eternal Founders
Nope, didn't miss the point, although you seem to have pretty well.
My point is that when the Pledge was written, it captured the spirit of the Founders intent. As evidenced in the documents that WERE created/written/signed by the Founding Fathers. As well as personal documentation by many of them.
Got it yet?
Um, no.
By the "documents signed by the founders" I will assume that one of them you are referring to is the Declaration Of Independence, which contains god-talk. There are others.
Here's the thing - the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, the personal correspondence, newspaper articles, speeches, journals, etc. of the Founders are not legal documents. Certainly they informed the creation of our Constitution, but I find it telling that the Constitution does not contain any god talk at all - except to prohibit religious tests for office.
In other words, the Founders were spiritual, and some were outright religious people. This is incontrovertible. However, they were also smart enough to leave all of that stuff out of the source legal document of our country and craft it in such a secular way.
The Pledge Of Allegiance has taken on mythic proportions of late. Christian Americans seem to think that it was written by one of the founding Fathers, and that it is some sort of legal requirement or law that must be recited to be considered a full citizen of the United States.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Pledge was written by Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy in August of 1892 when he was chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association. He wrote the Pledge to be part of a Columbus Day program.
Here's the one he wrote:
And here is his own words about what he was thinking as he wrote it:
So, this "intent" that you speak of is so much hogwash. Bellamy was not trying to capture the "intent" of the Founders, although he did do that in one respect by leaving god talk out of the Pledge he wrote just like they left god talk out of the Constitution. Instead, he was hammering home the point that the main ingredient of a Republic like ours is it's indivisible nature.
The addition of "under God" to the Pledge, and making it's recital near-mandatory in some cases, makes our Republic divisible by separating the non-believers from the believers, completely contradicting Bellamy's (and the Founders) intent.
I know you want all us uppity atheists just to shut up about it and be good little sheep, but it ain't going to happen any time soon. History, and the Founders "intent", are on our side.
Deal with it.
In other words, the Founders
Many of those persuaded by the arguments for keeping religion out of the Constitution were themselves extremely religious. They were informed by the teachings of Roger Williams (the founder of Rhode Island) and by personal experience. Williams essentially taught that to make religion part of the political machinations we created here on Earth was to denigrate god and religion. Moving forward in time, the personal experience of many of these people was such that they had to pay taxes to support the state church or the Anglican church even though they were not members of that church. They didn't want state-sponsored religion because they knew all too well that it meant the freedoms enshrined in the rest of the document were bogus if there would be state-sponsored coercion/invasion of a very personal realm.
Thomas Jefferson was lambasted during his presidential run as an atheist who would destroy the foundation of America just as it was getting started. Earlier, when castigated for being the prime mover behind the exclusion of god in the Constitution (following partly on the Virginia Constitution which he helped write) with the words (paraphrasing) that this would allow a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, an Atheist to become president, TJ replied famously - and with words that I consider to be absolutely fundamental to our understanding of America - "It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket."
So, any moron wishing to argue that because so many of the Founders were religious that they actually meant for a religiously informed state apparatus can put a frigging sock in it. They were religious, mostly, but had enough smarts, experience and sense of history to understand the destructive and divisive nature of people forcing god into the publicly-sponsored domain and wanted America to be better than that.
"You better start giving me some inner peace before I mop the floor with you." - Homer S.
or
"Pinky, you excel at random." - the Brain
That's really interesting
Capturing the "spirit of the Founders intent" in an advertisement in the Youth's Companion magazine.
When the pledge was written, a Baptist minister (and socialist author) was helping to promote sales of the American flag to children. From what I've read, Lincoln's use of "under God" in the Gettysburg address is what gave President Eisenhower what he thought was the precedent to add the phrase to the pledge.
Mandy U
RE: Riddle me this
Interestingly enough, when I read the newly proposed version of the Texas pledge, I, unlike you it appears, do not see a definition of the number of "Gods" that this is implying, nor a definition as to what "God" that would be.
It seems that you are having difficulty discerning the actual language in that very short statement.
The only Robotic noise that I'm hearing on this issue is you, and others like you that seem to believe that your secularist views are the only ones that count, the rest be damned.
Obviously, the founders of these United States had a better grasp of the moral fabric that this country was founded on, than you. Hence the inclusion of "One Nation under God" in our national Pledge of Allegience.
Eternal Founders
The Founders didn't write the pledge. The original pledge as written didn't have "Under God" in it. That wasn't added until the fifties.
Or are you saying that our Founders were still alive and pulling the strings in the fifties?
You have completely missed the point of Sporky's post.
However, you are illustrating it perfectly. Great job!