One Dude, Underwhelmed
I heard the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in a long time a couple of weekends ago, when my brother graduated from high school. (There was an invocation, too. I semi-bowed my head and looked around during it, and saw a couple in front of me not even doing that. Could have hugged them.) I don’t say the Pledge—partly, that has to do with this whole “under God” thing, but it’s also partly because there’s something really off-putting about teaching kids as young as four or five to say a daily affirmation to a nation and embedding things like “liberty and justice for all” in their brains as truisms and not truths.
You don’t say truths. You see truths.
In any case, I’m glad Michael Newdow (who gets “atheist” as his title, laughably, as if Fox would slap “Christian” up under Rick Warren or something; I suppose “doctor/lawyer” might have scared some viewers, though) argues well, and calmly, and with facts and logic. I’m also glad he’s not the one trying to justify America’s creep of religion by pointing to a picture of Moses in a government building or saying that the small minority should just deal with what the majority says, or trying to say that 95% of the country is some sort of Christian.
I wonder what will happen when some smart, non-Christian religious person (or his/her son/daughter) substitutes Allah, or Jehovah, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Jah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the Pledge. Are we going to have a debate about how slanted towards a Christian God our culture is, and how intolerant of other depictions of God we really are? Are we even equipped to have that debate?
I liked this one mostly for the complete inability to grasp sarcasm, and this immortal line: “If you don’t stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear!”
It is Christianity in that context. But how often was that said for slavery?
