2005-09-15 - 2:29 p.m.
UNDER WHICH GOD?
By Peter Fredson
September 15, 2005
Today a federal judge declared that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the inclusion of the words “Under God” in public schools is unconstitutional, a decision that could lead to a heated round of Supreme Court arguments and endless acrimonious debate among True Believers and non-Christian believers or “others.”
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton stated that the reference in the pledge to “One Nation Under God” violates the right of school children to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”
The case was brought by Michael Newdow whose previous battle last year, against the words "Under God". was rejected by the Supreme Court on grounds that he did not have custody of his daughter.
Newdow hopes that the pledge will be returned to its original version, without the phrase “under God”. The phrase had been added by religious devotees in Congress in 1954 as past of the national effort to oppose communism.
"All (the court) has to do is put the pledge as it was before and say that we are one nation, indivisible, instead of dividing us on a religious basis," Newdow told The Associated Press.
Newdow stated: "Imagine every morning if the teachers had the children stand up, place their hands over their hearts, and say, 'We are one nation that denies God exists,' "I think that everybody wouldn’t be sitting here saying, 'Oh, what harm is that?' They'd be furious.."
This has particular relevance today when a conservative judge is being considered for appointment as the head of our Supreme Court.
It is notable that most conservatives are conservative Christians, who love Christian symbols, icons, quotations, and texts. They see nothing wrong with publicly voicing their beliefs, using their political positions to push their dogma or to boast of its superiority.
They want government to acknowledge their beliefs in a public manner, as part of their strategy to declare dominion and superiority of Christianity to all other beliefs.
They particularly declared cultural warfare, in Ronald Reagan’s administration, against the separation of Church and State and want some sort of mild theocracy for the United States.
Most religious Americans hope that a new Justice will rule in favor of publicly voicing Christian beliefs, and the public display of Christian symbols and icons, to echo the sentiments of the sanctimonious President, administration, and Congress. This kind of fear is indeed justified, even more so than the constant terror evoked by Bush for political advantage.
Religious absolutism demands that there be freedom to express only one religion, as all the others are false. Christian sects and cults selected by the mass of white Christian Supremacists will be favored in “faith-based” Bush ideology, and other will be relegated to the trash pile of religious nonsense.
Their religious apprehension was shown during the campaign of John Kennedy, the first Catholic to become President. People wondered if a Catholic could serve both Catholic dogma and the American Constitution.
They desperately hoped that rosaries, crosses and the Sacred Heart of Jesus would not be imposed on the public.
A Catholic Bishop was discussing this topic with a Lutheran Minister and the discussion grew quite heated. Finally the Bishop said, “We are both priests and should not be fighting over politics.” The minister replied, “Yes, we are both Christians. We both worship the same God. You, in your way, and I in His.”
People were delighted that Jack Kennedy did not intrude his personal beliefs on the nation. He thought it important that religious freedom apply universally to any belief or disbelief.
This contrasts with the enormously bigoted expressions of Bush, the most intrusive President in U.S. history, along with his “faith-based” government sponsored ideology, missionary zeal, and proclamations of national bible reading and prayer. He made the Oval Office a kind of chapel, with frequent government prayer meetings, and recommends prayer as a universal solvent for the ills he has brought on the world.
We have all seen his nominees for office and how our worst fears were realized. Ashcroft was a fascist, Rumsfeld a good Nazi, Rove a fine Goebbels, Condi a sycophant Quisling, Wolfowitz a hissing serpent, Bolton an irascible destroying demon, etc. Anyone he nominates for government office, particularly for permanent tenure, must be a mixture of bigotry, dogma, and viciousness tempered with broad public smiles, non-committal handshakes, Simon Legree hugs, and manic public display of teeth which hide the underlying indoctrination into the depths of superstition and mythology.
We hope we are wrong. Let us make this a religious statement: “God, we hope we are wrong.”
To continue this thread, which God is it that Bush and his True Believers think we are under? Is it the God of the Israelites, nasty, vicious, arbitrary, who led his people into deserts for years, and treated them abominably, up to the present day, including the genocide of Hitler? The Old Testament God who kills for pleasure, wholesale, whose book is filled with slaughter?
Is it a Methodist God, a Baptist God, a Lutheran God, a Catholic God, the Army of God God, the Dominionists God, Jerry Falwell’s Tinky Wink God?
Or is it an amorphous God, like the one cited by the fundamentalist and a person he just met, who said, “I’m an atheist.” And the Fundamentalist said, “Oh, that’s all right, as long as we both worship the same God.”
What if a Muslim school kid decided to say, “One Nation, Under Allah.” Would that be okay, would that be
constitutional?
What if some believer in any other religion than Christian decided to substitute the name of his own leader…like Buddha, Krishna, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, or any of the other thousands of deities people worship?
What if Jews, Buddhists, Islamists, Confucians, Sikhs, Hindus and other religious adherents decide this phrase is a deliberate insult to their own beliefs and decide to revenge the insults with a counter-crusade, with killing of Christians?
The President of All the American People and his cabinet hold frequent meetings at which exclusive praise to their Christian God is offered.
When they mention God, they mean only the Christian God, who wrote both the Old and New Testaments with his finger on stone tablets, to cite all the commandments which are for True Believers the basis of every law and every system of morals in the universe.
They do NOT mean any of the other 10,000 intangible invisible omnipresent omniscient omni-terrific entities ever worshipped by gullible humans. Certainly not Zeus, nor Wodin, nor Quetzalcoatl. And definitely NOT Allah!
Congress is opened by professional Christian God Praisers. Presidential Candidates declare themselves, openly and frequently, in favor of the Christian God. Congressmen pass declarations in favor of a Christian God, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, Pledges Under God, constant prayer, Creationism, Religious School Vouchers, and sometimes assert that the Christian Bible should be the Law Textbook of the Nation.
Oh, they really LOVE their religion and their God. They don’t think religion should be separated from government. They carry Bibles, swear on Bibles, quote extensively from Bibles, and some even thump Bibles. Yes Sirree. But they never carry Korans, Torahs, Rig Vedahs, or Popul Vuhs. Oh, lordy, NO.
Congressional leaders declare periodically that school children should be allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to pray frequently and openly to the Christian God, that Republicans know the appropriate Christian prayers to be said, and that Professional Christian God Praisers and Christian Do Gooders be allowed free access to government resources. Politicians often mention that Christian views such as Intelligent Design should be given equal time with evolution in science classrooms, but they never seem to want equal time for evolution in church classrooms.
Certainly the conspiracy of religious denominations, gathered together in systematic political forces such as The Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, Dominionists, Reconstructionists, Army of Goddists, Promise Keepers, and a hundred other such organized semi-fascist institutions, work day and night, and offer money, votes, and labor to any candidate who will grant them free access to governmental institutions, including the Budget and public schools.
Church-political organizations have people behaving like fanatics, refusing to recognize anyone not holding their religious beliefs, and pledging their best to defeat with all their might, power and force anyone who they suspect will try to limit their access to a monopoly of power. They intend to make the United States a Theocracy. Ronald Reagan and the Bush Family took more than first steps in this direction.
The President of the Supreme Court, a Christian True Believer, openly said that the separation of church and state is a bad metaphor.
Recent appointments to high Federal Judgeships augurs the worst possible fate to democracy, to the disappearance of free opinion, freedom of religion, and freedom of press. We are certain to see an unfettered proliferation of Christian signs, symbols, monuments, statues, icons, and slogans posted and plastered in every public building in the United States.
The Goddists are in charge of this nation now, and they see no difficulty in imposing favorite Biblical passages and dogma into law. The Oval Office is an extension of the Far Right elite, and boasts about it.
The religious right owns probably the major of newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, Cable Networks and they absolutely control much of the news that is aired or published. We are not far from being another fundamentalist Iran, not far from having our own home-grown Taliban in the United States.
Churches own huge tracts of land and real estate, tax free, and are given more by the “generous” Congress and President.
The priests, preachers, reverends, parsons and other professional God Praisers are free to challenge freedom, except applied only to themselves. Any negative views of religion or its practitioners is censored at the root.
No journalist is permitted to express doubt of the efficacy of prayer, or mock the miraculous appearances of virgins and Jesus on fence posts or in soup dishes.
On the contrary, the tired vacuous speeches of popes and priests regarding the birth of the Baby Jesus or recitation of any of the biblical myths is reported solemnly as news. Major publications have huge spreads on religious illusions as though they were actually news.
They agitate endlessly to make their version of religion the dominant version, and would proceed to make it an absolute monopoly, with obligatory church attendance, tithing, and the accompanying version of whatever a modern Inquisition might be like.
Immense fines for showing an inch of mammary tissue have already been issued. People have been fired, ostracized for using a word beginning with F or S or C.
We don’t have to ask what the Bush attitude toward non-believers is. His daddy said that he didn’t think non-believers could be American citizens.
And Junior would probably have some Ashcroft clone put thousands of atheists in indefinite detention with abuse and torture until they recanted, converted, or repented of their grave apostasy. Although a big lie of Bush has been in regard to his declaration of war on Iraq, a more egregious one is “I don’t want to intrude my beliefs on anybody.”
Bush seems determined to not only politically dominate the world by preemptive stealth and malice, but to have everybody think like his dear friend Jerry Falwell. That may not terrify True Believers but everybody else had better put on diapers when the fundamentalist sh.. hits their pants.
What if I decided to say, “One Nation, Under the Constitution?” If I refused to say “Under God” would I be stoned to death by our American Talibanists?
This has already been suggested as a “remedy” for gays by a fundamentalist group. Some people have forgotten Church history, the burnings at stake, the torture, the garroting, the Inquisition, the Witch-Hunts. Those who forget history may be doomed to relive it, soon.
You might think it improbable that any church people would burn people at the stake for holding unpopular religious beliefs, or that they would drown or strangle people suspected of being witches, or would go on a “crusade” against any country that does not adopt the Christian Coalition version of absolute truth, or would abuse and torture anyone for their beliefs.
After all, those nice sincere religious folk who did all the burning, crusading, torturing and murdering in the past said “Oops, we’re sorry.”
What more could you possibly ask?
