{"id":7097,"date":"2002-06-30T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-30T20:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=6"},"modified":"2002-06-30T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-30T20:26:00","slug":"on-the-pledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=7097","title":{"rendered":"On the Pledge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I hope the recent appeals court ruling banning the phrase &#8220;under god&#8221; from the Pledge of Allegiance stands.  I can&#8217;t see any logic to it <i>not<\/i> standing.  But what does it really matter?  No one <i>has<\/i> to say the Pledge of Allegiance if they don&#8217;t want to.<\/p>\n<p>As an atheist am I glad that someone with cojones has stepped up to the plate and said, &#8220;Y&#8217;know, there&#8217;s this thing we have called Church\/State separation, and we don&#8217;t want to endorse any particular religious viewpoint, and while &#8216;god&#8217; is a sort of generic deity word the vast majority of the American populace reads it in this particular fashion, and as a consequence the Pledge endorses a certain, particular view of the deity which excludes perhaps five out of a hundred Americans, and that&#8217;s not fair to them&#8221;?  Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>I wish someone in authority would say that saying &#8220;God bless America&#8221; every time someone sneezes or breaks winds isn&#8217;t a good thing, either.  Isn&#8217;t it wonderful?  The past six months I&#8217;ve felt unwelcome in my own country because I happen not to believe in god.  Having Bush II and his thugs equate atheism with barbarianism isn&#8217;t the best way to promote acceptance and understanding of the religiously-challenged like myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I hope the recent appeals court ruling banning the phrase &#8220;under god&#8221; from the Pledge of Allegiance stands. I can&#8217;t see any logic to it not standing. But what does it really matter? No one has to say the Pledge of Allegiance if they don&#8217;t want to. As an atheist am I glad that someone<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=7097\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;On the Pledge&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,119],"tags":[4104,273,4108],"class_list":["post-7097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-politics","tag-atheism","tag-george-bush","tag-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}