A recent ongoing discussion over at Evangelical Atheist is about I AM’s wife, who is a preschool teacher and her dilemma about having to have her little students recite the pledge of allegiance every morning.

I AM writes: My wife just became a preschool teacher at a public charter school at the beginning of this school year. She was told to say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, but she believes it to be unconstitutional (duh). Rather than start a confrontation, she just excluded the Pledge from her classroom. I think she made the right decision. There’s no reason to stir things up unless pressed.

Everything was just fine until her boss came in to observe her class. During the subsequent meeting, she told my wife to start saying the Pledge. We were just discussing how she should handle this. The only thing we agree on is that the words “under god” will not pass her lips under any circumstances.

You can read the whole post and comments here: The Pledge Hits Home

This article today was very fitting to the topic we’ve been debating at I AMs website, and one that we have often discussed here. Sean would have loved this news:

Students at Calif college ban Pledge of Allegiance

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Student leaders at a California college have touched off a furor by banning the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, saying they see no reason to publicly swear loyalty to God and the U.S. government.

The move by Orange Coast College student trustees, the latest clash over patriotism and religion in American schools, has infuriated some of their classmates — prompting one young woman to loudly recite the pledge in front of the board on Wednesday night in defiance of the rule.

“America is the one thing I’m passionate about and I can’t let them take that away from me,” 18-year-old political science major Christine Zoldos told Reuters.

“The fact that they have enough power to ban one of the most valued traditions in America is just horrible,” Zoldos said, adding she would attend every board meeting to salute the flag.

The ban follows a 2002 ruling by a federal appeals court in San Francisco that said forcing school children to recite the pledge was unconstitutional because of the phrase “under God.”

“That (’under God’) part is sort of offensive to me,” student trustee Jason Ball, who proposed the ban, told Reuters. “I am an atheist and a socialist, and if you know your history, you know that ‘under God’ was inserted during the McCarthy era and was directly designed to destroy my ideology.”

Ball said the ban largely came about because the trustees didn’t want to publicly vow loyalty to the American government before their meetings. “Loyalty ought to be something the government earns through performance, not through reciting a pledge,” he said.

I noticed on Pharyngula that the now-infamous Jesus Camp also blogged about by Sean and Stardust has been shut down!

Some good snippets:

The film, showing young evangelical children steeling themselves for spiritual and political warfare, includes scenes with pastor Ted Haggard [my emphasis], the evangelical leader accused of gay sex and drug use…

The pastor, who has been accused of “brainwashing” the children, said she’s shutting down the camp for at least several years.

Woo-hoo!

Really good piece in the New York Review of Books called “A Country Ruled by Faith”. A bit long, but definitely worth the read. I attribute its length primarily to its scope, since it seems incredibly comprehensive.

In addition to the informative characterization of the line-up at the White House…

Aside from Rove and Cheney, Bush’s inner circle are all deeply religious. [Condoleezza] Rice is a minister’s daughter, chief of staff Andrew Card is a minister’s husband, Karen Hughes is a church elder, and head speechwriter Michael Gerson is a born-again evangelical, a movement insider.

…we come to understand the Five Ways of Faith in America: (1) Faith-Based Justice, (2) Faith-Based Social Services, (3) Faith-Based Science, (4) Faith-Based Health, and — my personal favorite — (5) Faith-Based War.

After he [i.e., General Boykin] led the failed “Blackhawk Down” raid on Mogadishu in 1993, he flew over the city taking photographs. When developed, the pictures showed black smears on the landscape. He showed them to his Sunday-school-teaching mother, and she asked, “Don’t you know specifically what you were up against?” Only then did he get the full supernatural meaning of the pictures. “It was a demonic presence in that city, and God revealed it to me as the enemy that I was up against in Mogadishu.” He remembered, in this light, the first feeling he had experienced in that non-Christian country: “I could feel the presence of evil…. The demonic presence is real in a place that has rejected God.” His task was not simply to defeat an enemy force, but to carry Jesus to the benighted. “It is the principalities of darkness. It is a spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against him in the name of Jesus.”

That is, my guess is that the xians are slightly more involved in my government than I’d like.

Just when you think you have heard it all, along comes something else! In all of my studies of mythology and world religions, I missed this somehow until visitor Michael came by and introduced us to Credo Mutwa and David Icke.

In the following YouTube, Icke talks about how he believes that the human race has been secretly dominated by an extraterrestrial reptilian race whose members are somehow related to the powerful elite families of the world. He mentioned that these reptiles are from a planet called “Lemuria” and that they are able to change their appearance from reptiles to humans in order to enter different dimensions.

Alllllllrightythen!

Apparently, “amazing confirmation” is claimed to have been found that a reptilian extraterrestrial race has controlled the world for thousands of years. A reptilian takeover of Planet Earth has occurred, and a shape-shifting Reptilian race (the “Chitauri” to Africans) has controlled humanity for thousands of years and how their bloodlines are in the positions of royal, political and economic power today.

I think these guys have found a way to sell books and DVDs and make themselves some buck-a-ronis!

David Icke Interviews Arizona Wilder

With it being election day, I wanted to send a friendly reminder to all of our American GifS readers to remember to vote today. There is obviously a lot of important stuff going on right now, such as an out of control war, a push towards an American theocracy, state initiatives seeking to prohibit gay marriage, congressional scandals, the chance to remove Santorum from office, and a sustained attack on our civil liberties. Today is not a day to remain silent. Get out there and be heard!!!

Some thoughts on this Tuesday’s midterm elections:

We’re atheists and most of us aren’t the sort to be joiners. Personally, I subscribe to the Groucho Marx maxim; “I wouldn’t be a member of a club that would have me for a member.” I’ve been a loner since I received my first marks for “does not play well with others” in kindergarten and, if you were to ask any of my former friends, lovers, bandmates, and family members, you’d find that the thirty or so intervening years didn’t smooth the edges much- okay, so I’ve still got most of my family members.

Just from comments and posts here, I know that most of us fall solidly on the left side of the political spectrum, but I realize that there are atheists out there who hang more rightwards. This is mostly for them.

Contrary to those ridiculous, fearmongering GOP ads, the greatest threat to our way of life here in the States is not Al Qaeda, not the crazy fucks running Iran and North Korea, not the tide of Mexican folks breaching our southern border.

The threat is to our Constitution, the very document that makes us, as a country, what we are, and it’s posed by the parasitic religious right that has assumed all but nominal control of the Republican Party.

Bush’s assault on the Constitution- via the so-called “unitary executive” notion, his Mr. Magoo leadership style in the Global War On Terror, his taunting signing statements, may look initially like merely the arrogance of the powerhungry but need I remind you that W. was appointed to his post by Gawd and that’s the ultimate source of his arrogance? Luminaries like James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and our buddy Ted Haggard have this man’s ear.

Look, I’m a lifelong liberal but, no matter how much I may disagree with them, I have a great deal of respect for political conservatives. I’m always up for a debate on the appropriate size for the federal government, the regulation- or not, of industry, or the insanity- or not, of Ayn Rand.

However, I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to say that this Republican administration, this Republican Congress, this Republican Party has totally let the Goldwater contingency down and, when you factor in the cancerous religious infestation, they simply do not deserve to remain in power- and nor can we afford for them to be.

Even when it comes to the GOP buzzwords “national security”, new leadership could hardly do worse than what we’ve got. We botched the hunt for the guy who punched us in the face on 9/11, we’ve coddled the Al Qaeda incubator/sugar daddy known as Saudi Arabia, we’ve foisted off our diplomatic responsibilities concerning Kim Jong-il on others, we’ve sacrificed almost three thousand soldiers and countless billions of dollars creating either another theocracy in the region or just your run of the mill failed state of Iraq, and while we were fixated on the flailing “Plan for a New American Century”, those pesky Taliban popped back up and resurrected that lovely, narco-tourism hotspot that is Afghanistan.

And that’s not even to mention the inept implementation of security measures here.

What it boils down to is this; no matter what you intend it to be, a vote for any Republican on Tuesday is an invitation to theocracy. As imperfect as the Democratic candidates are, every one of them is preferrable to their opponent by several orders of magnitude. Tuesday could be, should be an historic event, if for no other reason than to halt the belligerent march of the Ted Haggards of the world.

I’m Raindogzilla and I approved this message.

Nice bit from A.C. Graying at The Guardian, “Religions don’t deserve special treatment”. A tidbit or two to get you interested:

It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule. It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason… to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect. It is time to say so.

And that all goes double for here in Amerikkka. Check it out.

You can’t tell me that you didn’t think about it when you saw the picture of Ted in the post below… Your turn.