Why I stopped saying America’s Pledge of Allegiance

[hrmjustin]

Brian Pellot

The American Humanist Association launched a campaign Monday encouraging people to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance until the phrase “under God” is removed from it.

“The Pledge discriminates against atheists and others who are good without a god,” AHA’s executive director Roy Spechkardt argues. But non-believers aren’t the only ones put off by the ritual.

FYI to all you uninitiated international readers, most U.S. classrooms start each day with a school-led recitation of the Pledge.

- See more at: http://brianpellot.religionnews.com/2014/09/09/atheism-pledge-allegiance-humanism-free-speech-boyhood-england/#sthash.No9jpqSL.dpuf

[hrmjustin]

1. Atheists want you to sit down for the Pledge of Allegiance

Kimberly Winston

(RNS) Sit down and shut up.

That’s the message of a campaign launched Monday (Sept. 8) by the American Humanist Association, asking Americans to refrain from standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance until Congress removes the phrase “under God.”

The 29,000-member humanist activist group, which also advocates on First Amendment issues, holds that the phrase “under God” is an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

http://www.religionnews.com/2014/09/09/atheists-want-sit-pledge-allegiance/

[procon]

2. I stopped participating in the early 60s

after I read a news story about the added religious invocation. That reference to someone else's notion divinity changed the whole purposed of an oath of inclusion and solidarity for the founding principals of country, to a trite effort at proselytizing.

[hrmjustin]

3. I understand how you feel.