Motivating Atheists

This post is long - the type of post that it is easy to skip past. Yet, I think it has some useful information for those who have asked a question or two about how to actually motivate atheists and secularists.

A member of the studio audience wrote to me expressing disappointment that so few people seemed interested in the Pledge Project in specific - or motivating atheists in general. He wondered why this was the case, and what can be done to change it.

In light of this question, I want to say some things about what Desire Utilitarianism has to say about motivation in general - how to get people to act in certain ways. For example, how do you motivate people to put some serious effort into countering the anti-atheist propaganda that is written into the national motto and national pledge?

We start with the proposition that people always act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their own desires, given their beliefs.

[Note: If one is interested in a more technical description; people act in a way such that, if their beliefs were true and complete, then their action will produce a state of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of the most and strongest of their desires are true.]

So, how do you get people motivated to take on the pledge and the motto?

Answer: You make it the case that actions that take on the pledge and the motto will fulfill the most and strongest of the desires of those you are talking to - given their beliefs.

In other words, if the people you are writing to are not already acting so as to take on this task, then it is because the task does not fulfill their desires, given their beliefs. In motivating them, you must alter their beliefs, or their desires, or both, so that the task does fulfill the more and stronger of their desires, given their beliefs.

Beliefs

There is a moral issue here with respect to beliefs. This model suggests that one of the ways in which we can motivate people into choosing to act in a particular way is by lying to them. Since people act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, given their beliefs, if we get them to (falsely) believe that a particular act will fulfill their desires, we can manipulate how they choose to act. With the right lie, we can get them to act in ways that they think will fulfill their desires, but which will fulfill our desires instead.

For just this reason we have many and strong reasons to promote a love of truth and an aversion to deception. We have reason to praise those who strive to make sure that others have true beliefs, and condemn those who attempt to manipulate others through false beliefs.

I have mentioned in an earlier posts that liars are parasites. They feed off of the intentional actions of others – manipulating others into thinking that an acti will fulfill the agent's own desires when, in fact, it will thwart the agent's desires and fulfill the desires of the liar instead. We have reason to view these parasites with great condempt, and become deserving of contempt ourselves if we take this route.

So, let's add the moral constraints that we are going to be concerned with true beliefs, and we are going to respect a person's interest in actually fulfilling the most and strongest of her own desires.

With this moral restriction to provide true and complete beliefs in place, then the task of manipulating others is limited to the task of providing them with information that they are missing that is currently preventing them from fulfilling the most and strongest of their own desires. Belief-centered persuasion here focuses on, "Here are some facts that you seem not to be aware of. With these facts in place, you can see that the most and strongest of your desires can be better fulfilled by doing act A." This, then, motivates the agent to perform act A.

Much of what I have written in the Pledge Project fits into this category of motivation. I have sought to bring into the light some moral facts about 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' that have been buried behind an excess of interest in legal facts

Namely, that 'under God' in the Pledge adds atheism and other non-monotheist beliefs to the list of great evils that no patriotic American will support – the others being rebellion (indivisible), tyranny (with liberty), and injustice (with justice for all). It is my hope that readers will have an aversion to being classified with those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice, and see stronger reason to oppose 'under God' in the Pledge.

Also, I sought to point out how "In God We Trust" translates into "We Trust in God" – which means, "If you do not trust in God, then we do not think of you as one of us." This, I argue, is morally comparable to a sign that says, "If you are not hite, then we do not think of you as being one of us," since not being white is as irrelevant to matters of patriotism and moral character as not trusting in God. My hope is that people will have a sufficient aversion to this type of injustice that they would be motivated to challenge the Pledge and the Motto.

However, I could be wrong. It may be the case that opposing the Pledge and the Motto fulfills (or prevents the thwarting) of the agent's most and strongest desires. To the degree that this is the case, the person seeking to motivate others has to look towards another set of motivations.

Reward and Punishment

The next option in motivating people is to create a situation where the actions one wants them to perform will fulfill their desires. That is, to use threats and rewards in order to create a state where, "If you perform these actions that I want you to perform, you will be rewarded - that is to say, I will see to the fulfillment of other desires of yours. If you do not perform these actions, then you will be punished. That is, I will see to the thwarting of certain desires of yours."

Of course, it takes a fair amount of power to do this. In the United States today, it is those who advocate in favor of the Pledge and the Motto who have this type of power. We have seen it at work in a number of cases regarding the Pledge over at "Atheist Ethicist Journal" - people who have been subject to threats in order to get them to support or endorse the Pledge in some way.

This actually presents us ith a Catch-22. The reason that atheists do not have power, is because they are not organized. This lack of organization is caused, in part, by a lack of motivation to challenge the Pledge and the Motto. Increasing motivation will increase power, yet, to some extent, increased power is required to increase motivation.

Altering Malleable Desires

Setting this problem aside for a moment, the next option for motivation is to alter the desires that agents have. If people act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, if we can change their desires so that they have a strong aversion to any state that includes 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the motto, then they will be motivated to realize a state in which these do not exist.

Unfortunately, we have a situation where those who favor 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' have a virtual monopoly on the power to manipulate the desires of others – particularly young children. They have used this power to promote a desire to protect 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' – and to promote an aversion to any who would object to these practices. They use this power in particular on young children, where the aversions can be set deep and affect an individual long into adulthood.

We manipulate malleable desires through praise and condemnation. Those desires that we praise (particularly in children) tend to become stronger. Those desires that we condemn (particularly in children) tend to become weaker.

One of those hidden and unappreciated facts about the Pledge and the Motto is that they are instances of praise and condemnation. 'Under God' in the Pledge is a statement of praise for those who would support 'one nation under God' – just as it aims to praise those who would support union, and support liberty and justice for all.

"In God We Trust" is also a statement of praise for those who trust in God – claiming that such people deserve the honor of being included in the group known as "we"; while those who do not trust in God do not deserve membership.

When these emotional manipulators are applied to very young children, they created deep-seated desires and aversions. In this case, one of the aversions that it creates is an aversion to challenging 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' in the motto.

So, when I (and others) suggest that people challenge things like the Pledge and the Motto, we discover that such an act does not fulfill the desires of very many people. People, trained since early childhood to resist challenges to these practices, look on the instructions with a feeling of uneasiness – even dread. Following the suggestion thwarts basic desires planted in them at a very young age, and people will tend to avoid actions that go against their deepest aversions.

Theocratic Use of Three Tools of Motivation

In this, I want to point out how well the theocratic supporters of the current Pledge and Motto have used these three tools of motivation. They have manipulated beliefs so that people believe that support for the Pledge and the Motto fulfills desires that those agents already have. They have branded these acts of discrimination as acts of prejudice, and constantly assert that they show respect for all people who have fought for our rights.

They have power and they are willing to use it to make sure that others act so as to promote this Pledge and Motto. Let a politician dare to challenge the Pledge and Motto, and they summon their friends and neighbors to make sure that the perpetrator knows, "You will either support us on this, or you will suffer the political consequences."

Finally, they mold the desires – particularly of young children – by exposing them constantly to the idea that support for 'one nation under God' is praiseworthy, while failure to support 'one nation under God' is the same as insulting America and insulting all of those who have fought for our freedom. They expose children – and Americans in general – as much as possible to the praise of knowing that those who trust in God qualify as being one of 'us', and that those who do not trust in God are not to be counted as one of us.

Empowerment

Other groups that have faced discrimination have faced the same problem. Universally, it is recognized that one of the primary tasks in motivating people is to tackle these unproductive aversions that the culture has planted in people. Other groups recognize this problem as the problem of empowerment.

Gay-pride parades are not useful so much because of the effect that they have on others. They are useful for the effect that they have on those who march in the parade. This is an act of empowerment – a way of asserting oneself and overcoming the sense of shame and guilt that one has learned to associate with being gay at a very young age.

The women's rights movement instituted a ritual where women would burn their bras. What did this accomplish? What it accomplished was that it was an act of empowerment – a way of burning the psychological baggage that has been associated with a culture that has branded them as inferior and fit only to obey the rule of men.

Two rituals of empowerment have emerged in the atheist community to date. One of them was the Blasphemy Challenge. To make a video in which one denies the existence of God, and to post it on the internet, is an act of empowerment – just what is needed to throw off the yoke of aversions planted in us since childhood.

Another ritual of empowerment is Dawkins' Out Campaign. This campaign has promoted as a political act – an act grounded on the principle, "If they knew us, then they would not hate us." I have objected to this claim. History provides us with too many examples of groups easily identified yet still easily discriminated against.

However, if we take the same campaign and put it in a different context – if it were branded as an empowerment campaign, then it has merit. On this perspective, wearing the scarlet A is not a way of changing the world. It is a way of changing oneself. It is a way of taking power back from those who have claimed unjust power for themselves.

An act of empowerment is not a magic pill that instantly erases the effects of emotional manipulation through years of exposure to the Pledge and Motto as a child. It is, instead, a step. It weakens the effects of those practices, hopefully making it a little easier to perform another act of empowerment, which weakens those learned reactions even more.

Derived Lessons

Since they have effectively used these tools that secularists have ignored, we have the effect of living in a society where more people are motivated to defend these practices than to remove them.

How do we change this?

(1) Remove the Pledge (when it contains the words 'under God') and the Motto from as many places as possible – particularly from places where young children are involved. Recognize that these practices aim to manipulate the emotions (desires) of young children by praising support for 'one nation under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

(2) Engage in and promote acts of empowerment. So something to take back power from those who have been using these tools to take power for themselves for 50+ years. Wear an atheist t-shirt, attend an atheist gathering, attend a civic event just so that you can sit through the Pledge of Allegiance in full view of everybody, or just 'come out' to somebody you have not come out to before. These are all acts of empowerment. These are all acts that say, "This is my life and I am claiming it for myself. You do not have control over me any longer."

Of course, acts of empowerment are infectious. When a child sees somebody standing up to the Pledge and the Motto, the child is much less likely to see that these practices are unquestioned. She is much more likely to ask questions. "Is it the case that the Pledge unfairly brands atheists as un-American by putting them in the same category as those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice.

But it has to start somewhere.

The Pledge Project: The Philosopher's God

I had some false assumptions on when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will be releasing its opinion on "under God" and "In God We Trust." However, I do not want the Pledge Project to fade away into darkness. For the reasons I stated earlier, I think that failure to take a vocal stand on these issues is a mistake. These practices do psychological harm by generating an 'out-group' psychology among atheists that make them (us) passive and obedient, willing to silently concede power to the dominant and aggressive ‘in group’.

Remember, you can keep up on news relevant to the Pledge Project at The Atheist Ethicist Journal.

When I listened to the oral arguments presented to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals they included an argument that the word “God” referred to what the speaker called “the philosopher’s God”. This is supposed to be some generic, vague, idea of a God that all people, even atheists (assumedly) can believe in. It means, at least according to this speaker, “a moral code that is external to the speaker.”

Of course I believe in an external code that is external to the speaker. Desire utilitarianism finds morality in the tendency that malleable desires have to fulfill or thwart other desires (thus giving us reason to promote or to inhibit them respectively). Those relationships are substantially independent of the speaker – since the speaker has only a small subset of the desires that exist.

However, I have never in my life heard this referred to using the term “God.”

As a writer, one fact that I know about writing is that its purpose is to communicate. In order to communicate, I choose my words so that they generate certain ideas in the listener. What a word or phrase means is whatever idea a person can reasonably predict will spring in the mind of the listener or reader when confronting that term in that context.

Whenever a writer uses a term outside of its normal meaning, he or she owes it to the listener or reader to make it clear that this is an unusual definition of the word. For example, the term 'argument' in logic means ‘two or more propositions where one proposition (called ‘the conclusion’) is said to follow from the other proposition(s) (called ‘the premises’).

If I were to then write that my neighbors had an argument last night, readers would instantly know that I am not talking about the 'philosopher's argument'. What I mean by the term 'argument' is what virtually any native speaker would take me to mean by the term 'argument' in that context. They will take me as meaning that my neighbors had a disagreement that resulted in some emotional language being exchanged between them – perhaps some shouting, but some expression of strong emotion in any sense.

If I meant to say that they had two or more propositions where one was said to follow from the others, I had better include some hint in my writing or speaking to indicate that this was the meaning that I had in mind. Otherwise, the native English speaker will be perfectly within his rights to assume that I meant the "shouting match" definition of 'argument' instead.

Ask any native speaker what the word 'God' means in the Pledge of Allegiance. They will tell you that it means the God of the Judeo-Christian religion, or something similar. They will deny that it means the "God" of the Muslim religion – that God is known by a different name, 'Allah'. Among competent English speakers, 'God' means Judeo-Christian god, 'Allah' means Muslim god, other gods are identified by some sort of qualifier (e.g., ancient Greek god, Egyptian god).

If we are speaking in a way that sets the context for our speech – that is to say, if we are speaking about ancient Greek culture or about religious practices in Iran – then we may drop the qualifier and use the term ‘God’. People know from the context which God the term refers to. This is true in the same way that I can tell my wife that my keys are on ‘the table’ and she knows which table I am talking about.

None of this changes the fact that the term 'God' outside of that context or in a different context has a different meaning – and that the God of the Pledge of Allegiance is the Judeo-Christian God.

Nobody . . . nobody, except, somebody who wants to pull the wool over the eyes of an Appeals court judge or a few gullible readers . . . uses the term 'God' in a sense that means 'external morality'. This simply is not a recognized use of the term.

Claiming that this is the meaning of the term is such an absurd proposition that we are within bounds in many cases to call it a lie. It’s the type of fabrication a person invents when he knows he has been caught doing something wrong but needs to come up with something – anything - to try to deflect blame (or to create a diversion from the real issue).

We can see the magnitude of the lie in the fact that the Pledge is taught to young children. Certainly we do not expect young children to be thinking of 'the philosopher's God' when they are told that there are four great evils that all loyal Americans oppose; one of them being 'a nation not under God'.

They think of the God of their Sunday school class, the God of Jewish or Christian scripture. This is exactly the God that those who put 'under God' in the Pledge wanted children to be thinking about. They certainly made no attempt to try to clarify the situation. They clearly did not express any worries that, "Somebody might misunderstand our statement and think we are talking about the Christian God when we are not – so we had better append some sort of explanation to the law."

Sometimes the person being lied to will accept the lie because it is convenient to do so. You catch your best friend in a lie about where she was at last night. She comes up with some phony excuse as to how she could have been at the movie theater with Brad. You do not believe her but, to avoid a fight, you accept the lie without question and move on.

There are a lot of people who are so intent on keeping 'under God' in the Pledge that they are willing to embrace anything that might give the act a sense of legitimacy. There are even many judges who fall into this category – who are inclined by their prejudices to accept any argument the defense might put to paper no matter how absurd, and to accept their argument in his decision. If any judge were to accept the ‘philosopher’s God’ argument, we can bet that this is what is going on.

It is the same thing as when judges turned a blind eye to the inequalities of 'separate but equal' when they valued segregation.

I would say that, if you encounter somebody in a discussion forum or a debate who tries to pull the 'philosopher's God' defense, that it would be acceptable to simply call him a liar. "You're saying that when people hear the term 'God' in the Pledge, the thought that pops into their head is not the Judeo-Christian God, but the Philosopher’s God? You, sir, know that to be false. This makes you a liar. I bet you can find only the smallest subset of the population of native English speakers – those that you haven't coached into repeating your lie – who will report thinking of this so-called 'philosopher's God' when he hears the Pledge of Allegiance."

Giles Frasier on Morality and Non-Belief

Giles Frasier wrote an article in Ekklesia on Moral practice and non-belief. In it, Fraier says that atheists can be moral, but adds:

My worry about the way many atheists describe the process of moral decision-making is that it seems to boil down to a sense of moral instinct, informed by a few formulas of general benevolence: i.e. do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Often, there is much talk about being a “good person”.

He objects that:

This seems so naïve, underestimating the extent to which human beings are able to deceive themselves into believing they are doing the right thing, when they are simply doing what they want or what makes them happy.

He compares this to Christian moral decision-making, which he describes as follows:

Christian moral decision-making begins with a strong sense that we often try to fool ourselves, and thus we need some external check. Going to church, regular prayer, reading from scripture, specific times to meet and challenge each other’s moral instincts: all these are forms of external practice which offer checks against the dominance of my own internal moral intuitions.

Except the Bible itself was written by people who were using the same moral system that Frasier complains about when talking about atheists. They did not get their morality from God. They got their morality by appealing to their own moral intuitions and desires – fully under the influence of their human capacity to deceive themselves into thinking they were doing the right thing, when they were simply doing what they wanted or what made them happy.

We can see evidence of the fact that the Bible was written by humans assigning their own beliefs and prejudices to God by the moral code that was written in the Bible. Naturally, church leaders would want everybody to owe them allegiance and to give allegiance to no other religion, so they began with, "Thou shalt have no other God before me." They approved of slavery, as long as they were not the ones being enslaved, so they approved a Bible that allowed the enslavement of people from other countries, but not the enslavement of their own people.

They naturally thought that rape was not a problem since nothing in the Bible explicitly condemns rape as a crime. In fact, the punishment handed out for rape in the Bible was that the rapist had to marry the victim. Certainly, this was useful for a father who had daughters that he needed to marry off – for whom a raped daughter was ‘damaged goods’.

They had a natural aversion to murder and theft so they had good reason to write in prohibitions on murder and theft. Since they wanted their wives and children to obey them unquestionably they wrote commandments and prohibitions into scripture that sais that the husband was the head of the household with a right to rule while others had a duty to obey.

The eating of shellfish is an abomination because – well, have you ever looked at a shellfish? They’re disgusting. My wife has a hard time with peel-and-eat shrimp. So, of course, eating those things must be considered an abomination.

Some of these prohibitions are likely grounded on pure superstition and prejudice. Perhaps past generations thought that planting two different types of crops next to each other meant bad luck. In a religious context, "bad luck" is easily translated into "God's disapproval." If written in modern times, a Bible might well have prohibitions on hotels having a 13th floor or special commandments against walking underneath a ladder.

Of course, once the Bible was written (by people appealing to their own prejudices), it became a standard that future generations can appeal to that is outside of their own prejudice. Yet, we clearly see that the Bible is not used this way.

People pick and choose which parts of the Bible they are going to obey and which they are going to ignore. How do people decide which parts of the Bible represent actual moral requirements and prohibitions, and which can be ignored? We can easily say of those who think that the Bible actually serves as an external moral standard that:

This seems so naïve, underestimating the extent to which human beings are able to deceive themselves into believing they are doing the right thing [when deciding how to interpret biblical text or choosing which text to obey or ignore], when they are simply doing what they want or what makes them happy.

Current bigotry against homosexuals is not something that people get out of the Bible – something that people disapprove of because the Bible calls it an abomination. If people got their morality out of the Bible then they would be just as intent on protesting the eating of shrimp as they would homosexual sex. Instead, anti-homosexual bigotry is a cultural prejudice that gets read into scripture. It is one of the prejudices that people appeal to in deciding which parts of the Bible they want to pretend to be the word of God, and which part they want to ignore.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I do believe in an ‘external moral standard’ in a sense. Morality has to do with which malleable desires people generally have reason to promote or to inhibit. The vast majority of the ‘people generally’ are external. So, determining facts about how certain desires will tend to fulfill or thwart other desires is generally an examination of facts outside of the agent – of external facts, and not something that can be answered by appeal to personal feelings.

I do not deny the power of self-deception or even blatant disregard for moral facts. These things clearly exist, and these are things that we need to combat. Desire utilitarianism, handles these problems to an extent because it is concerned with the manipulation of malleable desires. A person with good desires has nothing to deceive himself about. He gets to do what he likes and at the same time does what he should because moral institutions have brought the two into harmony.

Fraser makes another point about atheism and morality that is true, but he falsely thinks that it is a problem.

Of course, atheists are often part of other traditions — political ones, for instance — that can generate public checks against self-deception. But, simply as atheists, they have little to perform this task.

It is true that atheism itself does not provide any moral checks on behavior. This is also true of heliocentrism (the view that the sun is at the center of the solar system), Einstein's theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, atomic theory, and evolution. None of these provide the person who believes them with moral guidance – because none of these are moral theories. They are purely descriptive theories about how the universe is (or isn't, as the case may be). None of these are theories about how the world should be.

The fact that plate tectonic theory does not provide us with moral guidance is hardly a problem with plate tectonic theory. It is not a reason to reject the theory and provide it with one that does provide moral guidance. Similarly, the fact that atheism is not a moral theory is not a reason to reject it in favor of some type of religious theory where morality comes from God. It is a theory that says that if we are going to find morality, we must look for it someplace other than in a God that does not exist. We need to find morality in something that does exist

Desires exist. Desires are reasons for action – so they lend themselves quite naturally to claims about what a person has reasons-for-action to do or to refrain from doing. That which fulfills desires are good, and that which thwarts desires are bad. Yet, on this model, desires themselves can also be good or bad. Desires that tend to fulfill other desires are good, and desires that tend to thwart other desires are bad. Furthermore, we can act so as to promote or inhibit certain malleable desires. So, we have reasons-for-action to promote malleable desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibit malleable desires that tend to thwart other desires.

People are mistaken when they try to find morality in God. What they are finding is not an external morality, but a set of prejudices and superstitions that primitive human beings (self-deceived and substantially ignorant of the world around them) made up in their own mind and assigned to God. Naturally, they assigned to God the moral values they liked, or that benefited them in some way.

In order to find morality we have to look for reasons for action that actually do exist – not those that primitive and superstitious people made up. Desires are reasons for action that exist. We find value in relationships between states of affairs and desires. And, finally, we find moral value in good and bad desires – in promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and inhibiting desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Standards for Determining Who Should Be Killed

Note: I am continuing the Pledge Project at Atheist Ethicist Journal. There, I am tracking political events relevant to 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' across the country. If you want to help do some preliminary work on the Pledge Project, waiting for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to give out their decision, please visit there.

Obama has come out against the Supreme Court's decision that the execution of somebody who rapes a child is cruel and unusual punishment (in violation of the 8th Amendment of the Constitution).

MSNBC reports in McCain, Obama disagree with child rape ruling:

"I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes," Obama said at a news conference. "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution."

For my part, I think that the best position to adopt is to be in opposition to all capital punishment. I am not firmly committed to this position. It is grounded on evidence that seems to suggest that a country that raises its children with a greater aversion to killing - an aversion strong enough that they disapprove of capital punishment - also raises fewer murderers. The hypothesis here is that the celebration of certain killings that we find in a society with capital punishment teaches at least some children the joy of killing, making it psychologically easier for them to commit murder.

My commitment to this position will depend on the degree to which empirical research confirms or falsifies this hypothesis.

However, my objection to Obama's position is not so much with his conclusion, but with the standards that he has used to reach this conclusion. He believes that the death penalty should be applied to “the most egregious of crimes”.

How do we determine what counts as "the most egregious of crimes"?

There are people who think that blasphemy is the most egregious of crime. Nothing that you can do to another human being is nearly as bad as insulting or denying God – the divine creator.

Some societies hold that apostasy (converting from one’s religion) is the most egregious of crime.

Some people think that teaching heathen beliefs to children, putting their immortal soul in danger, is the most egregious of crime.

If somebody goes to scripture to discover what the most egregious of crimes are – crimes that deserve the death penalty – then working on the Sabbath and eating shellfish are on the list of most egregious of crimes.

I think that we can safely assume that Obama does not share these standards. But, what standard does he apply?

"While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment," he wrote in his book "The Audacity of Hope."

So, it seems that Obama's standard for determining who should live or die is whether one can muster enough outrage to want somebody killed. If somebody is sufficiently outraged by the sight of somebody else sitting through the Pledge of Allegiance, then the death penalty for sitting through the Pledge of Allegiance becomes justified. The very desire to want somebody killed is justification for killing him.

This is the type of standard that I worry about with respect to the relationship between capital punishment and murder. A society that teaches its children that the desire to want somebody killed justifies killing him is a society that will raise more murderers than one that teaches children that, no matter how great your outrage, you should not kill.

Anyway, perhaps Obama is not advocating that we measure the justification for killing people by our own desire to see them killed. Perhaps Obama is offering, instead, the Obama outrage test. "In order to determine if you are justified in killing somebody you should not look at whether you want that person killed. You should look at whether I want that person killed." The Obama-outrage standard would have the advantage of giving one standard to everybody. It has the disadvantage of having absolutely no reason or justification to back it up.

Yet, maybe the Obama standard is not as personal as we might believe at first. Perhaps rather than the Obama-Outrage Test, what Obama is really using is the Obama-Chance-Of-Getting-Elected Test. This test differs from the Obama Outrage test in that Obama does not look at his own sense of outrage to determine whether a particular policy is right or wrong. Instead, what he looks at are poll results and other pieces of data that suggest what impact his stated position on an issue will have on his campaign.

He is merely pretending to use some other standard – and is struggling to identify a standard he can pretend to have, a standard other than the Obama's-Chance-Of-Getting-Elected Test – that would yield the same results. Those standards are unreasonable, but it is not impossible for a fake but unreasonable standard to pass the Obama's-Chance-Of-Getting-Elected Test.

I am a realist about this last proposed standard. It follows as a matter of logic that elected offices will be filled by those who hold this standard more than any other. The candidate that allow public opinion to determine his position has a significant advantage over the candidate that bases his position on principle. So, we have no choice but to elect a candidate whose standard for morality is, "That which gets me elected is good; that which thwarts my election is bad."

Yet, I would love to hear a candidate declare what I would declare in this type of circumstance. "I believe that capital punishment is a mistake. I believe that it gets innocent people killed, and we can save innocent lives by raising our children to think that all killing is wrong. However, in running for public office, I am not running so that I can represent only myself. I represent you. Too many politicians run for office expecting that, after being elected, they have a constiuentcy of on - themself. Poll tell me that you support execution in this case. As your representative, I will carry out your wishes. Though, in this case, I think you are making a mistake, and innocent people will suffer as a result."

The MSNBC Article also mentions briefly how Michael Dukakis was defeated in part because of his stand on capital punishment. Dukakis was against capital punishment.

Dukakis was asked during a nationally televised debate with Republican George H. W. Bush whether he'd still oppose the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. His unemotional, dispassionate answer was ridiculed, and gave Republicans more material to paint him as an emotionless liberal.

With the advantage of hind sight, I could suggest a better answer to this question.

"If the institution and culture that are required to execute my wife's killer was one in which your wife would more likely to be killed as well, then I would forego the execution of my wife's killer for your wife’s sake. And for yours."

Pandering on Energy

Reminder: You can continue to find Pledge Project updates at my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal

In other news, both Presidential candidates have decided to pander to an ignorant public on matters of energy policy, rather than educate the public on the real problem or to propose real solutions.

Both candidates are telling the American people that the problem, when it comes to energy, is the price of gasoline, and both candidates are offering proposals that have the explicit goal of lowering the price of gasoline. They then criticize each other’s proposal by pointing out how ineffective their opponents’ projects will be on effecting the price of gasoline.

The real problem is not the price of gasoline. The real problem is the cost of energy.

The difference between price and cost is determined by who pays the bill. If I go over to your place and buy a car from you for $1000, then the price of the car is $1000. The cost of the car includes the time and expense of getting to you. It also includes whatever I have to give up in order to spend the time and money getting the car. If, for example, I spend a weekend getting to you so that I can buy your car, and I could have spent that weekend hiking in the mountains, then a part of the cost of buying the car from you is the value of a trip hiking in the mountains.

My costs are not the only costs involved when we look at the transaction. The cost of my buying the car includes the costs inflected on others by my actions. If I fly to where you live to pick up the car, and I bump somebody else off of the flight, then his lost opportunity to take that flight is a part of the cost of my buying the car. If my getting the car from you mean that somebody else, who only has $900, loses the opportunity to buy the car. That is also a part of the overall social cost.

(Note that value of $900 in the hands of somebody who only has $1000 is a lot greater than the value o $1000 in the hands of somebody who has, let us say, $1 billion. The first person, in paying $900 for the car, has to give up a lot more than the second person in paying $1000. The ‘cost’ in this case cannot be measured in terms of dollars because the same dollar has different values for different people.)

The cost of burning a gallon of gasoline – which is what any moral person would be focused on rather than price - includes the contribution that burning gasoline makes to global warming and the costs that future generations will have to bear as a result. This could well include the widespread destruction of a great deal of coastal property through sea-level rise. I’m not just talking about the destruction of what was built on the property, but the loss of the property itself as what is now dry land becomes ocean floor.

Another cost of having America consume the oil that it has available domestically is that it has less of a reserve to draw upon in the case of an emergency. I know that this is a wild science-fiction like example that has absolutely no chance of happening in the real world, but assume that there is a significant outbreak of violence in the Middle East involving Saudi Arabia and Iran that disrupts oil supplies.

If that happens, we will be in much better shape if we have resources off shore and in Alaska that we have not touched than we would be if we used these resources up. They are like a saving’s account that protect a worker from the possibility of getting fired. We have the Strategic Oil Reserve for these types of emergencies, but the Strategic Oil Reserve is meant to protect us from a short-term disruption. The larger and longer the disruption we are worried about, the more reserve we need to protect ourselves from it.

In other words, another part of the cost of opening up offshore drilling or ANWR is the cost of lower national security – the cost of having nothing to fall back on if events elsewhere block our access to foreign oil, if we have used up all of our domestic oil.

I want to note that, in speaking about what a moral person would be concerned with, one might think that politicians are excluded from this list. However, the politicians, in taking the stands they do are pandering to the public. If the public itself was made up of moral people – if the voters were concerned about the cost of gasoline rather than the price of gasoline, then politicians will only be able to pander to the public by doing the right thing. Politicians get to take the immoral option of speaking only about the price of gasoline because the voters are not living up to their moral obligation to be concerned with cost, rather than price.

There are two tremendous side effects of a high price of fossil fuels. One is that it provides an incentive to conserve. As people find way to consume fewer fossil fuels, they inflict less costs on future generations.

The other, more significant effect is that if the price of oil is high, and it stays high, it provides an economic incentive to invest in option that do not have the same costs. It provides an incentive for research in nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, biomass, and other forms of energy. Research in those fields of energy could very well lead to discoveries that will lower the overall cost of energy.

The factors that investors are going to use to determine if investment in an area of production is worthwhile includes more than the current price of competitive options. It considers the future price of competitive options. Even the threat that the government is going to play with the price of oil – that the government is going to push oil prices lower through artificial means – is enough to frighten investors away from options that will not be competitive at the lower price of oil.

I am talking here about artificially lower prices of oil – prices manipulated downwards by having the government force excessive production (generating a false economic sense of surplus).

Another cost of these policies is that, while the government is keeping the price of oil artificially low by forcing oil into the market (regardless of costs), it is encouraging people to use up the oil we have left that much more quickly while discouraging people from investing in substitutes (because they cannot compete against the artificially low price).

The combined result of these two effects is that future generations will more quickly come to an age in which there simply is not enough oil for them to use – where governments cannot force more into production because it does not exist. At the same time, they will discover that they have not been building up alternatives. They will find themselves facing an economic catastrophe at the same time that they find themselves confronting a global climate catastrophe.

For a person with good desires – desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others – this is definitely something to be avoided.

The Immorality of Homosexual Marriage

I have moved discussion of the Pledge Project to my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal. That blog continues to track cases where the Pledge is used as a gate to keep atheists (or any who do not say the Pledge for any reason) out of public office and other moral offense. Atheist Ethicist Journal will continue to cover things that you can do to promote the moral case against 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

However, Sporkyy at Unscrewing the Inscrutable posted an endorsement of the E Pluribus Unim petition . The posting, 'Under God'/'In God We Trust' petition also contains a poster that demonstrates one of the moral problems with "In God We Trust" as the national motto. I would not mind seeing the poster in a few civic buildings and schoolhouse walls myself.

On to business as usual:

Since the California Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional to prohibit marriage among people of the same sex, I have noticed an important problem in the way people have talked about this issue.

The word 'morality' has been used almost exclusively by those who are opposed to the decision. They are writing that the Supreme Court decision is a defeat for morality, In some cases, they have argued that the Court is threatening to eliminate all moral constraints. If all things are now permissible, then murder, rape, and theft also become permissible.

Let's put the facts on the table. The California Supreme Court decision is a victory for morality because it protects the interests of innocent people from those who would harm those interests without justification. The Supreme Court's decision that permits homosexual marriage was no more of a defeat for morality than the 1st Amendment rights to freedom of the press and freedom of religion. These freedoms, too, were once branded as enemies of morality since people who were allowed to practice a different faith and not instructed in the One True Religion were at risk of adopting immoral practices.

This does not say that the Court's decision was an accurate interpretation of the law. There are unjust and immoral laws – such as laws that allow a person to marry somebody of a different gender while prohibiting marriage to somebody of the same gender. The Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s, Jim Crow law, segregation, the Japanese Internment, and the like represent other immoral laws. There are a slew of questions to be asked whenever any court is asked to enforce injustice and immorality.

Yet, none of that is relevant to the point of this essay – that a society that permits homosexual marriage is more moral than a society that does not.\

It is a mistake not to put it in these terms, and to allow those who like morality to religion or to scripture to make their assertions unchallenged. In this sense, silence implies consent. In this case, refusing to challenge claims that link morality to scripture means that most people only hear that they are linked. If that is all they hear, then that is what they will believe, which will perpetuate the myth, much to our disadvantage.

As a matter of fact, the 'morality' that we find in scripture is a morality that was invented by man, and then assigned to God. It is a theory that is filled with error – just as ancient theories of astronomy, physics, and economics were filled with error. This is not to say that everything found in scripture is mistaken. Ancient peoples were able to get some of the more obvious moral facts right, just as they were able to get some of the more obvious scientific facts right. But this does not change the fact that there are whole areas filled with error.

Then, these man-made moral errors get assigned to God, creating a situation where injustices get carried far into the future – thousands of years into the future – where injustices thought moral by primitive man are still being inflicted on innocent people today.

One of those ancient moral superstitions – the moral equivalent of the scientific superstition that the Earth is the center of the universe – is the claim that there is something morally objectionable with homosexual relationships. This is an ancient prejudice – like the permissibility of enslaving those who are from another country – invented by man and assigned to God.

Those who are familiar with this story know that there is a measure on the California ballot that will amend the Constitution to bar homosexual marriage. In that fight, I once again see that those who support the amendment are allowed to have a near monopoly on the use of the term 'morality'. In that fight, I once again see a people willing to give consent (through their silence) to the idea that whatever violates scripture is immoral, and whatever is immoral should not be permitted.

I would like to start to read those who are opposed to this Amendment that the Amendment itself is a threat to morality. It is a threat to the moral principle that the state should protect the interests of its peaceful citizens, and that one of the key moral principles that hold any moral society together is equal respect for those who do no harm.

I would like to hear the fact that reported that those who wish to prohibit homosexual marriage and who defend it through scripture are no different in principle than those who wrote into the U.S. Constitution that black slavery was permissible and defended it with references to scripture.

I would like to hear some people use this opportunity to point out that while some things found in scripture correspond to morality, that others do not, and that we can create a more moral society by ignoring certain biblical prescriptions (as with slavery) than we can by obeying them.

Considering False Beliefs

I am still acutely embarrassed over my mistake regarding the expected release of the Pledge rulings. As a result of that mistake, my thoughts today are firmly fixated on considerations on the ethics of belief.

Note: Even though I got the timing wrong, I am still going to be using the Atheist Ethicist Journal to drum up as much support for the Pledge Project as I can before the decisions actually do come out.

It is a part of our human makeup that if, at some time, we go through a set of reasoning to determine the truth of a given conclusion, we will remember the conclusion, but not the reasons we had for believing it.

If it turns out that one of those premises happens to be false, we can then change our mind about the premise, and yet not change our mind about the conclusion that came from the original false beliefs.

If you think about it, a huge stock of your beliefs fit this description. One of my beliefs is that the Martian day is almost the same as the Earth day. I cannot tell you where I learned this. I certainly did not measure the length of the day on Mars myself - I trusted that others were right when they told me this. Yet, I am certain that it is true. Even though I might be mistaken.

I do not remember how I came to believe that the Courts of Appeals worked on the same calendar as the Supreme Court. Yet, I did reach that conclusion somehow, and I fastened a flag on it that gave it the status of near certainty. It had a certainty value around 9.8 on a scale from 1 to 10.

Rationalists never assign anything a certainty value of 10. Even a simple proposition like “parallel lines never meet” can be called into question by a different way of looking at the universe. Even the proposition that nothing should be assigned a certainty of 10 is not given a certainty of 10. It always waits around looking for the possible case in which it is false.

This is one difference between rationalist ways of thinking and some faith-based alternatives. Faith-based alternatives assign to some propositions a certainty of 10. There is no possibility that these propositions are false. If evidence appears to suggest that they are false, then this proves (to those who have faith in certain conclusion) that they do not understand the evidence. A proper understanding of the evidence can never contradict a belief with a certainty of 10.

Budget constraints (in terms of time and energy) do not allow us the opportunity to hold every belief up to the light of reason. We form some beliefs sloppily. We must. Can you imagine a young child of 3 years of age holding all of his beliefs up to the light of reason? And, when that child of 3 becomes a child of 13 and he holds his beliefs up to the light of reason, much of that reason will have to do with consistency with belies that he acquired at the age of 3. He will not remember how he formed those beliefs. He will simply know that he has them and they have a certain certainty value. He has no capacity to review every belief he has ever acquired.

So, we must pick and choose which beliefs we should actually take the time to examine more closely. One of the standards which we should use in evaluating whether to re-evaluate a belief is the cost of being wrong. Another criterion, strangely enough, is the certainty flag. Once a belief has been flagged as near certain, this tells the brain that there is little to be gained by re-examining that belief. Instead, one should focus one’s efforts on some other belief.

I was so certain of the belief that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ended its term on June 30th that I accepted very high costs without re-examining that belief. The certainty flag suggested that re-examining it would be a waste of time.

Yet, once other people became involved, those priorities changed. My certainty flag gives me reason not to re-evaluate a belief, where I alone suffer the consequences of error. However, a morally responsible person does not inflict costs on others based on his or her certainty flag. Obligations to others require extra diligence.

So it was the case that when others started to ask me how I could be so certain that the Court will release its opinion by June 30 that I went to the effort to actually find out the facts of the matter.

I knew what I would find. When I started the search, it was simply a matter of looking for an official statement that says that the Court term end s on June 30th. The search was not grounded on any doubt about the fact of the matter. It was grounded on the fact that I wanted to provide others with the same certainty that I had – and they could not have the same level of certainty unless their beliefs were grounded on something more solid than my certainty.

Of course, what I discovered is that my own belief was not true. My belief went from high certainty to a moderate certainty that the original belief was false over the course of a few agonizing hours.

This policy of re-examining one’s beliefs, even beliefs that a person holds to be certain, when one discovers its effects on others, is a moral obligation that many religious traditions deny. We hear it said that religion is the great foundation for all morality. Yet, here is a component of morality that most of those same religions not only ignore, but counsel against.

These are the simple moral lessons. In this context, these points seem clear and obvious. Yet, there is one clear and obvious case where these moral principles are ignored.

There are people who advocate that an individual can have a belief, can use that belief to ground behavior harmful to others, and yet have absolutely no moral obligation to check those beliefs to make sure that they are well grounded. The claim is that these beliefs may be held on faith and faith alone. The fact that the faith grounds behavior harmful to others gives the agent absolutely no obligation to go back and review the belief to make sure that it is justified.

The case is actually worse than saying that there is no obligation to review the harmful beliefs. The claim is actually made that morality obligates the agent to refrain from questioning those beliefs. It is not even permissible to reconsider such beliefs.

Many people argue that there is some strong and necessary link between morality and religion. In this one case, religion teaches immorality. When religion tells a person that they may engage in behavior harmful to others and yet are obligated to refrain from examining the beliefs that underlie that behavior to determine if it is justified, in this case religion is teaching people to behave immorally.

I must point out that this is not a criticism of all religion. There are religions that teach that we must examine our beliefs, yet hold that the belief that a God exists and places certain demands on us is justified. These religions do not suffer from the fault that I have identified above.

It is also the case that a person does not have to be religious to hold an unjustified belief that leads to behavior harmful to others. People can hold these types of beliefs about any number of subjects, and still, at the same time, believe that it is (almost) certainly the case that no God exists.

This is not a criticism that says that atheists are inherently better than theists. Instead, this is a criticism that is meant to focus on the wrong of not examining one’s beliefs when an error in beliefs might lead to conclusions that are harmful to others. This happens to be a belief that is very common among a number of religions. Where it happens in any religion (or outside of religion) – wherever a priest counsels individuals to refrain from examining beliefs that serve as a foundation for behavior harmful to others – that religion and that priest promote immorality. They are advising their followers to refrain from doing something that all moral people have an obligation to do.

The fact that there are religions who commit wrongs on a much greater magnitude then the mistake that I made with respect to the timing of the 9th Circuit Court opinion does not change the fact that I should have been more careful.

Error

I must confess to an error.

I was absolutely certain that the Courts of Appeals had to release decisions before their term ended on June 30. I was so certain that I planned my time off around this fact. I cannot tell you how certain I was that this was true.

However, when others started asking me how I knew and started making plans based on my response, I had a moral obligation to verify (or falsify) what I knew.

This is one of the principles of the ethics of belief. We cannot always hold all of our beliefs up to the light of reason and evidence, so we must pick and choose which to examine and which will go unexamined. One of the criteria for picking and choosing is the effect of asserting a proposition on others.

Anyway, I could find no confirmation that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ended its term on June 30.

That was bad enough. How was something that was so certain be so hard to verify?

Then I thought of a way to test my hypothesis - to look for decisions released in July and August (other than court business such as stays of execution that have no set time limit).

I found some.

Now, I believe that my original certain belief was wrong. We might not get an opinion on or before June 30th.

I feel horrible about this.

At the same time, there are a lot of people out there professing things to be true who do not feel a sense of obligation to double-check their reasons for believing it before they inflict costs on others. And certainty is no guarantee of truth.

Yet, the fact that a particular moral obligation is so widely ignored is not a defense of ignoring it oneself.

I offer my appologies to any who made plans based on incorrect information. I should have done this sooner.

The Pledge Project: Current and Historical Events

Greetings:

As the expected time for the release of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision comes near, I am starting to get a bit nervous. I went in to double-check some things that I thought I was certain about, and I have some worries. While I found evidence that the Supreme Court clears its docket of all cases by June, I can't find evidence of what I was certain was true - that the Appeals Court works on the same calendar.

At least, I was never one of the people who has argued that it is always a moral crime to have an unfounded belief.

But, I needed to confess this possible error as quickly as possible. Along with my regrets, if it turn out that I am in error.

I have gotten some help from people that I would like to mention.

Hank Fox at Earthman's Notebook included my article The Pledge Project: Sound Bytes in The 94th Carnival of the Godless. He gave me the honor of picking that post out for special mention. For that, I offer my thanks.

I have exchanged some emails with Stuart Bechman from Atheist United. He is sending out an email warning its members of the upcoming decision and directing them to a couple of the Pledge Project posts (Table of Contents, Sound Bytes) in making responses.

Mattew Goldstein took the wording from my Letter to Candidates and turned it into an online petition: E Pluribus Unum petition. I know of the problems with online petitions. Still, if you support the ideas that are contained within the petition, I would appreciate it if you would say so by signing it.

Also, remember, I will be covering these types of items on my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal. Go there for further updates.

In the mean time, I have been reading through some documents my mother sent me. She is writing up the family history – and doing a fine job of writing in my opinion. She is starting with a branch of the family that lived in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

It is interesting to note that, 350 years ago, my ancestors seemed to be heavily involved in church-state issues as well, including some work on a pledge of allegiance. Only, back then, they were on the side trying to establish a theocracy in Massachusetts – one that had no tolerance for anybody who did not share the dominant religious beliefs of a society that demanded religious purity from all citizens. That was why they were called ‘puritans’.

No one could become a freeman unless he was a member of the church and if he wasn’t a freeman he couldn’t vote in any election, nor hold office or be on a jury. Strong efforts were made to bar immigrants belonging to other religions denominations. Puritans came to Massachusetts to develop religious liberty for themselves not to tolerate other religions. Whenever a non-church member was tried for a crime or offence he was tried by both the judge and a jury that belonged to the church and so had a strong prejudice against him. The Freeman’s Oath was the first paper printed in New England at Cambridge in 1639 using the words that were established in 1634.

I _______ being by God’s providence, an Inhabitant and Freeman within the Jurisdiction of this Commonwealth; do freely acknowledge myself to be subject to the Government thereof: And therefore do here swear by the great and dreadful Name of the Ever-living God, that I will be true and faithful to the same, and will accordingly yield assistance and support thereunto, with my person and estate, assign equity I am bound; and will also truly endeavor to maintain and preserve all the liberties and privileges thereof, submitting myself to the wholesome Laws and Orders made and established by the same. And further that I will not plot or practice any evil against it, or consent to any that shall do so; but will timely discover and reveal the same to the lawful authority now here established for the speedy preventing thereof.

Moreover, I do solemnly bind myself in sight of God that when I shall be called to give my voice touching any matter of this state in which Freemen are to deal, I will give my vote and suffrage as I shall judge in mine own conscience may best conduce and tend to the public will of the body. So help me God in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I find it interesting that, in this society that was devoted to establishing a religious theocracy, their Pledge of Allegiance is actually less objectionable than the one that we are currently burdened with. The person taking the oath does so in the name of God, in the site of God, and with the help of God, but does not actually bind himself or his community ‘under God’. The person binds himself, not to God, but to the government of the commonwealth.

In short, if you read the text, the concept of ‘under God’ is absent.

In the history of the time, I do not think we would be wrong in assuming that ‘under God’ was assumed. It is not stated that the government of the commonwealth was a government ‘under God’, but everybody thought that it was or, at least, that it should be.

The Puritans firmly believed their simple way of holding a religious meeting and of organizing a congregation was the only correct way. They were bitterly unfriendly and hostile to newcomers to their settlements who proposed or tried to set up any form of worship that differed from their own. Strenuous efforts were made to bar immigrants belonging to other religious denominations. Dissenters and critics who appeared among the Puritans were frowned upon and could be severely punished, executed and exiled into the wilderness. Puritans came to Massachusetts to develop religious liberty for themselves, not to establish an ideal of toleration for all religions.

After all, the lack of religious liberty that Massachusetts colonists gave their residents was one of the reasons that the Massachusetts Bay Colony lost its charter in 1684.

in 1684 the Puritan controlled Massachusetts Bay Colony lost the royal charter that was given to them in 1629. In 1691, after agreeing to observe the king's rules, they received a new charter under which they governed until the Revolutionary War.

My mother informs me that, in the period when the Puritans were expelling people who did not share the religious views of the Puritans that controlled the colony, our ancestors were not those who were driven out of the state. Instead of being expelled, they were the ones who were doing the expelling. They were the ones who administered the Freeman’s Oath and made sure that nobody voted or had a say in the direction of the colony who did not belong to the church.

The advocates of ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance today, at least in this respect, have the same attitude towards religion and politics as the Puritans did. Though they are not yet kicking people out of the community who do not share their beliefs, they still insist that nobody sits in government who is not a ‘freeman’ in the Puritan sense – who has not have the approved set of religious beliefs.

We’ve been here before. We do not need to come here again.

The Pledge Project: Objectives

As the Pledge Project picks up steam, one comment that I am hearing goes like this:

Why fight? All is lost. When the Supreme Court hears the case they will say that ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’ do not violate the Constitution. We will be defeated.

The Pledge Project would actually gain strength if the Supreme Court ruled ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’ to be constitutional – because the Pledge Project focuses on the moral arguments, not the legal arguments. An unfavorable ruling by the Supreme Court will chase secularists out from behind the robes of the judiciary, leaving them no option but to confront the issue in the public forum – which is where the arguments advanced in the Pledge Project are strongest.

As I see it, whether or not the Supreme Court hears the case, and what their decision happens to be, are beyond my control – and beyond yours. These are ‘facts of nature’ that we have to live with whether we like them or not – like the fact that chocolate is fattening and you have to pay $25 million to spend a week on the Space Station.

The goal that I have selected for myself – to leave the world better than it would have otherwise been if I had not existed in it – was very deliberately selected. I did not like the goal of ‘leaving the world a better place’ because a lot of circumstances beyond my could leave the world a worse place in spite of my greatest efforts.

Even if the world ends up being worse off while I am here, I can at least work to make it less worse off than it would have otherwise been. And even if people would have been better off in my absence, I can at least work to make them more better off than they would have been.

Now, allow me to apply this to a potential Supreme Court ruling that declares ‘under God’ to be Constitutional. Let’s assume that the Supreme Court does declare ‘under God’ to be constitutional. I can still ask what I can do to make the world better off than it would have otherwise been. In this, I see two options. The Supreme Court can render its decision in a culture that never questions the Pledge, allowing people to assume that no evil is done and promote it use accordingly. Or the Supreme Court can render its decision in a culture where many people recognize that the Pledge promote discrimination in the same way that a pledge to ‘our white community’ promote discrimination.

Of these two options, it is the second option that leaves the world better off than it would have otherwise been.

In order to be as successful as possible in getting thee arguments into the public mind, I hope to exploit the fact that, for about 7 days in the end of June and early July, much of the country’s attention will be fixed on this issue. I wish to take advantage of this situation to get the moral arguments out in front of people where they can read them and hear them. The more successful I am in presenting these arguments to people, the more we will hear people raising moral objections to ‘under God’ in the Pledge and ‘In God We Trust’ in government buildings and on government paper..

In order to get these moral arguments into the public consciousness, we must take advantage of a window of opportunity that will exist in the days after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals announces its decision. People will be discussing this issue. Our choice is to let the conversation be one-sided declaration of how anybody who opposes ‘under God’ is an enemy of free speech, freedom of religion, and the founding fathers, or to use this opportunity to insert whenever and wherever possible a string of moral arguments that will then serve as a context for any future Supreme Court decision.

At times in this blog I have drawn an analogy between these efforts in the realm of ethics and the laws of physics. No matter how massive an object is, and no matter how small the force that acts upon it, the force will have an effect on that object. You will not be able to fully explain or understand the movement of that object without mentioning that force. Similarly, society at large might be too massive for me to have much of a chance of moving it in any particular direction.

Those of us who will participate in this Pledge Project will have an effect. Even if we only reach a few dozen people, those few dozen people will have a better understanding of the moral objections to ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’ than they would have otherwise had. That better moral understanding will enable them to make better moral decisions. Even with the Supreme Court giving anti-atheist bigotry its seal of approval, we can have an effect on how much or how little anti-atheist bigotry actually takes place.

When one student who would have otherwise stood for the Pledge of Allegiance instead decides not to do so, and he explains his choice to those who asks as “I refuse to join the school in insulting many of those who fought and died for my freedom by saying that those who did not support ‘one nation under God’ deserve as much of our contempt as those who support ‘tyranny and injustice for all’,” then that will be our victory.

When a teacher stands before his class and says, “I will not lead you in the Pledge of Allegiance because no decent teacher will stand before a group of children and teach them bigotry,” then that will be our victory.

When a soldier stands before a group on a patriotic holiday and says, “I cannot lead you in the Pledge because I owe it to the people that I served with that did not believe in God not to insult them by saying that such a person is as despicable as a person who rejects liberty and justice for all, then that will be our victory.

When a city council votes to remove a sign that says, “In God We Trust” because, they say, it is as wrong to have a sign on our wall that says ‘We Trust In God” as it would be to post a sign that says “we are white”, then that will be our victory.

When a government body passes a resolution that says, “We condemn any statement that implicitly or explicitly denigrates the patriotism or the moral character of a person based solely on the person’s belief that no god exists for us to be under or for us to trust,” then we would have had a victory.

I do not know how many victories, if any, are to be found in the future. Perhaps there will be none.

We could, of course, guarantee no victories if this is what we want. We simply need to do nothing.

If the Supreme Court decides to do the right thing . . . if the Supreme Court were also to decide that the government should not tell people to condemn soldiers who do not believe in God, if the Supreme Court should agree that schools should not teach religious bigotry to children, if the Supreme Court should agree that there is something fundamentally undemocratic in allowing legislation that serves to block people from public office, then so much the better. In this case, the victory will be that much greater.

The best way to get these ideas into the minds of the Supreme Court justice is to get these ideas into the minds of the people, so the Justices themselves can hear people protest that they will not stand to have the government insult soldiers who fought in its defense without belief in God, and hear stories of people protesting the use of a Pledge and a motto to keep qualified candidates out of public office and positions of public trust, and hear teachers protest the teaching of bigotry in public schools – these are the best way to get the Supreme Court to consider these facts when it renders its decision.

How many of these victories can we credit to those who lie down and do nothing?

Even if this biggest victory is outside of our grasp, the other victories are still available to us. How many or how few of those smaller victories we can score depends on how much or how little we plan on working towards those victories.

The Pledge Project: Table of Contents

In the near future, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals gives its decision on “under God” and “In God We Trust”, This is one post that I must make available before that happens.

I have written this series of essays for you to use as a reference when they go out amongst the people and debate the issue. You’re going to need a way to easily get to the post that covers the issue you may be debating at any particular time. So, I want to provide this directory to Pledge Project articles.

1. Acting Against Anti-Atheist Bigotry: The introduction to the Pledge Project arguing that 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" as the national motto serve as a nearly impenetrable barrier keeping atheists and others who cannot pledge allegiance to ‘one nation under God’ out of public office.

2. The Atheist Burka: Compares the way atheists view the Pledge of Allegiance and National Motto in this country with the way women view the Burka in fundamentalist Islam cultures. By indoctrinating us starting when we were too young to question what we were being told, society has indoctrinated us into being comfortable with our own victimization.

3. Priorities: The Pledge Project is important because there are children who are (or will become) atheists who may also want to be elected officials or judges, serve in the military and be recognized for the quality of their actions, or just simply live among neighbors who have not been told by their government that no atheist can be a patriot and only those who ‘trust in God’ are to be thought of as ‘one of us’.

4. Offense: This answers the claim that others will make that atheists are merely ‘offended by every mention of God in the public square’. It proves that ‘under God’ in the Pledge and ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto are not about mentioning God in the public square, but about officially denouncing atheism. It presents an alternative way to mention God in the public square that does not denounce atheism.

5. House Resolution 5872: HR5872 is a government act to help raise money for the Boy Scouts. As such, it is a government act to help raise money to teach children that atheists are incapable of the best type o citizenship. It is as immoral as having the government itself hire a group of tutors to go to young children and teach them, “Citizens who do not believe in God are incapable of the best type of citizenship.”

6. Explaining Bigotry: This post uses a 2006 survey that showed that Americans identify atheists as the group that least shares their values as Americans, and the group that they would least like their children to marry (the sociologist’s best measure of prejudice). These results are easy to explain given that the Pledge of Allegiance says that American values include support for ‘one nation under God’ (which atheists do not share). This attitude is exactly the attitude that the government teaches people to have when it posts signs that say, “Do not think of those who lack trust in God as being one of us.”

7. Atheists are Untrustworty: Ron Lowe, an Mason in Idaho, explained in a news article that atheists are not allowed to be Masons because, "If you're an atheist . . . your word means nothing, so you have someone whose work cannot be trusted."

8. In God We Trust – America: In God We Trust – America is a group that is dedicated to having the national motto, "In God We Trust", posted in every government building and, in particular, in every city council.

9. Resolution Respecting Atheists: If you try to argue that the Pledge and Motto promote prejudice against atheists, some people are going to deny that it has this implication. This argues for having them prove this by supporting a resolution that any government agency can pass that condemns “any statement that explicitly or implicitly calls into question a person’s patriotism or moral character based solely on a lack of trust in God, or lack of support for ‘one nation under God’”.

10. A Memorial Day Dilemma: My father was one of those ‘atheists in foxholes’ who sought to make a career out of defending America and its freedoms. Yet, when the government introduced ‘under God’ into the Pledge it said that it does not care about the service of those who do not believe in God. My father argued that, when a person joins the military, he should be pledging allegiance to his country, not his church.

11. The Case of David Habecker: David Habecker was a city trustee in Estes Park, Colorado, who was recalled in a special election because he would not say the Pledge of Allegiance.

12. Sit Down and Shut Up: An advertisement from a Ford dealership in California said that those who oppose 'under God' in the Pledge and "In God We Trust' as the national motto should sit down and shut up.

13. Respect in Minnesota: A Minnesota school board is debating a rule that requires students to stand during the pledge “because all students should be required to show respect to the flag”. But why should a student show respect for the claim that 'Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'?

14. Freedom of Speech: Some people will defend their right to have ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance or to post ‘In God We Trust’ as implied by the right to freedom of speech. This post argues that the right to freedom of speech does not imply a right to freedom from criticism. Even the Nazi and the KKK member has a right to freedom of speech. That right to freedom of speech includes the right to condemn what they say.

15. Apologies and Excuses: This post looks at the distinction between an apology and an excuse. It teaches how to recognize when somebody is apologizing for doing something wrong or merely offering an excuse for his behavior, and explains what we will find in a true apology for wrings committed against atheists (and others).

16. Three Related Stories: This post covers three news stories related to the Pledge Project: Philadelphia ending a subsidy for the Boy Scouts, a Zoning Board commissioner in New Hampshire who is refusing to say the Pledge, and a city trustee in Wisconsin who is refusing to say the pledge. It looks at the types of claims being made in these disputes.

17. A Military Response: When somebody defends the Pledge of Allegiance as a way of showing respect for those who fought for our freedoms, this post explains why somebody shows more respect for ALL OF THOSE who fought for our freedoms by refusing to say the Pledge. After all, some of those who fought for our freedoms did not believe in God, and we spit on their graves when we pledge to put them in the same category as those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

18. A Patriotic Exercise. If somebody argues that the Pledge is permissible because it is a patriotic exercise, ask them if it would be less patriotic if ‘under God’ were removed? If they say ‘yes’, then the words ‘under God’ cannot be defended in virtue of patriotism. IF they say ‘no’ then they are guilty of asserting that atheists cannot be patriots.

19. Why? I was asked why I was putting so much effort into this project. This post answers that question.

20. Prayers and Promises: The standard debate over ‘under God’ in the pledge is between one group who says that it is a prayer (and thus constitutionally prohibited), while another says that it is like reading the Declaration of Independence or singing a patriotic song, which is permissible. Both sides ignore the fact that a Pledge is a promise and, unlike any prayer or reading, puts the speaker under an obligation. In this case, we are talking about a government sponsored promise to put the nation ‘under God’.

21. Should There Be a Pledge? Some argue that it is wrong to have any pledge. However, the question of whether or not we have reason to promote a pledge depends on the effects of a pledge. If a pledge to liberty and justice for all actually promotes liberty and justice for all, then we have reason to support such a pledge.

22. Liberty and Justice for All. Some people refuse to say the words ‘liberty and justice for all’ in the Pledge because they note that we do not have liberty and justice for all. They miss the fact that the Pledge is not a description of what kind of nation we are. It is a prescription for what type of country we should strive to be. However, this further implies that ‘one nation under God’ is also a prescription. In other word, the government is recommending ‘one nation under God’ in the same way it is recommending liberty and justice for all.

23. Moral Chauvinism. One of the worst qualities that we find in most religions is a tendency to turn its member into moral chauvinists. “Those who belong to my church are morally superior to those who do not.” Moral chauvinism is a form of bigotry. We see this bigotry in action whenever anybody claims that failure to indoctrinate children into their religion leads to moral degeneration.

24. An Endorsement of Religious Beliefs. One Constitutional claim is that the government must not endorse a religious belief. In light of this, some people claim that the Pledge is not an endorsement of religious beliefs. Yet, this is as absurd as saying that the Pledge is not an endorsement of union or of liberty and justice for all.

25. Political Consequences. McCain is going to use the Pledge ruling (if it goes against ‘under God’ to solicit million of hours in volunteer labor and tens of million of dollars in cash from those who want to see conservative justices on the bench that will defend religious bigotry. Obama dares not challenge religious bigotry because this would throw the election to McCain. The only defense that will come to the 9th Circuit Court opinion if it is against ‘under God’ must come from us.

26. Audience Participation. This post is a request for readers to join me on the companion blog Atheist Ethicist Journal when the news breaks to organize a response to the arguments that will certainly be made in favor of ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’.

27. The Voluntary Argument. Some people will assert that no violation takes place by having ‘under God’ in the Pledge because saying it is voluntary. This posts asks the question, “If a community adopts a pledge of allegiance to ‘our white community’ will the fact that they did not require people to say it prove that it was not racist?”

28. Flag Burning: This post look at the distinction between respect for a symbol and a respect for the thing symbolized. It notes how those who are most interested in protecting the symbol of liberty and justice for all seem least interested in defending liberty and justice for all.

29. The Race Analogy. My arguments draw heavily on analogies to race. For example, I argue that it is as illegitimate for the government to post a sign that says, “We Trust in God” as it would be for the government to post a sign that says, “We Are a White Community.” This post defends the race analogy and explains exactly why it is sound.

30. Legitimate Response. This post compares the atheist response to anti-atheist bigotry to the response that blacks and Jews might give to racism and anti-Semitism. It argues that the only consistent position to hold is that atheists are entitled to react to a sign that says, “We Trust in God” the same way that black would be entitled to react to a sign that says, “We Are a White Community.”

31. The Guantanamo Ruling: Four judges on the Supreme Court argue that the judiciary should yield to the legislature because the legislature is tied to the will of the people. How does this argument stand up to a case where the legislature adopts a policy that aims to deny a segment of the population a political voice and make itself accountable to only a portion of the population?

32. Foreign Affairs. In this post I address foreign readers to explain that they have reason to oppose violation of the principle of fair treatment by one’ government wherever thoe violations occur. I also argue that the American political system puts them at risk of being the victims o American religious exports using resources that religious groups are able to get hold of in this country.

33. Sound Bytes: This post presents some of the arguments that have appeared in the previous essays in the form of relatively quick sound bytes. Sound bytes are necessary for making a point quickly and effectively.

Of course, I must also include the first part of my story, A Perspective on the Pledge.

The Pledge Project: Sound Bytes

In the near future, the 9th Circuit Court opinion giving its decision on ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’.

And, a reminder, when the story break, I will begin tracking developments as they happen in my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal.

The purpose of the Pledge Project is to introduce a set of arguments against 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto that have been missing for the past 50 years – arguments other than the legal arguments we are all familiar with.

Moral arguments.

I have written a series of essays on the subject in this blog. (You can find a list of these essays at The Pledge Project: Table of Contents) Unfortunately, you will almost never have the opportunity to deliver a 15-minute speech or present a 1500 word essay on the immoral qualities of these practices.

All too often, you will have to make your point in 15 seconds or less – and even that might be generous.

Consequently, this post is dedicated to sound bytes – quick statements that deliver some of these missing moral considerations in a sentence or two that can be quickly thrown into a discussion.

For example.

'Under God' has never been about allowing God into the public square. It has always been about keeping atheists out of public office..

If you are given an opportunity to explain yourself you can start to bring out points from the 1500 word essay. 'Under God' was introduced in the 1950s to put atheist communists at a political disadvantage, but targeted all atheists. This sound byte has opened the door to that discussion. Yet, even if the recipient of the sound byte hears nothing else, she has heard something she had not heard before, and something for her to think about.

Here are some other sound bytes. Many of these are variations on a theme. The context in which the statement is used will determine which variation has the most relevance.

It is no more legitimate for the government to post a sign that says "We Trust in God" than it is to post a sign that says, "We Are A White Community,” or "We Are Not Jews".

If 'under God' is consistent with respect for people who do not believe in God, then 'with liberty and justice for all' is consistent with respect for tyranny and injustice.

This is how you intend to show respect for soldiers who do not believe in God, by saying that they are as bad as those who defend tyranny and injustice?

By adding 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance the government put atheism in the company of rebellion, tyranny, and injustice as the great evils that no patriotic American can accept and every patriotic American would oppose.

There is no better way to teach children that atheists cannot be patriots than to have a ritual of pledging allegiance from which atheists are conspicuously excluded.

To say that the Pledge of Allegiance is a patriotic exercise is to say that atheists cannot be patriots.

What's wrong with a pledge that shows respect for ALL OF THOSE who have fought for our freedom? What is right with a Pledge that compares some of those who defend our rights to the defenders of tyranny and injustice?

If you want to bring God into the public square, then do what the founding fathers did in writing the Constitution. They wrote an oath of office that did not mention God, allowing each individual to decide to add a phrase like, "so help me God" according to his or her private belief.

A good Christian would reject a sign the says "We Trust In God" for the same reasons a good Caucasian would reject a sign that says, "We Are a White Community."

Atheism is like race in that neither necessarily implies a lack of patriotism or moral character – and it is pure bigotry to assume otherwise.

The right to freedom of speech does not imply a right to freedom from criticism. Even the Nazi and the KKK member has a right to freedom of speech.

Psychologically segregating the nation between 'we' who 'trust in God' and 'they' who do not is as immoral as physically segregating the nation between 'we' who are white and 'they' who are colored.

Protesting 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance is anti-Christian in the same way that protesting segregation was anti-white or respecting the rights of women to vote was anti-male.

Moral chauvinism is the state of believing that the people who share your religion are inherently morally superior to those who do not.

There are as many ways to mention God in the public square that do not express bigotry as there are to mention race in the public square that are not bigoted. This is not one of them.

If you compare a sign on the currency or in public office that discriminate on the basis of religion with signs that discriminate on the basis of race, somebody will likely accuse you of equating religion with racism.

I am not equating religion with racism. I am equating signs and oaths that teach religious prejudice with signs and oaths that teach racial prejudice.

If a person denies that 'under God' or 'In God We Trust' denigrates the patriotism and moral character of those who do not believe in God, demand that they prove that they believe this.

I demand that the legislative body pass a resolution condemning any statement that explicitly or implicitly denigrates the patriotism or moral character of an American citizen based solely on the fact that the citizen does not believe that there is a God to trust or for the nation to be under.

I have given some of my ideas for sound bytes that might be useful. However, I might be suffering from a serious lack of imagination. I would like you, the reader, to think about this and come up with a few more.

I have some caveats.

I an looking for sound bytes that express moral concerns that have been missing over the last 50 years.

I am not looking for sound bytes that trash religion. This is not about being opposed to religion. This is about being opposed to injustice. As I wrote above – a Christian can oppose the psychological and social segregation of atheists in the same way that a Caucasian can oppose the physical segregation of blacks. It is not appropriate to answer anti-atheist bigotry with anti-theist bigotry; that would just make us hypocrites.

With these facts in mind, and with 33 essays from The Pledge Project at your fingertips, along with your own experiences, I would like to know what type of sound bytes you can provide to help arm those who will be debating 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' once the story breaks.

Sometime between now and June 30th, we will all have an opportunity to put those suggestions to work.

The Pledge Project: Foreign Affairs

I have worried that my readers with foreign citizenship might see the Pledge issue as a purely domestic issue with no relevance to them.

This is not the case. You have as much reason to be interested in how Americans handle this issue as Americans themselves.

Moral Concerns

The first is that a moral principle, by its nature, is universal. When a person says that something is permissible, this implies that it is permissible for anybody in a similar situation to do the same thing. This applies to people in other countries.

So, if it is morally permissible for Americans to post signs in its public buildings and to put on its money, “We Are Not Atheists,” this says that it would be morall permissible for the Iranian government (for example) to demand that the currency and every government building bears a model like, “We Are Not Jews.” It would be permissible for governments everywhere to post signs that say, “We Are White” or “We Are Not Hindu” or “We Are the Saudi or whatever other message that an oppressive group.

If it is morally permissible for a government to pledge allegiance to “one nation without atheists” then another would be within its right so t pledge allegiance to “one nation with Jews.”

If we are going to fight these types of injustices – if we are going to communicate the global message that these types of messages are unjust – then we need to oppose them everywhere.

This is the same argument that I have made against the Bush Administration’s policies of rendition, torture, imprisonment without charges, warrantless wiretaps, signing statements, and other injustices.

Whenever the President of the United States claims that torture is morally permissible, he gives every government on the planet permission to engage in torture.

When the American President says that a country can pick up people off the street and make them disappear, he tells nations around the world that they, too, may pick up people off the street and make them disappear.

Anybody who wants to condemn these practices when they are used in North Korea, or Iran, or Cuba, or Sudan, needs to challenge America’s assertion that they are permissible.

People have the right to protest injustice wherever it occurs Otherwise, injustice becomes the new standard. Consequently, people in other countries have a right and a reason to raise their voice in condemnation of any government that is so discriminatory towards some segment o their population This is the best way – this is the only way – to prevent the practice from growing and moving into other parts of the world or expanding in parts of the world where it otherwise exists.

In addition, the moral principles that have been used against ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’ can be applied to similar practices elsewhere in order to end certain abuses within one’s own country. Moral principles are universal, and I write about moral values so that others can take what I write and use them to improve the quality of life in their own homes, regardless of where those homes may be.

Importing Religion

I have written that ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’ in America generates an in-group of dominant and assertive theists, and an out-group of passive and politically impotent atheists. One of the implications of this is that religion is one of America’s leading exports. That export is lowering the quality of life in other countries – particularly in Africa, where poverty and the spread of diseases such as AIDS are supported by 0th-century views on sex and procreation.

Developed countries as well, such as England, Australia, and Canada, have had to deal with religious campaigns in their countries to promote ‘intelligent design’ as science, to promote religious schools and grant the indoctrination of children into religion special protections, and even fight a war (in part on a religious pretext) as a result of America’s aggressive religious population and passive atheist population.

You will continue to feel the pressure of millions (billions) of American dollars going into the export of religion into your countries as long as America remains a culture of in-group (aggressive, dominant) theists and out-group (passive, submissive) atheists. One thing that would work to your advantage is to eliminate the practices that generate this in-group/out-group psychology by condemning the practices that support it.

I find it interesting to note that the atheist movement in America has not, for the most part, been able to generate its own leaders. It has only grown in recent years by importing leadership from other countries whose citizens are not subject to the same type of brainwashing that American children are subject to. Has anybody stopped to ask why American Atheists have so much trouble growing domestic leaders?

Conclusion

If you live in another country, and you do not want the worst of American theocratic thinking to thrive in your country, you have reason to oppose it in the country of origin. You have reason to teach people that it is wrong or governments to declare that people who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are as bad as those who support ‘liberty and justice for all’, or they might come to your country and try to get your children trapped into a similar pledge.

If you are concerned about the import of the worst of religious practices in your country, such as the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ as science or importing a culture that would be hostile to your homosexual or freethinking citizens, then it is best to challenge those enemies where they life.

You have reason, in these circumstances, to call for an end of the practices in America that generate a dominant and aggressive theist class and a politically weak and timid atheist class. Otherwise, you will find yourself fighting forces in your own countries well funded by Americans eager to export their religion.

The Pledge Project: The Guantanamo Ruling

Recently, in a 5 to 4 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have a right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.

This dispute in the court was not fully on whether prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have a right to habeas corpus – a right to demand that those who imprison then provide justification for doing so (or release them). Another part of the dispute was over who gets to answer this question, the judiciary or the legislature?

The four justices who dissented in this case (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito) argued that the judiciary should defer to the greater wisdom of the legislature and the people who are actually fighting the war on terror. They said that the judiciary should not interfere.

This raises a couple of issues with respect to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Issue 1: Moral Judgments

Those who oppose 'judicial activism' say that judges should merely enforce the law as written and not appeal to their own moral judgments in deciding any case.

The problem with this view is that the statement,"Judges should merely enforce the law as written and not appeal to their own moral judgments" is, itself, a moral judgment. The justice that says this is expressing an opinion on the moral limits of judicial authority, and in doing so is saying that a judge should not express moral opinions.

Even if the legislature were to pass a law demanding that judges enforce the law as written, the judge would first have to decide that he has a moral obligation to yield to the will of the legislature to accept that law. There is no non-question-begging way for the judge to decide that he should yield to the will of a legislature than to make a moral judgment and use that moral judgment to guide his actions.

This means that the call that judges not use moral judgments is simply impossible to obey. Instead, the call must be for judges to apply the right moral judgments to how she does her job. This, in turn, raises the question, "Which moral judgments (if any) are the right ones, and how do we know?"

For the sake of argument, let us assume that the claim that judges have a moral obligation to enforce the law as written. At least in the United States, this does not imply that judges must yield to the legislature. Judges are still free to rule that the Constitution makes illegal certain government actions. The "law as written" includes the Constitution and any violation of that law should be stopped.

The argument for saying that the judiciary should yield to the will of the legislature is because the legislature is answerable to the people. Pledge Implications. Ultimately, the people get to decide whether prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are to have a right to habeas corpus by electing legislatures that support such a right (or not, as the case may be).

This leads to a second question, and this second question has implications for the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto “In God We Trust.”

Issue 2: Answerable to the People

What if the legislature is not answerable to the people? What I the legislature uses its power to establish a system that effectively blocks a group of citizens from public office or from getting people elected who would represent their interests. The legislature then is only answerable to a subsection of the population who actively pursue policies against the interests of those not represented. What implications would this have for the alleged obligation of the judiciary to yield to the legislature?

Inserting 'under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance and changing the national motto to 'In God We Trust' fit this description.

The Pledge of Allegiance, with the words 'under God', communicates to the American people that citizens who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are to be regarded the same way as citizens who do not support ‘liberty and justice for all’. It says that patriots support 'one nation under God' and that those who do not support 'one nation under God' are not to be considered patriots.

Furthermore, it focuses this message on very young children who are incapable of recognizing this type of propaganda for what it is. Most children learn to accept the messages they are given without question. In this case, what they learn to accept without question is that atheists (or any who do not support ‘one nation under God’) are not to be thought of as real Americans.

The national motto, 'In God We Trust', communicates this same message. Through this motto, the government tells the people, "You are not to think of any person who lacks a trust in God as being one of us. Its message of "We Are Not Atheists" exists for the same reason that people of another day or time might have posted a sign that says, "We Are A White Community" or "We Are Not Jewish."

The effect of these laws has not only been to impose a nearly insurmountable barrier between atheists and public office, it has created a barrier between atheists and those who would consider the claims of atheists. In short, they have helped to create a situation where legislatures are not answerable to atheists. Instead, these measure have given power to those who believe in ‘one nation under God’ and who 'trust in God', while denying power or representation to those who do not share these views.

What does this say about the moral claim that the judiciary should yield to the legislature, because the legislature is answerable to the people?

Let us assume that an anti-Jewish political faction has some political success. Among their first acts when they gain political power is to fill government buildings with anti-Jewish slogans and to teach anti-Jewish chants and rituals in civic ceremonies – particularly focusing these messages on young children who tend to accept what they are told without question. Over time they generate enough anti-Jewish sentiment that those who attack the Jews are the only ones capable of getting enough votes to get elected into government.

As I wrote above, 'one nation under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance gives Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' the same status in terms of patriotism and government respect as those who reject 'liberty and justice for all'. "In God We Trust" means, "Do not think of those Americans who lack trust in God as being one of us." These are certainly anti-atheist messages in the same way that "one Christian nation," and "In Jesus we trust" would imply that Jews are anti-American.

Would this have an effect on the thesis that the Judiciary should yield to the legislature because the legislature is answerable to the people? Or would this argue that the Judiciary should step in – that it should block the legislature from launching a campaign to promote hostility against a subgroup so that some fraction of ‘the people’ can establish a lock on political power for themselves – answerable only to their fraction of the people?

This is not a legal argument. This is not an argument about what the law prohibits and requires. This is what morality prohibits and requires. If the moral obligation that judges should yield to the legislature is grounded on the fact that the legislature is answerable to the people, then whatever makes the premise (the legislature is answerable to the people) false, makes the inference (to ‘the judiciary should yield to the legislature’) unsound.

Is there, then, some other moral argument or saying that judges should yield to the legislature in these circumstances?

The Pledge Project: Legitimate Response

I want to apply the scenario that I presented a couple of days ago against the idea that a 'voluntary' Pledge of Allegiance is defensible to the hypothesis that the ‘under God’ in the Pledge is not an issue worth caring about.

That scenario went as follows:

Assume that a community that is 85% white, where 100% of its elected officials are white, adopts a community pledge to our white community. However, they do not require non-whites to say this pledge. In fact, non-whites are free to leave the room whenever white people pledge allegiance to our white community. Would you support the argument that, since the pledge is voluntary, that it cannot be considered racist?

Now, imagine that you logged onto your computer one morning, browsed to your favorite news site, and saw a headline, "Community adopts pledge of allegiance to 'our white community'?"

You read a story that fits the description that I gave above. It is a story about a community that is 85% white and where whites hold 100% of the elected seats (because most people in that community refuse to vote for a candidate that is not white). This community adopts a community pledge to 'our white community'.

Now, I have some questions that I would like to ask you.

(1) What do you think your reaction would be as you read that story?

(2) What do you think your reaction should be as you read that story?

(3) How do you think the rest of the nation and even the rest of the world would react to that news?

(4) How do you think the rest of the nation and even the rest of the world should react to that news?

Next, imagine next that some news commentator, newspaper editorial board, politician, or opinion leader were to declare, "This issue is not important. The fact that some community has adopted a pledge of allegiance to 'our white community' simply is not important. We should be devoting our attention to more serious matters."

(5) How would you react to the news report about what that commentator or politician said?

(6) How do you think you and others should react to a public figure who said that a community's pledge of allegiance to 'our white community' is trivial and unworthy of concern?

A Digression into Theory

Before I go on to discuss the implications of these questions, I need to beg your indulgence for a few short paragraphs of moral theory.

I do not hold for intuitionist moral arguments. Intuitionism says that you can arrive at moral truth by contemplating a situation in a moment of calm and measuring one's own feelings towards that situation. It is as if the universe is filled with moral vibrations and the brain has some type of mental sense organ for picking up these vibrations.

All of this is nonsense. No such faculty exists.

My points above were not intended to pick up moral intuitions. They have to do with consistency. Whatever moral condemnation is justified against a city that posts a sign in its civic center that says, "We Are White People" that same level of condemnation is justified against a city that puts up "We Trust In God." Those who think that the latter is a trivial concern unworthy of a good person’s time and attention needs to also stand ready to assert that any protests against "We Are White People." Those who think that some more severe level of outrage would be justified against a community posting, "We Are White People" in its public school rooms cannot consistently assert that "We Trust In God" is a trivial concern.

At least, the person who gives these two events different moral evaluations needs to provide us with an explanation as to where the moral differences can be found.

(See yesterday's post for a defense of the analogy between religion and race on matters of government discrimination.)

The Civil Rights Calendar

I have heard some people describe the Atheist situation in America as being comparable to that of homosexuals in the 1960s – on the verge of a political movement that has brought them substantial progress.

I disagree. I think that a more accurate comparison puts atheists in the United States today on the same level as blacks in the 1920s. Blacks at the time were living in a society where they were surrounded by signs on water fountains, restrooms, sections of a restaurant, and parts of a bus that said "colored" and "white". There was no organized resistance against these injustices for the most part. Society was allowed to live a lie of "separate but equal" where blacks were clearly separate and clearly not equal.

In order or atheists to be able to claim that they have reached a level of sophistication in defense of their rights that blacks had in the 1950s, they would have to be willing and able to identify some community that has decided to post "In God We Trust" in its civic center or classrooms and make that community an example of all communities that expressed this type of bigotry.

How would blacks respond to news that a community that is 85% white had voted to post the sign, "We Are a White Community" in city hall?

They would probably begin with an economic boycott. They would advise anybody in the country planning vacations in that town to change their plans and to avoid the city. They would contact businesses and organizations planning conventions in the city and call for them to cancel those conventions or move them elsewhere, and encourage all other organizations to consider different locations for their businesses. They would contact businesses considering expansion into the city and have them reconsider.

My point is that anybody who claims that atheists are overreacting to a decision to put "We Are Not Atheists" in city hall must, by consistency, be ready to object that blacks would be overreacting to a sign that says, "We Are a White Community." If they are not ready to say that blacks would be overreacting to such a sign cannot, consistently, argue that atheists are overreacting to a sign that says "We Are Not Atheists" or, what amounts to the same thing, "We Trust In God."

The Pledge Project: The Race Analogy

I put a lot of weight in this project on claiming that a pledge of allegiance to 'one nation under God' is like a pledge of allegiance to 'our white community'. Similarly, I often compare a sign on the walls of city hall or in a classroom or on the money that says, "We Trust In God" with a sign that says "We Are White" or "We Are Not Jewish."

Some people may hesitate at that analogy, so I want to explain why it works.

First, a word about analogies in general. An analogy says that, "Since A is like B in all relevant respects, since X is true of B, we can expect that it is also true of A."

The phrase 'in all relevant respects' is important here. In all cases of analogy, there are differences between A and B. The analogy does not assert that A and B are identical. It only asserts that their differences are not relevant.

For example, you want to know the gas mileage that Car A will get. You look at Car B. Car B is exactly the same make and model as Car A. It has the same engine type with the same settings, the same body design and weight, the same drive shaft properties, the same kind of tires, and was driven under exactly the same conditions that Car A would be driven on. However, as it turns out, Car B is blue, while Car A is red.

The color of a car has no effect on its gas mileage. Therefore, the color of the car is not a relevant difference when it comes to drawing an analogy from the gas mileage for Car B to the gas mileage to Car A. Anybody who came along and said, "This analogy does not work because Car B is a different color," can be dismissed – not unless he can show some genuine relationship between car color and gas mileage.

The same is true with a sign in City Hall that says, "We Are White" or "We Are Not Jewish” and a sign that says "We Trust In God" or "We Are Not Atheists". Yes, there are differences between racism and religious bigotry. The question is whether there are any relevant differences? Is there anything about trust in God that justifies a sign in City Hall that says, "We Trust In God" that would not also justify a sign that says "We Are White?"

I know of none.

The relevant property – the property that makes the analogy work – is that there is no necessary connection between trust in God and patriotism or moral character, just as there is no necessary connection between race and patriotism or moral character.

The person who asserts that there is a connection between race and patriotism or moral character is a racist. She is guilty of pre-judging the members of that race based on an irrelevant quality, and this is guilty of the moral crime of prejudice. There is no argument that can be given for putting up a sign in city hall that says, "We Are White People" that is not ultimately grounded on prejudiced and bigoted assumptions that white people 'belong' in this community in ways that non-white people do not.

Similarly, the person who asserts that there is a necessary connection between religious belief and moral character or patriotism is expressing exactly the same sort of bigotry. The only evidence of a connection between atheism and immorality or treason exists in the imagination of the person who believes it. He believes the connection because he wants to believe it – just as the racist believes in the lesser moral qualities of blacks merely because he wants to believe it.

The reasons why people would put up a sign that says, "We Are Not Atheists" in city hall and on school room walls are substantially the same kinds of reasons that they would use to defend a sign that says, "We Are Not Jews" or "We Are Not White". Those reasons would have just as little merit.

Some people will bring up the fact that blacks have been treated significantly worse than atheists in this country.

That’s not a relevant difference.

The proposition, "X has been treated unjustly" is not proved false merely by pointing out "Y has been treated more unjustly than X." The injustice inflicted on X depends solely upon the nature of behavior towards X, and does not depend in the slightest on society's worse behavior towards Y.

Assume that a person walking through a park is robbed. The robbers make off with $200 in cash. Later, it was discovered that somebody else walking through the same park was robbed of $300 in cash and beaten. Now, imagine going back to the first person and saying, "Because the second person was treated more harshly than you were, we must now judge that no crime was committed against you. The people who took your $200 did nothing wrong in doing so, given that somebody else was robbed of $300 and beaten."

The argument makes no sense.

Putting up a sign that says, "We Are Not Atheists" remains a moral crime against atheists in the same way that putting up a sign that says "We Are Not Jews" would be a moral crime against Jews or "We Are White" would be a moral crime against whites. Greater moral crimes may have been committed against Jews or blacks, but that does not justify society in committing this particular moral crime against atheists.

Another difference that somebody might bring up is that race is not a matter of choice, while religious beliefs are a matter of choice.

This also is not a relevant difference.

Let us assume that race is a matter of choice. A physician has come up with a way of programming a bunch of nanites into altering a person's genetic code, altering their race. So, people gain the option of choosing their race. It would still be wrong for the government to post a sign that says "We Are White People" because society has no reason to try to coerce all of its citizens into being white.

Make no mistake about it – a sign that says "We Are White People" is an attempt at coercion in these conditions, in the same way that a sign that says, "We Trust In God" is an attempt to coerce citizens into trusting in God.

On the other side of the coin, imagine that scientists discover that a particular organization of brain cells near the hypothalamus is associated with rape. One hundred percent of the people whose cells in this region are organized in a way that scientists call Structure S, it turns out, commit rape. So, rape (in these cases) is shown to be something less than a choice.

In this case, this discovery may cause us to move the disposition to rape from the category of 'criminal' to the category of 'illness'. However, it would not make rape a legitimate and permissible act. This is because the discover that the desire to rape is (in these cases) caused and not a matter of choice does not change the fact that rapists do harm. In virtue of the harm done, people have reason to pressure citizens into pursuing whatever medical options exist that would make them less of a danger to others.

These cases illustrate that choice is not the relevant factor here. It is a disposition to cause harm. Race is as relevant to the disposition to cause harm as religion is.

So, it remains the case that as far as relevant differences, a sign that "We Trust In God" remains morally analogous to a sign that says, "We Are White People." There are no morally relevant differences between the two situations. There are certainly differences, but there are no differences that would give a sign that says, "We are not atheists" any moral status different than one that we would give to a sign that says, "We Are White People," or "We Are Not Jews."

The Pledge Project: Flag Burning

Today, June 14th, is Flag Day.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a Wisconsin legislator who was in trouble for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance. In explaining why she did not do so, she said that "the flag is just a piece of fabric".

Her statement is quite true. The flag is a piece of fabric that is not worth the loss of a single life, or even the loss of any significant piece of property. As I argued at the time, if you were injured in an accident and the only cloth that I had available to use as a bandage to stop the bleeding was an American flag, I would use it.

If there was a risk of your house burning down and, somehow (imagine whatever scenario you like) I could use a flag to prevent the loss of your home, I would do so. A flag is worth a lot less than a house. A flag is, after all, just fabric.

Now, I would not use a flag to clean the dishes or to use as a fine strainer to get the pulp out of orange juice. Not unless I had some particularly important reason for having clean dishes or orange juice. That would seem to state an unequivocal disregard for the values that the flag represents. But it does not show disregard for the values that the flag represents to use it to save a life or a house.

Now, when it comes to those values – when it comes to liberty and justice for all, for example – these are cases where I would not destroy the principle to save a life – not even my own. In fact, if the choice was between the principle of liberty and a life, I would choose the principle over the life, even if it were my own. Or, at least, I hope that I would be able to do the right thing. If I had to make a choice between an the institution of justice and a life, even my own, I would protect justice.

One of the strange things that I have noticed over the past seven years is that there seems to be an inverse relationship between a person’s devotion to symbols (flags, lapel pins, pledges, mottos), and their devotion for the principles that these objects are supposed to symbolize. The Bush Administration strikes me as being populated and supported by people who will destroy liberty and justice to save a life, but willingly see thousands of people killed and homes destroyed to save a flag.

One of the statements that the Bush Administration used repeatedly since 9/11 is that our freedoms are of no use to us if we are dead, and so he will do whatever it takes to protect American lives. This type of statement simply ignores the fact that most of the people in uniform are there to do exactly the opposite – to give their life if it proves necessary to protect the freedoms and justice that the rest of us enjoy.

They are heroes because they put the institutions of liberty and justice above life. Bush, Cheney, and their cohorts dishonor those soldiers by asserting that the institutions of liberty and justice are to be the first things sacrificed the instant there is a life at stake.

We hear a great deal about Democratic Presidential Candidate Barak Obama not wearing a flag pin and not saluting the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance (the latter being a lie). We hear very little about Bush’s illegal wiretaps, cruel treatment of prisoners, arrest and confinement without trials, and signing statements.

The people who support Bush, we may assume, are the people who are critical of Obama. What these people exhibit by their behavior is the same principle that I identified above. The more vocal a person is when it comes to defending the symbols of liberty and justice for all (lapel pins and pledges), the less interested that person seems to be in defending liberty and justice for all.

Given this disposition, we might be well served to abolish pledges of allegiance, lapel pins, flags, and similar forms of patriotic idolatry. Those religions that prohibit followers from worshipping idols and symbols of whatever divine entity they follow because the worshippers of idols forget to worship the deity might be onto something. We might well have reason to believe that the promotion of patriotic idolatry goes hand-in-hand with the loss of respect for the values being symbolized.

This is just a hypothesis. It is not even that, really, given that it is grounded on anecdotal evidence that I might just be seeing purely because it is compatible with some interests that I have. Readers should not take this as an actual theory.

It does, however, point to the moral distinction between promoting symbols and promoting that which is being symbolized. It points to the fact that, morally, it is the love of liberty and justice for all itself that we should be promoting, not the love of the symbols of liberty and justice for all that we defend at the expense of those things being symbolized.

The flag is a piece of cloth. It is not worth our defense. Liberty and justice for all is worthy of our defense. But they are not a flag. When we see the flag we should be reminded not of a duty to protect it - because there is no such duty. We should be reminded of the duty to protect liberty and justice for all - that which the flag represents.

This relates to the issue of flag burning and whether this should be permitted or prohibited. I have mentioned that the right to freedom of speech is the right to be free from violence, not a right to be free from criticism. A person who communicates an idea by burning the flag has a right to be free from violence (including arrest and imprisonment), not a right to be free from criticism. In fact, most people who burn the flag are guilty of a great deal of criticism, because the ideas they are seeking to communicate are ideas worthy of criticism.

I had an idea for the next time the Senate debated a constitutional amendment to allow the burning of the flag. My plan involved getting all of the permits together for a fire in a field, where I would put up 100 American flags. Each flag would be on a pole that had the name of a Senator on it.

After the vote, I would go down the rows of flags while reading the roll-call of the votes for the Amendment. If the Senator voted for the Amendment, I would remove that flag and burn it. If the Senator was not present or abstained, I would remove the flag without burning it. In the end, there would be a field of flags and empty flag poles, where every flag represented a Senator who knew the difference between a symbol of liberty and liberty itself, and protected that which had the true value.

In this case, those who protected liberty itself would have protected the symbol of liberty as well, while those Senators who voted against liberty would have failed also to protect the flag.

This seemed to me a good way to communicate the idea that some Senators seem to have forgotten the difference between defending a symbol and defending an institution, and the true defenders of the flag are those who defend, not the cloth itself, but the institutions that give the flag meaning.

The Pledge Project: The 'Voluntary' Argument

A reminder to readers that I am spinning up Atheist Ethicist Journal to handle day-to-day reporting on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' until July 6th.

One claim that is going to be used over and over again by those who support 'under God' in the Pledge is that it is voluntary. Nobody is being forced to say it if they do not want to. At the same time, these people will point out that the opponents of 'under God' are attempting to prohibit people from saying the Pledge, so the opponents of 'under God' are anti-freedom.

This is an easy rebuttal to those claims.

In fact, I want to express this rebuttal in terms of a fantasy I have that somebody will have an opportunity to step up to a microphone at a Barak Obama rally and ask him the following question.

Senator Obama, assume that a community that is 85% white, where 100% of its elected officials are white, adopts a community pledge to our white community. However, they do not require non-whites to say this pledge. In fact, non-whites are free to leave the room whenever white people pledge allegiance to our white community. Would you support the argument that, since the pledge is voluntary, that it cannot be considered racist?

Of course that pledge would be racist.

Of course those who oppose a community having such a pledge are not ‘anti-freedom’ – any more than people who oppose the practice of walking into a store and taking everything out of the cash register are anti-freedom. A free society still places some limits on what people are free to do.

Technically, the reason that the voluntary argument is not relevant in this case is because the objection to having 'under God' in the Pledge is an objection based on its content. I am objecting to what 'under God' means in the context of the Pledge of Allegiance. What the government is telling the people by inserting 'under God' in the Pledge is that a citizen that does not support 'one nation under God' cannot be considered a good American. It says this in the same way that it says that a citizen that supports rebellion or secession cannot be a good American, and a citizen who does not support liberty and justice for all cannot be a good American.

It does not matter who actually utters the words, "A citizen who does not support one nation under God cannot be a good American," the statement is both malicious and false and nothing that a moral person would support. The properties of being malicious and false remain a part of the content of this Pledge even if nobody says it – and is precisely the reason why a good person would not say it.

The parallel question about the community that adopts a pledge of allegiance to 'our white community' brings these properties up to the surface. We recognize straight away that a community that would adopt a pledge of allegiance to 'our white community' has attitudes towards people who are non-white that are malicious and false, and they are using this Pledge to reinforce those malicious and false attitudes.

In the same way, the American community has adopted malicious and false attitudes towards citizens who do not believe in God, and 'under God' in the Pledge is being used as an instrument to reinforce those malicious and false attitudes.

In these cases, the fact that people voluntary choose to utter, or have the freedom to voluntarily choose not to utter, the pledge is no argument for or against its merits.

In fact, in our community of white racists, we can see that the people who freely and proudly pledge allegiance to 'our white community' are morally more suspect (at least on this issue) than any who does so as a result of coercion. The strength of the racist sentiments that a citizen has can be measured by how freely and how proudly that citizens pledges allegiance to 'our white community'. While the person (the white person) who says such a Pledge out of social conformity and a desire to fit in, while morally flawed, is not as flawed as those who actually provide the social pressure to pledge allegiance to 'our white community'.

The flaw with coercion in this case is that by forcing people to say, 'our white community' this will, over time, still have the effect of growing the racist attitudes that are inherent in such a pledge. What a person is forced to do one year (surrounded by praise for doing so and condemnation for any sign of resistance), she may do willingly the next. This is because, over time, the agent may internalize the prejudices that sit at the foundation of a pledge to 'our white community'.

So, coercion is definitely an evil. It is a violation of the right to free speech and, in this case, it is a tool for the growth and development of prejudice. However, the absence of coercion is no defense against the charge that a pledge of allegiance to 'one nation under God' is morally no different than a pledge to 'our white community'.

Given the tendency of some people to distort and twist words to political advantage, the above argument does not say that belief in God is tantamount to racism. It says that a pledge of allegiance to one nation under God (in light of the fact that there are good citizens who do not believe in God) is prejudicial in the way that a pledge of allegiance to 'our white nation' is prejudicial.

A just white person can be opposed to a pledge of allegiance to 'our white community' without saying that all white people are evil. Similarly, a just Christian can be opposed to a pledge of allegiance to 'one nation under God' without saying that all Christians are evil. The white person simply needs to say, "As a white person, I will endorse expressions of bigotry against blacks". The Christian simply needs to say, "As a Christian, I will not endorse expressions of bigotry against those who do not believe in God."

The good white person will not try to argue, "Since the pledge to our white community is voluntary, then it is perfectly legitimate." The good Christian will not try to argue, "Since the pledge to one nation under God is voluntary, then it is perfectly legitimate."

The Pledge Project: Audience Participation

I have a question from the studio audience that I have been sitting on for a week now because I could not find a way to fit it into the discussion.

It’s time to introduce that question.

I am hoping for the changes in the pledge and US currency to be achieved. But to be completely honest, I hate sitting around and hoping for others to do and fight for beliefs or the right to not have any....what can I do? What can I do to be more involved, to be more informed, and to be part of the change instead of just watching it happen?

Let me answer this by stating what I intend to do, and what you can do to help if you are so inclined.

I expect the 9th Circuit Court to release its opinion on or after June 26th. At that point, for the next week or 10 days, the nature of this blog will change considerably.

I have already asked for and received permission to be off work from June 26th to July 6th, so my days will be free. I will be spending those days monitoring the national debate on the 9th Circuit Court opinion, directing readers to what is being said, where, and by whom.

For the sake of those who subscribe to this site by email, I will be using my other blog, Atheist Ethicist Journal, to monitor the day-to-day activities once the Court decision is released.

What I would like you to do is to go to those places and introduce arguments into the debate that have been missing for the past 50 years.

Where somebody objects to 'the secularist's goal of removing all mention of God from the public square', I want you to go there and say, "Under God has never been about allowing God in the public square. It's always been about keeping atheists out of public office. If people want to mention God in the public square they can say the Pledge without 'under God' and add 'so help me God' at the end if it pleases them to do so."

If they complain about atheists "offended by every mention of God," I want you to go there and say, "I'm not offended by the mention of God. I'm offended by the fact that the government thinks every citizen who does not support 'one nation under God' is as bad as a citizen who does not support 'liberty and justice for all'."

If they say that religion is necessary for morality and that removing God from the school is the source of all evil, I want you to go there and answer, "Mr. X is guilty of moral chauvinism – the crime too many religions are guilty of where they say that 'those who belong to my church are morally superior to those who do not."

If they complain about the minority imposing its will on the majority, I want you to go there and ank, "Would you see nothing wrong with a community that happens to be 85% white adopting a community pledge of allegiance to 'one white community'? Would you see opposition to such a pledge as a minority trying to force its will on the majority?"

If they speak about posting 'In God We Trust' in the civic center or the classroom, I want you to go there and protest, "I do not think that it is appropriate for a law-abiding citizen to have to walk into a classroom or a government building and see a sign on the wall that says, 'If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you to be one of us.'"

If they speak about showing respect for those who fought for our freedoms, I want you to go there and answer, "Some of those who fought for our freedoms did not believe in God. Yet, you want to compare those who do not support 'one nation under God' to those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'. That's not a show of respect. That is an insult. Unlike you, I insist on showing respect for all of those who fought and died for our freedoms, not just that fraction that happened to share your religious belief while insulting those that did not."

If they speak about how the Pledge is non-discriminatory because students are free to leave the room while others give the Pledge, I want you to go there and answer, "I can think of no better way to teach children that atheists are unpatriotic then to conspicuously exclude them from a pledge of allegiance." Or, alternatively, I want you to ask, "If we have a Pledge of Allegiance to one white nation, but black students were free not to participate for personal reasons, would you argue that this eliminates all trace of prejudice from such a pledge?"

If a candidate says that the Pledge and the Motto does not call into question the moral character or the patriotism of atheist citizens, I want you to call for that candidate to put this on the record by voting for a resolution that says, "The fact that a citizen does not trust in God, or does not support one nation under God because of a lack of belief in God, in no way diminishes his moral character or patriotism."

The goal of this project is that, by the time the public discussion of this issue dies down again, we have introduced a whole new set of arguments into the public debate – arguments that have been sorely missing or underrepresented in the past 50 years. These are arguments that do not mention 'separation of church and state' or the First Amendment or the Constitution. These are arguments that do not care about the intentions of the founding fathers. These are arguments about how a government ought to treat its peaceful law-abiding citizens.

I am not saying that those other arguments are bad arguments. I am saying that I trust that those arguments will be adequately represented in the public debate. They will be used by people who are not familiar with this blog. They will be used by people who are familiar with and comfortable with those arguments. My hope is to augment those arguments with arguments that have so far gone largely unheard – moral arguments of the type that I have been presenting in the Pledge Project.

From the time the Court releases its opinion, through the July 4th weekend, 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' will be front page news. I want to use that opportunity to introduce them to arguments that they will almost never get a chance to see under any other circumstances. This is a short window of opportunity, and it will not come again until the Supreme Court decides the issue probably in the year 2010. We need to use this window of opportunity to inject these arguments into the debate now to have any hope of influencing that decision.

I would like you to monitor the news during those seven days and send me reports on who said what. In those reports, tell me

(1) Exactly what was said. (Provide exact quotes in context.)

(2) Who said it.

(3) Contact information where readers can go to respond to what was said.

I want you to take advantage of this information as I post it on this site to take advantage of that contact information to present the arguments that have made up the Pledge Project.

I want you to solicit the help of your friends, relatives, and group members who share an interest in these issues and this project.

Our focus is going to be on the mainstream media – on people who, if they hear these new arguments, will be able to present them to a wider audience. Our focus will be to get national news agencies to ask their invited quests and political candidates, "What do you think about the argument that ‘under God’ in the Pledge has to do more with keeping atheists out of public office than with mentioning God in the public square?"

Or, to ask a defender of 'under God', "You say that 'under God' is not an endorsement of religion. Would you say that 'liberty and justice for all' is also not an endorsement of liberty and justice for all?"

Or, "Do you think that it is fair for the child of an atheist to have to sit in a classroom where there is a sign on the wall that says, 'If you do not trust in God, then we do not consider you to be one of us'?"

That's the goal of this project.

Before I go, I want to conclude with a couple of side notes.

First, this is not a conflict between Atheists and Christians. A person can be a Christian and still appreciate that it is wrong to hang a sign in city hall or in a classroom that says, "We do not consider a person who lacks trust in God as being one of us." This is true in the same way that a person can be white and still disapprove of hanging a sign in city hall that says, "We do not consider a person who is black as being one of us."

A person can be a Christian and appreciate that it is wrong to have a Pledge of Allegiance to 'one nation under God' in the same way that a person can be white and appreciate the wrongness of a pledge of allegiance to 'one white nation'.

In fact, a few of these people have already written in comments and emails endorsing the Pledge Project.

All these people need to recognize is the right of all peaceful and law-abiding citizens to the equal respect of their government.

Second, while links to my site are flattering, it is best to put the argument itself in your communications directly, rather than to do so with a link to this cite. Most people do not follow links. If you do not present the argument in your communication, then the readers you are trying to reach will not see that argument. You need not give me credit in your statements. This is not about credit. All that matters is that you get the arguments out there.

The Pledge Project: Political Consequences

"Vote for me, and I will turn America's court system over to you." This appears to be Republican presidential candidate John McCain's strategy to get religious conservatives to support him, the way they supported Bush in previous elections.

MSNBC: McCain Reaches Out but Evangelicals Still Wary

I would bet good money that the McCain campaign is counting down the days to the 9th Circuit Court opinions on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' (now between 0 and 21 days away). They have probably prepared a full-court press on the topics of "patriotism" and "judicial activism" starting the day that the decision comes out, and following through to the day of the election.

With millions of votes, tens of millions of dollars, and millions of hours of volunteer time on the table, the release of the Court opinion – particularly if it goes against 'under God' in the Pledge – will be harvest time for the McCain campaign.

Meanwhile, I would also bet good money that the Obama campaign doesn't even see this one coming. Some time before the end of June some Obama staff worker will be working with CNN on in the background when the news channel will break with some important news. "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has again ruled that 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment." Uttering a string of profanities she will then drop everything as she starts making frantic phone calls saying, "We need some kind of response, and we need one quick."

This, of course, is pure speculation on my part.

Obama does have a part of his campaign directly focused on evangelical outreach.

Nevertheless, the Obama campaign plans to add a full-time evangelical-focused staff member to its existing religious outreach team and is rolling out an effort over the summer to organize over a thousand house parties built around an hour-and-a-half-long curriculum on faith and politics.

Part of Obama's evangelical strategy seems to be getting them focused on issues like poverty and the environment, rather than homosexuality and abortion. Still, I suspect that Obama will see no need to have an outreach program for secular America. Why should he, given that secular America has very little to offer in return in terms of votes, money, or volunteer labor?

If the people involved in this outreach are competent, they are ready for the upcoming 9th Circuit Court opinions regarding 'under God' and 'In God We Trust', and they will not get caught by surprise.

Obama has already stated that he expects McCain to attack him largely on issues of patriotism, and the 9th Circuit Court opinion will provide the best possible opportunity for such an attack.

The smart response from the Obama campaign would be to denounce the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in no uncertain terms – even more harshly than McCain. Politically, it would be wife for him to express as much hatred for the secularists who are 'seeking to remove all mention of God from the public square' and to profess how important it is that Americans express their religious views in public ceremonies and rituals. He will then talk about the importance of faith in his own life and state how religion is good for Americans (implying that no religion is bad for Americans).

The reason that this is the smart response is because he has little to lose in siding against secularism, and a great deal to gain. There are few votes in embracing secularism. There is almost no money in it. There are few volunteer hours to be expected from those who identify themselves as secularists. Siding with secularism in this country is the same as handing huge amounts of resources to one’s opponent. This is not something that a candidate who wishes to win will be prepared to do.

I suspect, Obama is in this election to win.

In Obama's only statement on this issue that I am aware of, he said that he did not feel oppressed by the words 'under God' when he went to school. (Call to Renewall Keynote Address) I would like to know if he feels the same way now that he has been the victim of a smear campaign that motivates people against him on the basis of a lie that he does not say the Pledge. Has this made him aware of what the political consequences are for those who cannot honestly pledge allegiance to 'one nation under God'?

Secularists are not going to get any help from either side of the political isle until they make it worthwhile in terms of votes, in terms of cash, and in terms of volunteer labor hours worked to give that support.

This is the situation that we have gotten ourselves into by 40 years in which secularists have presented their arguments to the courts in the form of politically unpopular lawsuits, but not to the people. While secularists have expected the wall of separation of church and state to stand forever, sectarian sappers have been tunneling underneath.

Once they control the judges, there will be no wall.

These are the political facts. Let's not ignore reality here.

Politics is fueled by the making of political deals – the "you wash my back and I'll wash yours" method of social interaction. In McCain’s case, the deal that he is going to propose will be, "You give me the White House, and I will give you the courts."

This is a deal that the religious base will accept, because they appreciate the power of the courts. Though they cry against 'judicial activism', they define 'judicial activism' as 'any judicial decision that produces a result that I do not like'. 'Judicial activism' for these people means, 'Any decision on the part of any judge that I disagree with.'

Since the defense of secularism will not come from Obama, it has to come from people outside of politics who recognize the value of secularism – from you and me.

We have to create a nation where it is once again safe for a candidate to say that he supports the separation of church and state and to say that he opposes the government declarations that question the membership of those who do not trust in God. We need to make it safe for politicians to suggest that there is something wrong with the moral character or patriotism of a citizen who does not support 'one nation under God'. Then, and only then, will we have politicians on our side again. Then, and only then, will we atheists themselves be able to run for public office and win.

We need to put some votes, some cash, and some willingness to do work behind secularism. Then, we will have a voice that the politicians will have reason to listen to.

The Pledge Project: An Endorsement of Religious Belief

I know that this is not a blog in Constitutional law. However, there is a statement in the Supreme Court record that:

(1) Is blatantly absurd.

(2) Can be easily shown to be blatantly absurd.

(3) I have never seen the proof of its absurdity anywhere other than in this blog.

The absurd proposition appears in County of Allegheny et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union where, with an eye towards previous Supreme Court decisions, the statement was made that:

Our previous opinions have considered in dicta the motto and the pledge, characterizing them as consistent with the proposition that government may not communicate an endorsement [492 U.S. 573, 603] of religious belief. Lynch, 465 U.S., at 693 (O'CONNOR, J., concurring); id., at 716-717 (BRENNAN, J., dissenting).

I have been reading the briefs for the 9th Circuit Court case that will be decided in the next 20 days or less. I have seen repeated references to this absurdity. Yet, nowhere have I seen what to me is the most obvious proof that it is absurd.

The easy proof that this is an absurdity requires a simple substitution that brings the absurdity right into the light.

Our previous opinions have considered in dicta the pledge, characterizing them as consistent with the proposition that the government may not communicate an endorsement of one nation, indivisible.

Or

Our previous opinions have considered in dicta the pledge, characterizing them as consistent with the proposition that the government may not communicate an endorsement of liberty and justice for all.

There is no proposition that the government may not endorse union, or that the government may not endorse liberty and justice for all. Yet, these two statements make clear how absurd it is to claim that 'indivisible' does not endorse union, and 'with liberty and justice for all' does not endorse liberty and justice for all.

It makes clear the absurity of the claim that 'one nation under God' does not endorse the proposition of 'one nation under God'.

I am going to be redundant here simply to make sure that the point gets through.

It is absolutely absurd to say that the Pledge is not an endorsement of liberty and justice for all.

It is absolutely absurd to say that the Pledge is not an endorsement of one nation, indivisible.

It is equally as absurd to say that the Pledge is not an endorsement of 'one nation under God'.

In fact, I can hardly think of a statement so easily proved false as this statement that the Supreme Court has repeated through a whole string of decisions – that the words 'under God' added to the Pledge does not endorse religious beliefs. Anybody who believes that the Pledge does not endorse 'one nation under God' has to believe that it does not endorse 'liberty and justice for all', and that is simply unbelievable.

Yet, as I have said, in nearly 30 years of Supreme Court decisions in which this claim has been made, I am surprised never to have seen this very simple proof as to its absurdity.

Situations like this make me wonder if I am not the person who is overlooking something obvious. How is it that a whole nation can miss what to me is entirely obvious – that the words 'under God' endorse religious beliefs in the same way that 'indivisible' endorses union and 'with liberty and justice for all' endorses liberty and justice for all?

To me, this is truly a case of a people, so overwhelmed by culture and tradition, that none of them even thinks to consider the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Not only do they refuse to say what is completely obvious, but in their minds they manufacture an image of clothing and convince themselves that they see it. That this applies to proponents and opponents alike. Nobody dares to admit what is too obvious to deny – that 'one nation under God' endorses the religious belief of one nation under God in the same way that 'with liberty and justice for all' endorses liberty and justice for all.

If it is not the case that I am missing something – if this argument is as obvious as it appears to be – then this is an argument that needs to be made a part of the public debate before the Supreme Court actually passes judgment on the issue.

If the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declares 'under God' to be unconstitutional, then the Supreme Court will likely hear the case in its 2009-2010 term. Oral arguments will likely be heard in late 2009, giving us about 18 months to make this argument so much a part of the public consciousness of this issue that no news commentator and no Supreme Court judge can ignore it.

I have been giving this argument for 2.5 years now. I first gave this argument in the story, A Perspective on the Pledge. I expanded on the argument to make the book by the same name, "A Perspective on the Pledge."

I would like somebody to explain why this argument does not utterly destroy the claim that the Supreme Court has used for 30 years to assert that 'under God' does not violate the First Amendment.

Anybody?

The Pledge Project: Moral Chauvinism

The Pledge Project: Promoting Morality

One of the claims that we are certain to hear if the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declares 'under God' to violate the Constitution is how the country is descending into greater and greater immorality as a result of moving God from the schools and the country.

In other words, if you want to be safe – if you want to live without fear of being robbed, raped, or murdered, you need to support 'under God' in the classroom, 'In God We Trust' on the classroom walls, prayer in schools, abstinence only sex education, and creationism. If you do not support these things, do not be surprised if you wake up slaughtered in your sleep by the evil secularists out there waiting for an opportunity to get you.

The standard response to these types of claims is for secularists to say, "Atheists can be good, too." Indeed, this is true.

I selected the name that I use for this blog precisely to counter this type of prejudice. To a lot of people, putting the terms 'atheist' and 'ethicist' together in the same blog title is an oxymoron – like writing about round squares or unmarried bachelors. This prejudice needs to be put in its place – along with all of the other prejudices that have plagued humanity.

So, I would like to recommend a new type of response to this claim. Rather than the defensive, "I can be moral, too," type of response, I would like to recommend a response more like the following:

Mr. X has just given us an example of one of the things religion has been most successful at since religion was invented – promoting bigotry. It does this because the practitioners of each religion get to declare that they are morally superior to all others, so members become the privileged class with God's own right to look down the inferior members of society – the infidels, the heathens, the unbelievers, the heretics, ir noses on everybody else.

I am not saying that every religion suffers from the same moral chauvinism – though, historically, it has been a very common attitude to take.

In addition, let's not deny that some atheists are moral chauvinists as well, writing or speaking as if lack of belief gives in a God gives a person membership in a morally elite club that gets to look down on all others.

I have argued against these positions repeatedly in this blog, and I will argue against them in the future. The propositions 'At least one god exists' and 'No god(s) exist' carry no moral implications. It's the stuff that we add onto these claims that carry moral weight. Atheists are just as capable of tacking absurdities onto the proposition, "No god(s) exist," as theists are at tacking absurdities onto the proposition, "At least one god exists."

But Mr. X has proven by his statements that he belongs to one of those religions that does preach and does practice moral chauvinism.

Mr. X has just told us that he sees two type of people in the world – those who share his religion, and those who do not. Mr. X has just told us that of the two that he, of course, belongs to the morally superior group, while those who do not share his views are the morally inferior to him and his kind.

Of course, Mr. X is a member of the morally superior group. Can we imagine Mr. X telling us that his group is the morally inferior group? This has always been the case with this type of moral chauvinism. Moral chauvinism simply is the expression of the attitude that "I belong to a group that is morally superior to all others. So, I get to morally judge others by one simple standard. To what degree do you share my morally superior qualities."

Perhaps Mr. X is magnanimous enough that he is willing to widen his circle of morally acceptable people a little – to let in religions that are not too much different from his own. Yet, this is the same chauvinism as the white racist willing to expand his circle of prejudice to include a few brown people, but which cannot fathom the idea of letting in blacks.

Of course, the shade at which Mr. X decides to draw the line between those who are acceptable and those who are unacceptable, since it is not grounded on evidence, is grounded only on Mr. X's personal preferences.

Or, I should say, his personal prejudices, because that is all we are talking about here.

Nobody has the right to assert moral superiority over a whole group – not unless the group itself is defined as people who are guilty of some crime (e.g., murderers, rapists, thieves). The very act of dividing the world into groups, and asserting that one's own group is morally superior to all others, is an act of moral chauvinism. This is bigotry.

Each of us has a right to be judged by our own actions – according to the quality of our own deeds. If it should turn out that every other atheist on the planet is a sadistic serial killer, it would still not be justified in claiming that I am a sadistic serial killer - not without evidence that I am actually sadistically killing people.

This tendency to divide the world into groups (my religion vs. your religion, my country vs. your country, the fans of my soccer team vs. the fans of your soccer team) and assert moral superiority of one group over the other, is a religious trait. It is a human trait. I strongly suspect that if Earth were to become totally populated by atheists, that those atheists would still be dividing themselves up into separate group, declaring the moral superiority of 'my group' over 'your group', with all of the ill effects that we have seen in the conflicts among different religions.

This is a human quality, but it is an evil quality – one that we have every reason to fight against, and to condemn whenever and wherever it emerges.

It emerges any time that somebody argues that we need 'under God' in the Pledge, 'In God We Trust' in the motto, prayer in school, and creationism in science classes, in order to promote morality in the schools. These statements are built on the assumption of moral chauvinism - an unfounded assumption that those who are members of 'my group' who trusts in God are morally superior to all other groups, and people are moral only to the degree that they belong to and follow the dictates of 'my group'.

Strangely, even some atheists are moral chauvinists – not in the sense of holding that atheism is morally superior to others, but in assuming that atheists are morally inferior to others. These are the people who write or speak to tell us that atheists must be more moral in order to set a better example – to prove to others that we are not as bad as others think we are.

This attitude tells us that the speaker has internalized society's moral chauvinism against atheists – turning it even against themselves. These types of claims assume that atheists are not already living moral lives. These types of claims say, in effect, that the public hostility against atheists is deserved, given the moral inferiority of atheists, and that we need to shun that moral inferiority if we are to earn the moral respect of our 'betters'.

None of us are morally perfect. There is certainly room for moral improvement among atheists as there is room for moral improvement among all people. I am not objecting to the claim that atheists can do better – atheists certainly can do better. I am objecting to the assumption that the prejudice against atheists – the judgment that atheists must work harder in order to deserve to be considered the moral equal of others that I am objecting to.

I object to this assumption. I object when it comes from a theist who asserts that 'under God', 'In God We Trust', school prayer, and creationism are essential for morality. I object when it comes from an atheist who says that atheists must engage in more moral behavior before they can be considered the moral equal to theists.

And I think that this type of chauvinism needs to be answered with something other than, "But I am a good person." I think it needs to be answered with, "By merely making that claim – unless you have some evidence to back it up – you have proved yourself to be a moral chauvinist."

The Pledge Project: Liberty and Justice for All

In debating whether to have a Pledge of Allegiance, another view that I encounter comes from those who protest the Pledge, not because of the words 'under God', but because of the words 'liberty and justice for all'.

These people come in two major stripes.

The first group says, "I do not say the last six words of the Pledge, 'with liberty and justice for all', because we do not have liberty and justice for all. We are engaged in a great deal of injustice. Saying that this is a nation of liberty and justice for all is a lie.'

The second group says that they do not say the Pledge at all for substantially the same reason.

These people miss an important fact about the Pledge. A pledge to "one nation . . . with liberty and justice for all' is not a statement that we are actually a nation with liberty and justice for all. It is a statement that we should be a nation with liberty and justice for all.

Consider the first group – the group that says the Pledge but leaves the last six words off because 'we are not a nation with liberty and justice for all'. These people are still pledging allegiance to the United States. These people are still pledging allegiance to 'one nation under God'. Yet, if their interpretation is correct, they are pledging allegiance to a nation that is both, at the same time, 'under God' and 'without liberty and justice for all'. Their interpretation of the Pledge would be ideal for a theocratic tyranny.

Yet, these people in creating and in reciting this pledge, think that they are protesting tyranny and injustice. By their own statements, they are pledging allegiance to tyranny and injustice.

Those who refuse to say the Pledge at all on the grounds that lack liberty and justice for all have a more consistent (and sensible) view. At least they are not pledging allegiance to a nation 'under God' but without liberty and justice for all.

Yet, their refusal to recite the Pledge in virtue of their belief that we do not have perfect liberty and justice implies that everybody who says the Pledge believes that we have somehow reached a state of perfect liberty and justice. Yet, I doubt if you will find anybody who actually holds that view. Even those who are the most vocal advocates of saying the pledge can generally find some remaining injustice in this country worth complaining about (and in need of fixing).

The view that the Pledge states we have perfect liberty and justice, and that it is not to be said because it simply is not true, is an absurdity.

The fact of the matter is that the Pledge is not descriptive, it is prescriptive. It does not say that we do have perfect liberty and justice. It says that we should have perfect liberty and justice – or as perfect as we can get it. We may fall short of this ideal (as most people, and most nations, fall short of the ideals they set for themselves). However, the ideal is something to strive for.

Yet, this fact carries an important implication. In the same way that 'liberty and justice for all' is prescriptive, 'one nation under God' is prescriptive as well. By inserting 'under God' into the Pledge, the government is telling its citizens (and, in particular, young children who have a habit of accepting the claims made by authority figures such as government teachers without questioning it) that the nation should be a nation 'under God'. We may fall short of this ideal, but it is an ideal worth striving for, according to the government.

Now, when the government prescribes 'liberty and justice for all', this is another way of saying that we should strive to establish a country of liberty and justice for all. So, when the government prescribes 'one nation under God', this is another way of saying that we should strive to establish a country 'under God'.

Yet, somehow, we are supposed to believe that the government can prescribe 'one nation under God' without it being the case that the government is trying to establish 'one nation under God'. Yet, ask those people whether the government's attempt to prescribe 'liberty and justice for all' without it being the case that the government is trying to establish 'liberty and justice for all'.

Does the person you are talking to want to deny that the Pledge prescribes 'one nation under God', and that this is the same as trying to establish 'one nation under God', answer, "So, you believe that this country is already a state with perfect liberty and justice.'

When they deny this, tell them that they have only two options. Either the Pledge says that we already have perfect liberty and justice for all, or it says that we should strive for (establish, to whatever degree we can) liberty and justice for all. Either the Pledge says that we already are one nation under God, or it says that we should strive to be (establish, to whatever degree we can) one nation under God.

Any argument that the Pledge of Allegiance is descriptive ends up in this absurdity that we already have 'liberty and justice for all'. Any argument that avoids this absurdity yields the conclusion that 'one nation under God' is prescriptive - an attempt to establish 'one nation under God' just as the Pledge is an attempt to establish 'liberty and justice for all'.

The Pledge Project: Should There Be a Pledge?

Note: The Pledge Project is featured on the most recent edition of Dogma Free America. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

If you enter into a public discussion on 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, you will often encounter somebody who will argue that there should be no Pledge at all. 'Loyalty oaths,' they argue, are the instruments of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, and free people should not be bound by such oaths. It goes against the very idea of freedom.

I want to take a good close look at the ethics of 'loyalty oaths'.

Let me begin by quickly clearing away some of the larger brush.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a loyalty oath. This is because there is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything. Intrinsic value does not exist. The only type of value that exists are relationships between states of affairs and desires. Moral wrongness is found in relationships between states of affairs and good desires (and the absence of bad desires). Good desires are those that people generally have reason to promote. Bad desires are desires that people generally have reason to inhibit.

Long-time readers will recognize these as the basic claims of desire utilitarianism, which I have argued for throughout this blog. A search through this blog for the term 'desire utilitarianism' or a look at the book mentioned on the right will lead you to postings that discuss the theory in more detail. Readers interested in an alternative presentation of desire utilitarianism (or 'desire consequentalism' as he calls it) are encouraged to check out No Double Standards

Anyway, a state of affairs in which people utter a loyalty oath such as a Pledge of Allegiance is bad only to the degree that a person with good desires would be averse to such a state of affairs.

One of the reasons a person with good desires might be averse to loyalty oaths is because they were used by totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. However, the mere fact that a tool was used by evil people does not give us reason to reject the tool. Hitler also used airplanes and tanks, money, roads, cameras, and a great many other tools to further his ends. His use of a tool for evil purposes does not argue against our use of similar tools for good purposes.

A related argument that somebody can use is that there have been evil pledges. That is to say, the pledge itself was a promise to promote something evil, as when subjects in a dictatorship are told that they must pledge allegiance to the dictator. However, we can say the same thing about laws in general. Where there are laws, there is a risk of evil people promoting laws that do more to secure injustice than justice. We see this in totalitarian regimes all the time, and even in our own country where special-interest groups push for unjust laws that favor their faction over others. However, the existence of an unjust law is no argument against the legitimacy of just laws. The existence of pledges used for immoral purposes does not argue against the possibility of a pledge being put to good use.

I spoke above about the existence of desires and aversions that people generally have reason to promote. What if a Pledge of Allegiance were an effective way to promote good desires? That is to say, what if a pledge of allegiance to ‘liberty and justice for all’ were to actually to promote the desire for liberty and justice for all? Whereas liberty and justice (or an aversion to tyranny and injustice) are desires that people have reason to promote, this argues that we have reason to use such a ‘loyalty oath’ and no reason to refrain from using it.

In other words, a pledge, when the pledge is to something good (worthy of promoting) is something that a good person would favor (for its power to promote that which is good), rather than something to which a good person would be adverse.

What about the claim that loyalty oaths (a Pledge of Allegiance) is contrary to freedom?

We have to recognize that freedom is not an absolute. Freedom does not include a right to engage in murder, rape, or theft. Freedom does not extend to the ‘freedom’ to promote tyranny and injustice. The type of freedom that we have reason to argue is something good is the type of freedom that still does not rule out our taking steps to outlaw or to otherwise discourage people from murder, rape, theft, tyranny, and injustice. If a pledge of allegiance to 'liberty and justice for all' helps to discourage tyranny and injustice, then inhibits freedom in the same way that laws against murder, rape, and theft inhibit freedom.

This raises another possible objection – that pledges of allegiance do not work. We have had people pledge allegiance to 'liberty and justice for all' for over a century now, yet we still have unjust restrictions on liberty. (Furthermore, an argument can be made that those who argue most emphatically for the virtue of the Pledge of Allegiance seem to be pushing most strongly for unjust restrictions on liberty.)

This is an empirical question, and one that I must confess I am ill prepared to answer.

However, I will point out that we use oaths throughout our society in order to try to focus people’s attention on certain duties and obligations. Elected officials take an oath of office – effectively, a loyalty oath (an oath to be loyal to the Constitution of the United States, in the case of federal officials). Witnesses take an oath before stepping on a stand. Many married couples (myself included) take an oath as the central part of the marriage ceremony.

All of these oaths aim to fix into the mind a commitment to particular ends, and an aversion to that which would violate those commitments. I think it would be difficult to argue that those oaths have no effect – that they do not actually promote the ends that they seek to promote.

In fact, if loyalty oaths had no effect, then tyrants and dictators would have no reason to use them. They, at least, expect these oaths to better secure their position. It is just as likely (or just as unlikely) that those oaths can also be used to secure certain values such as ‘liberty and justice for all’.

If we are left uncertain as to the effect of such oaths, we would still be left with reason to believe that a loyalty oath to 'liberty and justice for all' will have some or no positive effect. It will not have negative effect. So, we still have reason to use such an oath (in terms of its possible positive effect), and no reason not to other than the possibility that it is a waste of time.

All of this depends, of course, on whether the Pledge is being used to promote something worthy of being promoted (e.g., liberty and justice for all), or to promote something that should not be promoted (e.g., obedience to a tyrant).

A relevant problem is that people will inevitably disagree over what is worth promoting. There is always a risk that one faction will put its ideas into a Pledge as a way of shutting down the opposition, stifling debate on issues that very much need to be debated. One way to avoid this type of problem is to simply not have a Pledge, It is not possible to make rhetorical use of a Pledge if there is no Pledge to use.

We see this very problem with the Pledge of Allegiance. The words ‘under God’ were inserted into the Pledge by demagogues attempting to close debate on issues that are very much need to be debated. Worse, they attempted to close debate on issues where the government has a prohibition on taking sides – on matters of religion. This gives us unambiguous evidence that demagogues will seek to use a Pledge to manipulate the public, from which we can argue that it is better that no Pledge exists at all.

Here, too, we must weigh this against the fact that all institutions are open to abuse. The institutions of morality and law themselves are constantly being abused by demagogues seeking to manipulate the public. Yet, these institutions provide so much of an advantage when used correctly that the possibility of abuse does not argue for abolition. These moral and legal institutions include the practice of making pledges. Where we need to devote our energies is in fighting these corruptions, not in eliminating the institutions that are being corrupted. In would be difficult to argue that we should rid ourselves of the institutions of morality and law simply because some people abuse these institutions.

There is no argument against the moral permissibility of a good Pledge. There is no argument against the possibility of a good Pledge. The argument that evil powers have used Pledges is no more of an argument against a good Pledge then the fact that evil powers have manipulated the law is an argument against just law. Our focus should be on promoting justice over injustice, both in pledges and in laws, rather than throwing away tools that the unjust might be willing to exploit.

The Pledge Project: Prayers and Promises

First, a note. My posting, "The Pledge Project: House Resolution 5872" was picked up in the Carnival of the Liberals today. The host wrote about the article:

I thought at first that this would be the same old same old on this topic, but I believe Alonso has some good points. If only someone in Congress would ever think of things this way!

This describes exactly what I am aiming for in this series. I do not want readers to come here and find a repeat of the same arguments that they have heard from a thousand other sources discussing this issue over the past fifty years. I want them to come here and find an approach to the issues of ‘under God’ in the pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto that have been ignored (and unheard) for the past 50 years.

A part of this project is to create a repository of responses that readers can come back to once the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hands out its decisions (in 25 days or less).

Some of the arguments that I want to respond to are those that are found in the State's oral arguments before the Court. Those arguments will undoubtedly enter into the public discussion once the debate hits the streets.

Today's post concerns a pair of arguments.

(1) That putting 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance makes it a prayer, and the Supreme Court has already ruled that prayer in public schools is unconstitutional.

(2) The words 'under God' in the Pledge do not make it a prayer. Rather, it makes reciting the Pledge of Allegiance no different than reciting the Declaration of Independence or singing the Star Spangled Banner – other patriotic expressions that contain a reference to a God. Whereas these latter items are permissible, the former must also be permissible.

Let me repeat the point that I am not interested in legal arguments in these points, but in moral arguments. The lawyers in making the arguments above followed them up by trying to provide evidence of how the court has ruled on prayer versus patriotic expressions such reading the Declaration of Independence. Mine is a moral argument, so I have no need for legal precedence. There is a distinction between what the law is and what the law ought to be, and this post is concerned with the moral question of what the law ought to be.

Prayers and Promises

I find it surprising how, in this debate, people overlook the most obvious facts.

Regardless of whether the Pledge is a prayer or a patriotic expression like reading the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance is a promise. A promise, in turn, is a part of a moral institution that carries with it certain implications. One of the major properties of a promise is that the person who makes a promise agrees to take on certain duties and obligations.

If I promise to pay you $5, then I acquire an obligation to provide you with $5. In general, if I make a promise to realize some state of affairs S, then I have given myself an obligation or a duty to realize that state of affairs S. So, if a child pledges allegiance to 'one nation under God', then she puts herself under an obligation to preserve or to create a state that can be described as 'one nation under God'.

We have legal scholars from one end of the country to the other arguing over whether the act that put 'under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance turned the pledge into a prayer. The comedian Red Skelton gave a speech that defenders of the pledge are very fond of where he worries that the term 'under God' might be construed as making the Pledge into a prayer and banning it from schools. In the oral arguments before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Michael Newdow (arguing that ‘under God’ is unconstitutional) took the time to provide quotes from Presidents and others to argue that the Pledge is a prayer and thus something the Supreme Court has already made unconstitutional.

However, not even a prayer has the property of putting the prayer-giver under an obligation.

Certainly, when a person prays she can make promises to God (or she can at least think that she is making promises to God). However, it is not in virtue of being a prayer that the agent adopts these obligations. It is in virtue of making a promise that the agent acquires obligations (or would have if there were a real God for her to make promises to).

I would like to know how it can be the case that it is wrong to ‘encourage’ (actually 'coerce') children into saying a prayer to God, but it cannot be wrong to 'encourage' a child to make a promise and, thus, incur an obligation to support 'one nation under God'. The prayer only asserts the existence of a God. A promise not only asserts that a God exists but puts the speaker under an obligations with respect to that entity.

The Second Elephant

At this point, I would like to introduce the second elephant in the room that everybody seems to be ignoring.

(1) The Pledge of Allegiance is a promise

(2) A promise to establish a state of affairs S (e.g. to pay you 5) is an act that puts the speaker under an obligation to realize state S.

(3) A promise to support 'one nation under God' is an act that puts one under an obligation to create a state of 'one nation under God'.

How can this act of putting children under an obligation to establish a state of 'one nation under God' not be an instance of Congress passing a law that seeks to establish religion?

Like I said, this blog is not concerned with Constitutional arguments but with moral arguments. So, I will leave it up to the Constitutional scholars to deal with the legal question of whether such an act, understood as having these qualities, violates the First Amendment.

My point, with respect to the moral case, is that any student who takes the Pledge of Allegiance puts herself under an obligation to realize a state of ‘one nation under God’, which is a quality not inherent to prayers.

Patriotic Documents and Anthems

This difference between the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer is also a difference between the Pledge of Allegiance and reading the Declaration of Independence or singing the National Anthem.

The mere reading of a document does not put the reader under any sort of obligation, even if he is reading a document that the author wrote in order to put the author of an obligation. If I write down on a piece of paper that I will pay Jane Smith five dollars, and you pick up the note and read it out loud, this does not put you under an obligation to pay Jane Smith five dollars.

A person who sings the Star Spangled Banner also does not put himself under any type of obligation.

This quality is reserved for those who make a promise – in this case, a promise to establish a state of 'one nation under God'.

Conclusion

I have no idea why the most obvious qualify of a Pledge of Allegiance – that it is a pledge and, thus, a speech act that puts the speaker under an obligation, has been so widely ignored to date. It appears to me to be a significant difference between a Pledge and a prayer, or a simple recital of a historic document or a song.

If there is a reason why this factor has not entered into the public debate, I would like to know what it is.

In the mean time, I think it is time for this fact to enter into the public debate.

The Pledge Project: Why?

I think that I owe an answer to this question:

Are you not bored with this yet? I used to be a regular reader here, but I have to tell you, this pledge thing is not that interesting. But every time I drop in for a visit, God and the Pledge is within the last few day's topics. Yawn.... While I am an atheist, and I don't like the phrase "Under God" anymore than you do, I just can't understand why you think this is such a large grain of sand in the Vaseline jar.

The Pledge Project ends on July 7th.

Specifically, I expect that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to give its opinion between June 26th and June 30th. Whatever the date, I will then post a directory of postings written up to that time linking to the various arguments that I have discussed. Hopefully it will serve as a useful resource for those who will be engaged in the debate that follows.

NOTE: 6/23. I have discovered that the above prediction was based on false assumptions.

I have already asked for the time off from work for the week following the anticipated decision date so that I can fully participate in the debate.

The national discussion will probably go through the July 4th weekend where people will use the patriotic holiday to muster support for ‘under God’ in the pledge, then the story will fade as the nation moves on to other issues.

I will move on as well. However, the U.S. Supreme Court will likely hear the case late in 2009 or early 2010, rending a final opinion on the issue of ‘under God’ and ‘In God We Trust.’ I sincerely believe that if these moral arguments can be pushed into the public light before the Supreme Court hears the case, that there is a chance that the Supreme Court may decide correctly on these issues. Otherwise, the Court will give us a new and extremely narrow interpretation of the Establishment Clause that will prohibit nothing less than fine and imprisonment for not attending Church.

So, why am I putting so much energy into this?

Answer:

(1) Because I think these policies are extremely destructive – far more destructive than most people realize.

(2) Because the principles on which my objections are based have implications across a number of areas where discrimination and religious conflict are an issue.

The Costs of the Current Policies

A lot of people are significantly underestimating the harms of having ‘under God’ in the Pledge and ‘In God We Trust’ as our motto. In particular, they are ignoring the psychological harm being done to young children.

There have been a great many psychological studies done about what happens when you divide a population up into an in-group and an out-group. These experiments have involved differences as subtle as giving one group a blue ribbon to wear on their shirt and the out-group a green ribbon - or dividing a room between 'those on the left' and 'those on the right'.

The out-group becomes submissive and servile. They find it difficult to look members of the in-group in the eye. They become underperformers, suffering from a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence that keeps them from even trying to accomplish some of the things they might have otherwise strived for. At the same time, the in-group becomes dominant and aggressive. "Believing in themselves", they become much more willing and able to assert themselves against others, particularly members of the out-group. Because of the extra effort, they actually become more successful.

It does not matter whether we are talking about Arians and Jews, blacks and whites, males and females, theists and atheists, the psychological dynamics of in-group and out-group relationships follow the same pattern.

I see that pattern to be blindingly obvious whenever I read news stories about some abuse or insult inflicted on atheists and their passive response to these assaults.

How can you get 6 million Jews into the forced labor camps and gas chambers? How can you get millions of black slaves to work the fields with just a few overseers? How can you treat women as property for thousands of years and have women submissively believe that this is their rightful place, and keep them in that place even in several regions of the world today?

These things happen because the human brain is wired in such a way that out-group membership makes people submissive and obedient, unwilling to take a stand against their own victimization.

President Bush, when he said that he would not appoint anybody to be a judge who does not believe that our rights come from God, should have seen that as the end of his political life. It should have been like claiming that he will only appoint white judges or Christian judges. Yet, nothing happened.

Monique Davis, in claiming from her chair as a Illinois state representative that atheism is a philosophy of destruction, should have seen this as the end of her political career - the way that Trent Lott's career suffered with a single comment praising segregationist Strom Thurmond. She apologized only for raising her voice.

Kieffe & Sons, the Ford dealership telling secularists to sit down and shut up in their advertisement, should have been met with protests that would have threatened to shut down their business unless they gave a serious apology. For a few moments it seemed that they were actually worried about the response. Then they realized that the people they were dealing with were too passive to be much of a threat.

These are real-world observations that make it obvious that we are dealing with a situation with an aggressive and dominant in-group culture of theists against a passive and submissive out-group culture of atheists.

This comes from a program that teaches children on the first day of school, and on from there, that those who support ‘one nation under God’ and who trust in God belong to the in-group, and those who do not belong in the out-group.

Demoting Atheism

In addition to creating a society of aggressive theists and passive atheists, the Pledge and the motto do an excellent job of serving their primary purpose of steering children away from atheism (because no child wants to be a part of the out-group of he can help it) and towards theism (because children have a deep need to be a part of the in group if they can get in).

It does so in a way that shuts their mind to atheism, because atheism comes at too high a cost. Adopting atheism means entering into the out-group. Evidence that atheist claims might be correct stirs an emotional response – a level of anxiety that overrides rational thought and fixes the person’s brain on a belief that they cannot afford to let go of. They feel the anxiety and they conclude that atheism must be wrong. Somehow – someway – it must be wrong.

This is amplified by the fact that in-group members tend to assist in-group members up the social, political, and economic ladders. Presidents appoint only those people to be judges who believe that our rights come from God. Military officers recommend promotions and key assignments to members of their prayer groups. Voters bar from elected office anybody who is not willing to pledge allegiance to ‘one nation, under God’.

You do not need to have a person sit down to do a cost-benefit analysis for these types of considerations to have an effect. All you need is the emotional response that comes from recognizing that adopting a particular attitude towards God (or towards those who do not believe in God) puts certain values at risk. The emotional response is enough to generate the agent’s decisions on the matter with almost no cognitive input. “I do not like the way that your ideas make me feel, so your ideas must be wrong.”

The power of teaching young children that those people who support ‘one nation under God’ and who trust in God are good, and those who do not support these values are bad, is the power of the emotional associations that these practices create that will be with the child far into adulthood.

No amount of anecdotal evidence to the contrary has any relevance here. Anecdotal evidence is always (and rightly) highly suspect. We have the observed results that I have mentioned above of political leaders and businesses making hostile and denigrating comments about atheists without repercussions. No anecdotal evidence can change those observed facts.

Stigma

Finally, the stigma (the socially manufactured aversion) of atheism gets attached to anything that can be linked to atheism. By associating evolution with atheism and creationism to ‘In God We Trust’ and ‘under God’, proponents of creationism can touch basic emotions that the government has planted in children at a very young age.

By associating Democrat with atheist political factions can cause people to transfer the uneasiness that they have towards atheism to Democrats, and turn more than a few elections in their favor.

People are using the bad name of ‘atheism’ against some worthy causes, but the passive and servile atheist is unwilling to do anything to challenge these practices.

One option that those who support these good causes can do in order to save themselves from these associations is to strongly join in the denunciation of atheism and to assert, “Religious people can believe in evolution,” and “Democrats can have faith, too.”

Of course, nobody thinks to deny the ‘badness’ of the object of the original association – of atheism, in this case. One side tries to link what it wants people to hate with what is already hated (atheism), while the other tries to deny the link with what is already hated (atheism). What they share in common is the sociological fact (and it is a fact) that the comparison object is hated.

It is a hatred that is only made worse by the fact that the government is teaching young children that those who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are bad people (just as those who do not support ‘liberty and justice for all’ are bad people), and telling citizens, ‘do not think of those who do not trust God as being one of us’.

Conclusion

I am well aware of the fact that I am taking on a topic that out-group members are going to find . . . uninteresting. I am making claims that are completely at odds with the passive and submissive nature of out-group psychology.

However, the fact that people find the topic uninteresting is not an argument against my position. The empirical evidence to support my position is there. We see it every time elected officials and business leaders trash atheists and atheism wand receive an impotent protest in response.

It is exactly the type of behavior we were taught in grade school, where the school ritual was to denigrate those who lacked support for 'one nation under God', and we were told at best to take the insults in silence or at worst fiegn acceptance of those same standards. So, now, when politicians and business leaders denigrate atheists, we still follow our old school lessons and take the insults with silence or, at best, a weak and impotent protest that goes nowhere.

Yes, I think that this issue is important. I think it is worth every bit of the energy that I am putting into it. Soon, this issue will be front-page news and we will have a few days' opportunity to expose people to arguments that they have not had to deal with before. I want to be as prepared as possible to take advantage of that opportunity.

The Pledge Project: A Patriotic Exercise

We are now between 0 and 26 days away from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handing out a decision on 'under God' and 'In God We Trust'.

I expect that they will release their decision at the end of the month. One of the judges deciding this case, Stephen Reinhardt, voted that 'under God' violated the Constitution in 2002. He likely remembers the swarm of phone calls, emails, and even death threats from six years ago. These will give him good reason to argue for waiting until the very end of this year's session – June 30th – to release the decision.

However, I could be wrong.

I am nearly certain that the Court will decide that having children pledge allegiance to "one nation under God" violates the first amendment to the Constitution. As I said, Reinhardt already voted this way once, and his comments during oral arguments gave the impression that he has not changed his mind.

(See Newdow's Pledge Arguments Get New Recital Before 9th Circuit for an account of the oral arguments.)

I am also expecting Dorothy Nelson to vote that the Pledge in public schools is unconstitutional. During oral arguments (audio recording ) she asked a question that I think is highly significant. I hope that the answer she received would help to decide her vote, and that its importance will not be overlooked in the court’s decision.

She asked of the governments lawyers, "Would [the Pledge] be any less patriotic if 'under God' were removed?"

The government answered, "Not necessarily."

But this is a trap.

The government defends having students say the Pledge of Allegiance as a patriotic exercise. If the Pledge would be just as patriotic if the words 'under God' were removed, then having the words in the Pledge cannot be defended as a "patriotic exercise". If the words 'under God' are not in the Pledge for patriotic reasons, then why are they there? Religious reasons, perhaps?

But, what if the government had said that the Pledge would be less patriotic without the words 'under God'? This means that the Pledge is teaching children that patriotism requires supporting 'one nation under God', and those who do not support this concept are less patriotic than those who do. This is a case of the government impugning the patriotism of peaceful law-abiding citizens based on religious beliefs.

In other words, if the Pledge is a patriotic exercise, it says that belief in God is a part of patriotism – one cannot be a patriot without supporting 'one nation under God'. If, on the other hand, one admits that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' can still be a patriot, then pledging allegiance to 'one nation under God' is not a patriotic exercise.

Either this argument will make it into the court's opinion, or it will not. If it makes it into the Court's opinion, atheists and secularists need to be ready to defend it. They need to defend it not only in terms of a Constitutional prohibition on establishing religion, but in terms of a moral prohibition of the Government impugning the patriotism of its atheist and secularist citizens. We have to point out that, every once in a while, children actually learn the lessons they are taught in public schools, and, as a recent survey proves, far too many American children have learned the government’s lesson that atheists do not share their values.

If this argument does not make it into the Court's opinion, then we need to raise the issue loudly enough that people can hear the question outside of the small group that reads atheist blogs and discussion groups. We need to reach the ears of news anchors and talk-show hosts who can then ask, "Does the government have the right to teach young children that Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' are less patriotic than those who do?"

Defenders of the pledge will certainly seek ways out of this trap. One of the arguments they will use is that atheists do not have to say the Pledge. However, the fact that atheists do not have to say the pledge does not change its meaning. The fact that atheists do not have to say the Pledge does not change the fact that the Pledge says that Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' are less patriotic than those who do.

This topic came up in oral arguments.

When Bea inquired as to why a child couldn't simply leave the class during the Pledge – and thus avoid injury – Reinhardt brought up the inherent sigma as sufficient injury.

But it is more than 'inherent stigma'. The government's message that those who do not support 'one nation under God' are less patriotic than those who do is harm itself – even if the atheist stays in the room and pretends to say the Pledge. Having the student leave the room during the pledge adds significantly to the harm done, because it reinforces the message that those who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are not patriots. After all, why would a patriot have to leave the room during the Pledge of Allegiance?

To back up this argument, be ready to ask, "Doesn't the Pledge of Allegiance question the patriotism of anybody who does not support 'liberty and justice for all'? Doesn't the Pledge of Allegiance question the patriotism of anybody who does not support, 'one nation, indivisible'?” After they answer, "Yes", then add, "Doesn't the Pledge of Allegiance question the patriotism of anybody who does not support, 'one nation under God'?"

Clearly, it does. Or, if it does not, then the person defending ‘under God’ in the Pledge needs to defend why it does not. More importantly, they need to explain how the distinction is so obvious that a first grade student can understand the difference. Tell the defender to explain to you how it is obvious to a first grade student that the government is not trying to tell her that people who do not support ‘one nation under God’ are bad people?

I am hoping that the Court will make it easy for us to ask these questions by including this argument in their case. If it is there, I would like you, the reader, to be ready to exploit that opportunity by making sure to include this in the public debate. If the Court does not put this argument before the public, I will ask that you, the reader, make up for the deficiency by inserting the argument itself.

An "Atheist" Video Game

I need to interrupt the Pledge Project for a moment.

This morning I encountered news of a "video game" where:

The object of the game is to stop the spread of Christianity and Islam by murdering Abraham and the authors of the Bible, before beheading Muhammad.

According to the article:

The new game, not yet released, is giving a voice to the atheist community, that’s according to the game’s creator, a University of Virginia graduate student. He wouldn’t release his name, for fear of his safety.

It's not giving voice to this corner of the atheist community.

This corner of the atheist community says that the only legitimate way to prevent the spread of some idea is through words and private action. Never with violence. This is the whole idea behind freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

The very idea of trying to prevent the spread of an idea through violence is repugnant. It is a type of thinking that has destroyed more lives and well-being than any other force in history. There is a tendency among atheists to attribute this kind of thinking only to theists. Yet, we see here, it is not the case.

I have written repeatedly that atheism is not a virtue - any more than the belief that the earth is round is a virtue. You do not make somebody into a moral person by getting him to believe that no God exists. You simply make him more proficient at pursuing whatever good or evil he desires.

The inventor of this video game simply provides me with a living example of those claims. Atheism has apparently not taught the inventor of this game that countering ideas with violence is wrong - that ideas should only be countered with better ideas promoted through words and private action.

Ultimately, I want the inventor of this game to very quickly realize how wrong his actions were and to issue an apology. Issue a sincere apology - unlike those that we typically get from people who denounce atheism. It would not be an apology that says, "I'm sorry that others were offended by my action," but an apology that says, "I'm sorry that I advocated the use of violence as a way of spreading, or preventing the spread, of ideas. Those methods are entirely inappropriate." And says so in a way that shows that he understands these moral principles and will live by them in the future.

The Pledge Project: A Military Response

The Pledge Project: A Military Response

In looking over disputes about the merits of saying or not saying the Pledge of Allegiance virtually always (if not always) contains some claim about how those who do not say the Pledge do not respect those who fought and died for our freedoms.

I have mentioned the standard legal argument - that the right to freedom of speech gives people the right not to show respect for those who fought or died for our freedoms.

I am challenging the claim that not saying the pledge shows a lack of respect for such people. In fact, the pledge itself insults some of those soldiers.

One of the saddest absurdities involved in putting the words 'under God' as they are in the Pledge of Allegiance is how it has brought even military personal to virtually spit on the graves of some of the people who have fought for our freedoms - and to demand that others do the same thing.

To compound the absurdity, whenever military personnel and the defenders of military personnel stand up to insist on spitting of the graves of some who have served this country, they claim that they are promoting the virtue of 'respect'.

Respect?

The Pledge of Allegiance is meant to show and to teach disrespect for those who do not support liberty and justice for all – to claim and to teach that those are bad people and cannot be good Amerians.

The Pledge of Allegiance is meant to show and to teach disrespect for any who would support rebellion – to claim and to teach that such people cannot be thought of as good Americans,

When Congress added the words ‘under God’ it was done to show and to teach the same disrespect for people who do not support ‘one nation under God.’ In doing so, it virtually spits on the grave of those military personnel who fought for your freedoms and for mine, but who did so even though they did not believe in God.

Remove ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance, and you show respect for a of those who have fought for our freedom – rather than continuing the practice of showing respect for only some of them, while virtually spitting on the rest.

Am I saying that the only way to show respect to all who have fought for our freedoms is to remove all mention of God from the public square? Demagogues and bigots would want you to think so.

I propose that we deal with the issue the same way the founding fathers did when they created the Constitution. They created an oath for public office that did not mention God. Yet, as George Washington showed, anybody sworn in to public office is free to bring with him or her whatever religious affirmation suits his or her beliefs. Washington voluntarily added the phrase, ‘so help me God’ to the end of his oath of office.

Similarly, citizens are free to add a religious affirmation whenever they take the Pledge of Allegiance, the way George Washington did. In doing so, they bring their God into the pubic square. However, the government’s position remains one in which a citizen who does not support ‘one nation under God’ is given equal respect to those who do not. The government’s official position becomes one that shows respect for all, and not respect for some while showing disrespect for the rest.

I do not see any reason to oppose this suggestion. It honors the founding fathers by dealing with the issue the same way they did. It allows individuals to bring their own religious beliefs into the public square in accordance with their different beliefs. It shows disrespect towards none.

The only reason that I can think of for keeping the current system has nothing to do with showing respect. It has to do with a desire that some people have to show and to teach as much disrespect towards others who do not share their religious beliefs as they can get away with.

This includes disrespect<.i> for some who have fought, and some who have died, to protect our freedoms.

That is a lesson that this government, or any government, has no legitimate reason to reach.

As I said, the saddest part of this is that inserting ‘under God’ in the Pledge even has military personnel turning against their brothers in arms, insisting that civic ceremonies and public schools teach the disrespect of those who have fought beside them in battle.

I think they do this out of ignorance. Soldiers do carry with them into the military the same weaknesses and prejudices that they had as civilians. Soldiers are still human beings with human weaknesses. They have the human weakness of accepting without question things that they have been taught never to question. When they have been taught that respect requires disrespect for some of their brothers in arms, it is easy to accept this without question, until somebody stands up and questions it.

That time has come. The Pledge of Allegiance as it currently stands shows the same disrespect for a soldier who does not support ‘one nation under God’ as it does for a soldier who does not support union, or who does not support liberty and justice for all. There is no greater measure of disrespect that one can show to an American soldier than to accuse him of being comparable to a defender of tyranny and injustice. Yet, the government shows and teaches this level of disrespect to all of its defenders who do not believe in God.

It is no longer possible to claim ignorance of this insult against fellow soldiers. You now know. Now it is time to show how you really feel about a government and its people showing respect rather than disrespect towards all of those who have fought, and in some cases died, for our freedoms.

This issue is very much about respect for those who have fought to protect our freedoms. It is about respect for all of those who have honorably served, and it is about disrespect towards none. Do you truly think that the people who helped to defend this country and our freedoms deserve your respect? Then you cannot tolerate a government that compares many of those people to those who would support tyranny and injustice, and which uses its power to teach this insult to as many children as possible.

I want to quickly add that this is not a proposal that it is wrong to make legal/constitutional arguments against ‘under God’. Quite the opposite, the legal arguments are very important. I am proposing that we end the practice of focusing exclusively on legal arguments, and that we add moral arguments that support the same position. The two reinforce each other.

When we give legal arguments only, without the moral arguments to back it up, we give the impression that we are people willing and eager to defend unjust and immoral laws just because the law demands injustice and immorality. We need to show that we are not only interested in upholding the law and the Constitution independent of the law’s morality or justice. We need to show that we are upholding moral and just law, by showing why the law is moral and just.

The Pledge Project: Overview

Before this month is out, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will release decisions on whether 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the national motto violate the Constitution.

The Pledge Project is an attempt to introduce a set of moral arguments against these practices to add to the legal arguments that we often hear when these types of cases make the news.

I am already several days into the project. However, since this is the first of the new month, I want to make sure that readers know about the articles that appeared last month.

Acting Against Anti-Atheist Bigotry: This post introduced the Pledge Project and the main moral consideration – that 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" as the national motto serve as a nearly impenetrable barrier between atheists and secularists on the one hand and public office and positions of public trust on the other.

The Atheist Burka: Many atheists and secularists are comfortable with the current Pledge and Motto. I argue that this is true in the same way that some women are comfortable wearing a Burka and being denied basic freedoms. This is the effect when we introduce people to prejudice at a very young age.

Priorities: Why is the Pledge Project important? One reason is because there are children who may become atheists who should not be denied the opportunity to serve in public office and positions of public trust. Another is that people who do not believe in God have important contributions to make on all sorts of issues from stem cell research to global warming to matters of health. We should not have a society where only those who pledge allegiance to God are considered eligible to decide how to deal with these issues.

What to Do: This post argued for getting the word out – for making people aware of the moral arguments and encouraging people to be ready to use them when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases their opinions.

Offense: Those who defend 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' will almost certainly protest about secularists who offended by any mention of God in the public square. This post answers that spin by saying, "Mentioning God in the public square does not offend me. Having the government teach children that a person who does not support 'one nation under God' is as anti-American as one who does not support liberty and justice for all offends me." It then provides an argument that utterly defeats the 'offense' claim.

House Resolution 5872: In this post, I use the moral arguments against 'under God' and 'In God We Trust' against House Resolution 5872 – a resolution to issue a commemorative coin that will raise up to $3.5 million for the Boy Scouts. I argue that the government has no right to fund classes to teach young children that atheists are incapable of the best type of citizenship – which is what the Boy Scouts claims.

Explaining Bigotry: A survey in 2006 showed that atheists are the least trusted Americans – the group that most Americans will say does not share their values. This post argues that the best explanation for those observations is that the Pledge teaches children that Americans who do not support 'one nation under God', and the motto teaches children that Americans who do not trust in God, do not share our values.

Atheists are Untrustworty: Ron Lowe, an Mason in Idaho, explained in a news article that atheists are not allowed to be Masons because, "If you're an atheist . . . your word means nothing, so you have someone whose work cannot be trusted."

In God We Trust – America: In God We Trust – America is a group that is dedicated to having the national motto, "In God We Trust", posted in every government building and, in particular, in every city council.

Resolution Respecting Atheists: If members of a legislative body should try to claim that the Pledge and the Motto are not meant to denigrate those who do not believe in God, I propose getting them to vote on a Resolution Respecting Atheists. This resolution requires the legislator to actually vote that failure to say the Pledge or a lack of trust in God in no way implies a lack of moral character or a lack of patriotism.

A Memorial Day Dilemma: Where does one go on Memorial Day to honor a father who made the military his career, when one's father was an atheist, and almost all ceremonies begin by saying that soldiers who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad soldiers who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'?

The Case of David Habecker: David Habecker was a city trustee in Estes Park, Colorado, who was recalled in a special election because he would not say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Sit Down and Shut Up: An advertisement from a Ford dealership in California said that those who oppose 'under God' in the Pledge and "In God We Trust' as the national motto should sit down and shut up.

Respect in Minnesota: A Minnesota school board is debating a rule that requires students to stand during the pledge, because all students should be required to show respect to the flag. But why should a student show respect for the claim that 'Americans who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'?

Freedom of Speech: This post looks at the concept of freedom of speech. I assert that the right to freedom of speech is a right to freedom from violence, not a right to freedom from criticism. In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto people are asserting this right where it does not apply – against people who have not violated it.

Apologies and Excuses: This post looks at the distinction between apologies and excuses. It provides lessons to look at in determining whether somebody is actually apologizing for a wrong done, as opposed to merely offering excuses. It also points out that a sincere apology does not exist unless the person apologizing offers some sort of compensation (or restitution) for the wrongs done.

Three Related Stories: This post covers three news stories related to the Pledge Project: Philadelphia ending a subsidy for the Boy Scouts, a Zoning Board commissioner in New Hampshire who is refusing to say the Pledge, and a city trustee in Wisconsin who is refusing to say the pledge. It looks at the types of claims being made in these disputes.

This is it so far.

My official predication is that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will release its decisions on these two cases on June 26th.

My official prediction is that if atheists and secularists are not able to throw some moral arguments into this debate when the news flares up – and do so with such volume that those arguments actually get heard – the effect of this decision will be to end church-state separation.

There is already a movement to end the "Lemon Test" used to decide church state issues with a "Coercion Test", which will legalize all church-state relationships that fall short of actually compelling a citizen to attend a church service. (Though bribing a citizen to attend church services would not count as coercion.)

See: New Constitutional Test for Religious Liberty.

So, I want you to join me or the Pledge Project. I want you to join me in helping to make sure that, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals releases its decisions and the debate erupts, as many people as possible hear a new set of moral arguments against 'under God' in the Pledge and 'In God We Trust' as the motto.

Between now and then I will be continuing to present those arguments.

Arguments that it is wrong for the government to teach young children that people who do not support 'one nation under God' are as bad as those who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

Arguments that it is wrong for a government to post a sign in city hall or on the money that says, "The government suggests that you think of a person who does not trust in God as not really being one of us."

Arguments that it is wrong for a government to involve itself in a campaign that aims to create a barrier between peaceful law-abiding citizens and public office and positions of public trust based solely on a belief about whether one or more gods exist.

More to come.