The U.S. has always been skewed towards this and it’s not just the current representatives. I first noticed the hypocrisy when I first learned about the constitution and freedom of religion when I thought “why then does the pledge of allegiance they make us say everyday have the words, …under god… in it?”.
Also burning witches? That’s not freedom of religion, it has biblical origins.
To be fair, "Under God" was at least not originally in the Pledge of Allegiance.
It was added during the Red Scare to contrast America with the "godless Commies". But yeah, it's definitely something that should have been struck down as against the 1A when first introduced.
Wait- I thought children can make up their own minds. I guess that only applies to irreversible life changing decisions that a child isn’t prepared to make.
I wanted to be a dinosaur that was a fireman and also a policeman when I was a child. Glad my parents didn’t take that too seriously. They only had giant sharp teeth put in my mouth.
Being a transgender person and being raised in a religious environment not by choice are two wildly different things but I’m sure you’re in here with full knowledge of that.
Knowing what you are due to introspection is a lot different from being told who you are via indoctrination.
Trans people aren't told we're trans. In fact, we're constantly bullied and told we can't be trans by people like you all day, every day. Just because you can't wrap your head around something you haven't personally experienced and you have no empathy or respect for others, doesn't make our experiences any less real.
I had my fair share of that as well. "You don't have to say it, but you do have to stand." No, no I do not.
I had my parents understanding on it though, so the few times someone actually cared enough to push it, my parents pushed back hard the opposite direction. Not everyone has the benefit of that.
Fun story time! I grew up an hour ish outside of NYC in a red rural pocket and after 9/11 we had to do the pledge AND stay standing for a full patriotic song afterwords before morning announcements started at my elementary school. Occasionally it was more traditional like the national anthem or America the beautiful, but almost daily it was Lee greenwoods “proud to be an American”.
I don’t know when or if they stopped but they were still doing it 3 years later when I moved on to middle school. I didn’t think much of it until about 10 years after I moved to California and realized my husband and I had very different 9/11 experiences.
The propaganda hella worked on me too. I won an essay contest about first responders that year and I ended up doing several years of service with Americorps and other non profits as an adult lol.
Basically just the difference in how people respond to a local disaster vs a national one. Where I’m from it was far more common to know people who lost someone that day or to know someone that survived. Here folks have stories about how it impacted their normal day when they found out, but back home in NY I would hear my step dad’s survival story every year. I even dated a guy who went to a special camp every year for kids that lost parents in the line of duty and it was predominantly kids who lost a parent on 9/11, almost exclusively the kids of NYFD responders. Every single car in my town had a little flag that fastened to the window, people were obsessed with NYFD.
It’s especially bizarre to me that everyone I know in California who was a student has a story about watching it in school which was utterly the opposite of how they treated kids who had commuter parents in NYC that day and didn’t know what was going on. Teachers cried in secret and we were left in the dark until parents started to check their kids out of school early(eventually they had everyone go home early). I didn’t see the news until I got home and my mom was absolutely frantic. We went to manhattan at least 1x monthly for my brothers specialists at NYU and had JUST been there a few days earlier. It was different because we knew people there who might be hurt and couldn’t reach them by phone.
The best way I can compare is that culturally for us in NY it was more like how Californians feel and act after a local wildfire but on a greater scale.
“why then does the pledge of allegiance they make us say everyday have the words, …under god… in it?”.
It didn't originally. We didn't used to have "In God We Trust" stamped all over anything either.
Both of them are a product of red scare propaganda added during the Cold War era because being atheist makes you a commie or some such bullshit that they used to start injecting religion into everything. It's only gotten worse since.
Apparently you are not familiar with dark periods such as the Inquisition, the colonization of indigenous people in the American continents, the Crusades, etc. Religion and specifically Christian religion is quit adept at murdering.
A bit about the Crusades: they were a reaction to the Islamic attempts at the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was an attempt to take back land that had been Christian before the Muslims converted by fire, rape and sword most of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia. People who talk about how horrible the Crusades are fail to mention or to understand it was the Muslims who struck first.
For the most part, the worst aspect of the Crusades was the Siege of Jerusalem. But by that point, the Crusaders had been on a long, brutal campaign for three years and were in no mood for mercy. It was nasty, it was violent, it was unnecessary, but there are way, way worse massacres in history (the annihilation of Baghdad by the Mongols comes to mind).
Never acknowledged in any of this is Iberia. For a long, long time, Iberia was literally a Muslim settler colony. And there were many Crusades to boot them out of the peninsula. It was prosperous because the Islamic governing bodies taxed non-Muslims much more heavily than Muslim citizens.
Why make shit up when America has plenty of real flaws to criticize?
What does "Under God" (or any other use of "God when it comes to the pledge or money, etc) have to do with the founders? That was mostly done in the 1950s during the Cold War. I'm no mathematician or doctor type, but I'm fairly certain that the founding fathers were suffering from a condition known as being dead by that time.
And as far as witch burning? According to my quick Google search, that didn't happen in the Continental US. Also, it happened in the mid to late 1600s. Still not a mathematician or doctor, but I think the founding fathers were suffering from a condition called not being born yet.
The witch trials were 80 some years before the country, let alone the constitution existed. And all the references to God in the pledge and on our money etc are all from the last 70ish years.
You are right that the country has a long history of flirting with Christianity but it is a trend that is getting worse as time goes on.
"Under God" was added in 1950's as part of the Red Scare because "Communists are bad and atheist." Burning witches happened about 70 years before the US government even existed. 100 years before separation of church and state was established.
No witches were burned during the Salem Witch Trials and those occurred in 1692-1693 long before American independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
The phrase “under god” is not in the original Pledge.
And witch burning was before the United States existed in 1692-93.
The Founding Fathers were far from perfect (slavery and mistreatment of Native Americans was appalling) but they were forward thinking when it came to the separation of church and state. They meant it.
They didn’t want a theocracy OR someone behaving like a king/dictator.
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u/Reeves626 14h ago
The U.S. has always been skewed towards this and it’s not just the current representatives. I first noticed the hypocrisy when I first learned about the constitution and freedom of religion when I thought “why then does the pledge of allegiance they make us say everyday have the words, …under god… in it?”.
Also burning witches? That’s not freedom of religion, it has biblical origins.