This article gives voice to the secular basis and operations of the American constitution and describes the wholesale rape and destruction of America's ideals by the disasters of predatory religion that has taken spiritual, material, and economic advantage of the freedoms they were granted as freeborn Americans.

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Why I Pledge Allegiance To An Atheist America

The Puritans of England were a devout people who distinguished themselves in the mid-1500s by adopting and adhering to John Calvin's doctrine of Total Depravity. [1] This doctrine is based upon the story of Eve, the primordial woman who ingested the fruit of knowledge against the will of their god thereby making all women prone to evil. Accordingly, man's desire for women and the evils they are said to embody enslaves all men to sin. Total Depravity's solution to this curse is to subjugate women, live a life of joyless hard work and obey the dictates of their church. It asserts that only god's grace will save mankind from an eternal damnation and to prepare for this grace it is incumbent upon them to unify their church and state into an example of their Bible's "city upon a hill." [2] Their communities were natural allies with other separatist groups that had waged one hundred years of conflict against the established English church and monarchy. In 1642 the First English Civil War erupted and in 1649 Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan and military general assumed political power. They ruled England, Scotland and Ireland with reckless inhumanity and administrative incompetence until they too were ousted in 1660. From then on, they were merely tolerated as a fanatical over-zealous fringe of religious crazies and were left alone to practice their devotions to Total Depravity.

In effect, they were a stern and paranoid people always on guard against evil eyes, devils, and what they called, venomous spirits, which they found most often in single or widowed women whose property, upon death, went to the men of the church. The historical records of Europe and England document more than fifty thousand church-led trials and executions with unrecorded estimates in additional thousands. [3] It is timely to note that the definitive handbook used to determine the presence of witchcraft and its prescribed punishments was first written in 1376 and revised in 1578 and titled, Directorium Inquisitorum. Translated from the Latin, it says, ""for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified [emphasis added] and weaned away from the evils they would commit." [4]

A shunned but determined people, they set out to evangelize, colonize and terrorize the New World. By 1640, the Massachusetts Bay Colony registered over twenty thousand residents and by the 1690s had conducted scores of witchcraft and heresy trials. Records show the names of thirty-two victims, mostly women, who were condemned to death and executed. [5] Many more languished to death in prisons. This was all a part of America's historic fabric when in 1787 a new generation of men rose up and said, enough. These were well-educated men in literature, the arts, science, history, philosophies and languages. They were men of The Enlightenment who put their faith in the inherent goodness of humanity. They believed in a new world American that required nothing less than all the rights and opportunities necessary to live in peace with liberty and justice for all. It was an assembly that included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others who put aside the church Bible and its Directorium Inquisitorum in order to draft and ratify the Constitution of the United States. It begins,

" We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

            Nowhere in the full Constitution of the United States are the words, God, Creator, Deity, or Divine. It is a non-theistic, secular document without reference to religion, deities, depravity, sin, superstition or supernatural powers beyond the scope of "We the People of the United States""

In today's world, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 16% (45 million) of Americans are either agnostic or atheist while in California that percentage jumps to 21%. [6] These percentages are consistent with a similar study by Trinity College's, American Religious Identification Survey of 2008 that reports: "Whereas Nones [atheists, agnostics] are presently 15% of the total adult U.S. population, 22% of Americans aged 18-29 years self-identify as Nones." [7] California is also home to Dr. Michael Newdow, atheist, emergency room physician and lawyer. His daughter is one of six million children currently enrolled in California's public schools [8] where the daily recitation of our nation's 1954 congressionally amended Pledge of Allegiance invokes, inculcates, and pays tribute to a purported deity as in, under God. Considering that it was a fervent political coalition of conservative Catholics and Protestants that pressured Congress to insert the words, under God, into the original god-free Pledge, Dr. Newdow filed a 2010 suit (Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School Dist.) [9] with the San Francisco-based United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to re-omit the words, under-God. Dr. Newdow contended that the state mandated invocation of a deity constituted a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that expressly forbids government endorsement of religion.

The original god-free Pledge was first written 1892 by Francis Bellamy who was a vice-president of the Society of Christian Socialists and staunch advocate for the separation of church and state. Bellamy's living children and grandchildren were outraged by its theft and misuse. Bellamy's son diligently opposed all efforts to amend the Pledge with under-God--".["].on the grounds that his father utterly objected to such a clear conflation of church and state." [10] Bellamy's great-granddaughter stated that her ".["].great-grandfather"[was a] deeply religious man, [but] was also a strict believer in the separation of church and state"He intended the pledge to be a unifying statement for [our] children. By adding the phrase "under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, Congress"divided our nation further rather than uniting its citizens." [11]

In March 2010, Judge Carlos Bea wrote the (Newdow v. Rio Linda) majority 2-1 opinion that upheld the use of, under God. Judge Bea was born in Spain and is a Roman Catholic. [12] He was appointed to his lifetime position in 2003 by the born-again Christian president, George W. Bush. The second vote of this meager majority was cast by Senior Circuit Judge Dorothy Nelson, who in her career has also sat on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'i Faith. [13] The mission of Baha'i, as stated by their avatar, Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), is to bring the will of God, referred to as He and Him, into public life. [14] Judge Carlos Bea wrote, "The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our republic was founded." [15] He further wrote, "The Pledge reflects many beliefs held by the founding fathers of this country -- the same men who authored the Establishment Clause -- including the belief that it is the people who should and do hold the power, not the government. They believed that the people derive their most important rights, not from the government, but from God." [16] Judge Bea explained that the Pledge of Allegiance was examined as a whole and wrote, "In doing so, we find the Pledge is one of allegiance to our Republic, not of allegiance to the God or to any religion. Furthermore, Congress's ostensible and predominant purpose when it enacted and amended the Pledge over time was patriotic, not religious." [17]

To an outside observer, Judge Carlos Bea's opinion seems to repudiate the very foundation of the American Constitution, an utterly god-free secular document that established the United States as a nation of laws, not beliefs. To say that our founding fathers, ""believed that the people derive their most important rights, not from the government, but from God," is to assume they were too ignorant, illiterate or stupid to say so. Instead, and on the contrary, regardless of what Judge Bea believes the founders believed, what they actually created was a government of, for, and by the people, not as subjects below, beneath or under any king, priest, dictator, or god. If Judge Bea finds the Pledge, ""not of allegiance to the God or to any religion," then why is under God required?

Psychological projection is a pathology that Sigmund Freud described as an unconscious defense mechanism used to ascribe one's own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs onto others. So when judicial telepathy outweighs the reading of the Constitution as written, it bends the mind to find balance in either justice or itself. But a cauldron of blind, backhanded lunacy really begins to boil when the Judge writes, ""Congress's ostensible and predominant purpose when it enacted and amended the Pledge over time was patriotic, not religious." On its face, this argument is nonsense. A casual Google search will turn up megabytes of dedicated under-God lobbies that were driven entirely by politically right wing Catholics and Protestants. Year after year, they spit hellfire and damnation from pulpits to Congress until America was declared a god-fearing nation. In fact, the moment after under-God was signed into law, congressmen gathered around the Capitol flag pole and were led in the newly christened Pledge by the Senate Chaplin while a single bugle played Onward Christian Soldiers. [18]

It was the time of the Cold War and the Red Scare raged. The nation had been stirred into a frightful state of nuclear doom while Catholic Senator, Joe McCarthy's deranged Congressional Committee investigations, called witch-hunts, [19] found traitors and spies everywhere they looked. Into this breach stepped the Christian clergy who made allegiance to their god a way to root out anti-American communists, atheists and liberals from government and society. However, what got lost in their catechisms of loyalty and faith is the very core of what made America free. It is not adherence to political ideology, religious beliefs or gods--it is the practice of democracy with liberty and justice for all.

To students of history, the entire issue begs several questions. To what sort of patriotism do these godly refer? Is it to the principles laid out by the fathers of our Constitution or to a mystical godhead who lives in an unseen world? Otherwise, by what truth or reason would the Constitution be so overwritten and made so incidental to the vague and proprietary articles of their faith? Is it the same strain of hallowed authority established by our Puritan forebears who remember, were unabashed imbibers in the Doctrine of Depravity? Their demented marriage of church and state shows how fear, greed, and ignorance fuel an hallucinatory engine of lies, torture, plunder and death. They demonstrate how religion amplifies credulity over conscience in order to turn their own unspeakable acts of terror into something divine, sacred and pure--the will of god, they say. They showed how to enrich themselves in service to their gospel by ridding the land of evil--and acquiring the wealth of its heathens, heretics and witches.

To even discuss the depravity of these devil makers does an embarrassing disservice to human conscience. Yet, in our own new millennium, the highly politicalized and dubious decision of five god-fearing Christian Supreme Court Judges, [20] (Bush vs. Gore, 2000), awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 Trade Tower attacks, Bush went to the U.S. Justice Department and asked two lawyers, Jay Bybee, a Mormon, [21] and John Yoo, a Roman Catholic, [22] for the legal means to override all existing law, treaties and conventions against war crimes, crimes against humanity, and torture. These Torture Memos gave our Christian president the authority to capture, imprison, and torture detainees into whatever confessions were necessary to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Coincidentally, the same oil and mineral reserves that our nation's troops were sent to protect have since been contracted into the private property of the Bush-Cheney oil cartel. [23] However, in 2005, Rupert Cornwell, a reporter for the U.K. newspaper, The Independent, wrote an article titled, "Bush -- God Told Me To Invade Iraq." [24] It contains a transcript of a BBC broadcast called Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs. In it, Bush explained his actions to Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath and former prime minister Mahmoud Abbas:

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then god would tell me, "George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did.

"I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I will be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course, I pray for forgiveness.

"he [Bush] told [reporter] Mr. Woodward, "I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will."

Spoken like a true Puritan's son. In fact, Mary Parker, who was hanged for witchcraft by a Salem, Massachusetts church court in 1692 happens to be George W. Bush's eighth great-grandmother. [25] And a Mr. Richard Bush (1696-1732) of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, is the first known male Bush in America. [26] So perhaps Bush's War on Terror had less to do with his predilection for dungeons and torture and more to do with a pious reiteration of his family's hand-me-down Directorium Inquisitorium. After all, their god requires the spectacle of terror as an instrument of its justice and authority. It helps me to understand, but not condone, the more than trillion American dollars spent into debt for the horrors of war, [27] the thousands of troops wounded and killed, [28] the millions of innocent civilians butchered and bombed, [29] the millions of orphans and destitute widows, [30] the catastrophic environmental devastation abroad and at home--all this and more in the name of their god. But it nearly pales in the shame of lost hope to think what millions of saved lives and trillions of saved taxpayer dollars might have done for America had our troops gone to college rather than war, had green energy supplanted oil, had jobs been made in America instead of off-shored, had the rich paid their fair share in tax, had truth in media exposed the brainwash, hogwash, cover ups, and lies.

Reagan was elected president in 1981 by a majority of voters who attached their beliefs in god and religion to the republican party and became known as the Moral Majority. Since then, America has sunk to the bottom of every quality of life index conducted among all the world's industrialized nations. [31] We have the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world. [32] We have the highest rate of childhood poverty, [33] [34] and the greatest disparity of wealth between rich and poor. [35] So earlier, when I wondered to what patriotism these godly refer, I return to The Independent's 2005 BBC transcript:

"Another telling sign of Mr. Bush's religion was his answer to Mr. Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.

"The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to." [36]

By itself, Bush's appeal to a higher father might seem endearing, but when coupled with a report later that year by Doug Thompson of the conservative Capitol Hill Blue [37] news site, the lineage of diabolical madness comes full circle. The article interviews three GOP operatives who were in a White House meeting with George Bush in an attempt to keep him from renewing the suspension of human and civil rights that were ordered by his USA Patriot Act:

"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper." [38]

The president of the United States is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But according to Bush, our 43rd president, "It's nothing but a goddamn piece of paper." I will not speculate what the outcry would have been from the pro-patriot, pro-Christian political opposition had George W. Bush been a Muslim, Jew, woman, democrat, liberal, atheist or member of any other ethnic or cultural group than rich, white, male, and Christian, but my guess is that impeachment and trials for treason would have been on the table. Instead, I ask the question, Whose country is this, really? Is it the land of Pilgrims and Puritans armed with their long history of brute conquest, torture, terror, theft and Depravity? Is it the property of the top twenty percent of Americans who now own eighty-five percent of our country's wealth and resources [39] [40] --an inequality that is twice that of other industrialized nations? [41] Does it belong to the fifty percent of Americans who cynically renounce their right to vote, the very foundation of citizenship, in favor of their own systemic apathy and submission? A partial answer can be found in an auxiliary memo to the Total Depravity of Christianity called--Antinomianism. The term was coined by John Calvin's compatriot, Martin Luther (1483-1546) and is defined by the Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as, "The doctrine or belief that the Gospel frees Christians from required obedience to any law, whether scriptural, civil, or moral, and that salvation is attained solely through faith and the gift of divine grace." [42]

This explains to me, at least, how and why all these self-appointed messengers of divine will, do what they do. Antinomianism bestows the faithful with the a priori dispensation needed to take what they want, including the inalienable rights of the American people in order to sell them back as Christian charity or as evidence of their god's grace. Not so? What could possibly explain the landmark 2010 Supreme Court's, Citizens United v. FCC [43] 5-4 decision that revokes and nullifies the voice of individual free speech and fair elections with the unlimited wealth of multi-national corporations? Yes of course, money talks. But now, by judicial fiat, they can out-talk and out-scream as loud and long as they want. It is a Frankenstein construction that invites foreign and special interests to outspend, saturate, flood and monopolize all available media with their political voice and thereby quash, smear and extinguish all opposition to their corporate and religious empire. The plaintiff, Citizens United [44] is an ultra-right wing Christian organization intent on legislating America into a tightly controlled Christian state. The five justices who ruled in their favor are all god-fearing conservative Catholic republicans [45] who were nominated to the bench by two god-fearing Christian republican presidents, Reagan and George W. Bush. This decision has elevated disembodied multi-national corporations to the status of natural born citizens and has endowed them with all the human and civil rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States, yet they remain unborn, undying, without heart, brain, guts or feeling--eerily like the god they worship. At best, this decision diminishes we, the people into a neutered spectator species within our own nation. At worst, it turns citizens into mute, disenfranchised drones on par with slaves in chain--bound, gagged, without voice or the means of self-determination.

War is terrorism. To have a Global War on Terror is as ludicrous as chewing sand to end thirst. Fraud, lies, pollution, poverty, slavery, imprisonment, torture, war, genocide, god and religion are all elements in the Christian arsenal of Total Depravity. They are the fiery stake and gallows of church-state collusion where goodness and generosity, love and peace, art and science, justice and equality all go to die. It is where democracy fails and the patriarchal disease of exclusion, domination, and violence succeed. I question how peace and freedom can exist beneath or under anybody's superstition, god or religion. Myths are fine for poetry, bedtime stories and fireside chats, but who in their right mind could possibly care if their Christian god rose from the dead when it is the Christian-led military-industrial cabal together with their clergy and judges who do nothing but kill the living, rape the treasury, and turn all Americans into inmates of a crude, disastrous torture state--and for nothing but their own profit and power. If these godly minions are so determined to put their religious beliefs above country and are so convinced that the Constitution is nothing but ".["] a goddamn piece of paper," then to me, their god and religion are nothing but goddamn figments of their goddamn minds. And here is the rub: Christians and their co-religionists are welcome to live and thrive in an open and liberal society, but liberals, liberty and truth cannot live in theirs. It is why the founding fathers made it abundantly clear that the only trinity Americans are obliged to observe are those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--and we, the people expect the same from others, too often to our own chagrin.

As an aside, the Pew Forum released a study in September of 2010 called the US Religious Knowledge Survey. [46] The results showed that atheists and agnostics know more about religions and the Bible than any other group tested, particularly Catholics and Protestants. It showed that even though America leads the developed world in religious conviction, ".["] large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions -- including their own." [47] However, this is just the tip of the ironic iceberg. You see, there has been a long standing schism within the Christian religion that goes back to its beginning. It has to do with what Jesus, the teacher said, and what the church Patriarchs said he said. In a wry and simple way, one could say that the entire moral history of western civilization is less about good v. evil, and more about Goodness v. God.

Here is why. It was 1789. At war with Briton, Napoleon routed the British from Egypt and marched his army down the Nile to capture the capitol city of Cairo. For the first time, the pyramids and tombs of Egypt were seen by legions of modern western eyes. As tombs were unearthed and treasures revealed, the research and study of Egypt and its antiquities grew. In 1896, a German research scholar purchased a cache of ancient papyrus scrolls that were dated to the 3rd century A.D. [48] They were found hidden and buried in caves along the Nile and tell of a teacher they called Savior. Over the years many more of these hidden scrolls were found, then translated, published, and finally brought to the public in the mid-1950s [49] --just as the under-God fires, and Congressional Witch-hunts were ablaze in The States.

All together, these scrolls are called the Gnostic Gospels [50] and tell a very different story of their Savior, community and salvation than what the Patriarchs of the early church wanted known. In these gospels, their Savior says that women are the ones most inclined to goodness and therefore the ones most qualified to serve as priests and that men would do well to listen. In these gospels, sin is explained as psychological conflict and salvation as the joy of uncovering one's own innate goodness. They teach peace, not war. They teach justice and equality, not deference to the frauds of church and state. In these gospels, the teacher explains the resurrection as the liberation of mind from the grip of all gods so that one's true self is free to unite with life's universal goodness. This was his testament--his new testament.

The Patriarchs had other ideas. They taught a trickle-down theology that scorns women and dooms men to sin. To them, salvation requires submission to their church and god. So when the Roman general, Constantine (272-337 A.D.), became the first Christian Emperor of Rome it became his duty to unify the empire, including Egypt, under one rule, one state, one god, and one religion. The Emperors and Patriarchs not only excluded the gnostic gospels from today's Bible, [51] but declared them all heretical--and cleansed from existence. Communities were leveled, its members tortured and killed, all temples and statues defaced and destroyed. They burned down the Ancient Library of Alexandria [52] and torched all other centers of learning so that centuries of accumulated pre-Christian history, scholarship, science, arts and wisdom were crushed, buried, burned to ash and forgotten. They also controlled print and paper, the media of the day, and took great pains to overwrite all trace of the gnostic teacher's Goodness with their God.

The patriarchs are not an inward people. To them, god is an all-powerful, all seeing entity that must be obeyed; and when god, power and obedience mix in the minds of men, the twisted alliance of church and state gives rise to all the known horrors of human history. To them, power is the manifestation of their god, and since power is irrefutable, their god is irrefutable. Unfortunately, this illogic creates an irreality that blinds them to life. Show them ten million year old fossils and they will invoke their bible as proof that the world is less than ten thousand years old. They herald their Global War on Terror as god's triumphant march on evil yet show them lakes and rivers on fire with industrial pollutants and hear them denigrate global warming as a godless hoax and liberal myth. They are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the needs and rights of women and our children, yet demand that they forfeit their health and well-being to the stillborn god of their bible. But by the grace of god, they see witches where there are no witches, terrorists where there are no terrorists, WMD where there are no WMD, and with judicial miracle glasses, see God throughout the Constitution where there is no god. Nor are they able to see the cruel ignorance they stare into each time they look in a mirror. They, the under-Godly, seek power for the pure sake of power--omnipotent, omnipresent, and Totally Depraved. Take away their god and they have nothing, just empty shells without standing in a conscious, and caring world.

So for me and from now on, whenever I am again invited to recite their under-God Pledge, I will not stand, but quietly sit and say to all those complicit in this sanctimonious hijack of our nation, to either shut up and act like an American or get the hell out of our country--and take your goddamn god with you.

Endnotes

Authors Website: www.hi-desertliberty.com

Authors Bio:
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, got a BA in anthropology from Cal-State University, L.A. I then traveled the world for a number of years before settling in northern California where I was involved in organic farming and continued with an arts education at the San Francisco Art Institute. I have been active as an exhibiting artist and a cultural arts writer for a regional weekly.

Writing has become my way to stay conscious and informed as well as fight back against the apathy and collapse of culture.