[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by August

Atheists tend to use language that includes their whole group. "Thumpers", "religious nuts", "holy rollers" and similar disparaging terms are never applied to just a few TV evangelists but to the entire religion.

You use that phrase on "Atheists". Did you notice that your paragraph does exactly the same thing, lumping all non-believers into a single group?

So it's easy to understand why some might get defensive in the face of constant and mean spirited attacks upon their cherished beliefs.

And those same constant and mean-spirited attacks have been made by certain (not all) religious types against non-believers since the attacks on Jefferson accusing him of being an atheist (which he wasn't), and probably long before that.

While society thinks of itself as more inclusive these days it really is just more inclusive of certain things and far less inclusive of many others. If it gets the religious people on board I have no problem with allowing "In God We Trust" on our currency. They are after all still 70% of the population.

Are 70% of Americans Conservative Evangelical Protestants? I have heard the same people who claim Christian solidarity when talking about "Christian America" deride Catholics as not really being Christians. I've heard those same people dismiss others who believe in God but support freedom of choice as "Liberal Christians". Evangelical Christians like to talk about America being founded as a Christian country, but in fact then, as today, people claiming to be religious where highly disparate and actually believed many different things.

This is also "cherry-picking". There are "religious" people who also dislike having religious slogans on our money. While the statement itself may seem innocuous enough, if you ask any Evangelical Christian he'll tell you it doesn't mean some nebulous supreme being but the God of the Christian Bible specifically.

BTW neither do I have a problem with letting the south retain some minor connection with their confederate history with the occasional display of the stars and bars or by naming a few military bases after their famous generals.

In front of your own house? On your own property? Neither do I. In front of State buildings, which supposedly represent the whole population? I'm of two minds. On the one hand if it were my state I'd be trying to get it removed. On the other, if other states choose to keep flying the Stars & Bars I consider that to be their business, decided in-house and locally. They can bend to pressure, but should not be forced by outside influences to one action or another.

Just the same as I support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion or not, even though I'm personally against it. Freedom is a tricky question, but it has to be honored in all circumstances.