1939 Newsreel Shows US Pledge of Allegiance Was Once Godless

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Wasn't the pledge of allegiance written by a proud socialist?

Er, I don't really know much about the Pledge, but I thought it was a written by a priest.

Don't know really anything about the guy myself but thought it was interesting that he was a "Christian Socialist" and related to Edward Bellamy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

Sarah Palin thought some interesting things about geography, too. Don't judge Christians by Sarah Palin. Some other groups not to judge by Sarah Palin: conservatives, republicans, Alaskans, women, people who wear glasses, and brunettes.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

hm. Yeah, they put 'in God we trust' in the currency about the same time. It had to do with those evil commies, and how they were Godless.

Now the bit on the Statue of Liberty, that was done by a Progressive (there's a dozen names for those on the Left...

That's because at one time America actually believed in keeping church and state seperate.

Huston Smith, in writing about Zen Buddhism's general disdain for words and communication through them, wrote this:

So yeah...

Secularism has strengthened in America over the years, not weakened.

The only problem with disdaining words is what do you replace them with? In saying that, if you notice, Huston Smith was using ... drumroll ... words.

Mistaking words themselves for what the words mean is a mistake, of course, but not anywhere near as bad, IMHO, as mistaking words for mistakes.

This is still the case legally. No one is compelled to support any church with tax funds, nor to attend any church. Have you been in anywise forced to associate with any religion or religious organization? If yes, then how. If not, they what are you complaining about?

ruveyn

I take it you've never studied in a Zen monastery. Huston Smith realized that most of the people reading his work would not be Zen monks. Zen monks are very adept at conveying Truth in what we could consider absurd fashions. This is where the idea of a koan comes from. It's not the answer that is important, but the thinking on the unanswerable. The idea is that you don't use words to convey ideas, you teach others how to come about to the answers themselves, because no words that you could use could possibly describe Bodhi. Except, as the Zen poem goes, that Bodhi is not a tree.

Also: Don't try and argue that the Zen poem uses words to describe Bodhi. That would kind of prove that you're not thinking along the lines of Zen.

I have actually felt some affinity with Zen because of its feelings as far as words go (as opposed to intuition and experiential knowledge). I have always viewed books as sort of sacred things (in some ways), but not because of the words. Rather, it is behind the words. Once again (and this is another reason why I feel affinity towards Zen), I am frustrated by my inability to convey the sacredness of books in words. It is to understand what is truly sacred about the scriptures that Zen students are often ordered to destroy them. I think it rather odd that you would completely dismiss a religion as a whole because you cannot, apparently, understand the significance of its beliefs.

Aside from that, the point of my post was to introduce Huston Smith's point on the words "under God." Considering that he's one of the world's foremost (if not the world's foremost) authority on world religion, I would think that he's a bit more qualified to speak about what those words mean than anyone on this forum.

Arguments out of authority have no validity in themselves. They merely indicate the argument requires close consideration and substantiation. The statement that believing in belief conveys no belief in itself is obviously invalid. It only conveys a demand for enforced belief.

I think you may have misunderstood what the quote meant. That is understandable. Words do do that. Which was another point of the quote, I guess.

Believing in belief means freedom of religion, nothing else. There is not a single set of beliefs that doesn't require belief. It's been stated on these forums that athiesm requires belief as well, else what about the Axial Period or life being capable of existing at all? These can only be explained by coincidence, which means you believe that it is more likely that those coincidences happened (as well as numerous others) as opposed to there being a Being, a God, if you will. God is merely the simplest way to state that belief.

For athiests, God is science. For me (and other Taoists), it is the Tao. For (some) Buddhists, it is Bodhi. For Hindus, it is Brahman. For Discordians, it is Eris. For the Norse, it is Odin, Thor, Baldur, and all the various other Norse deities. It is much easier to compress them all into the words "under God" than in any other way of saying it. It can be extraordinarily deceptive to the uninitiated, but is correct nonetheless. Keep in mind that freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion. The Supreme Court has made that abundantly clear.

If I was in a worser mood, I'd say something that could earn me an infraction.

Last edited by Henriksson on 16 Jul 2009, 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sure. But zen monks don't have a monopoly on this kind of expression. And they are still conveying truth with words.


It might prove that I'm not thinking zen thoughts, but if I think zen is silly and irrational, why would that be a problem?

I don't know what poem you're talking about, but if the poem is about the Bodhi, then it is using words to describe it, because a poem is made of words.


This is quite an interesting double-irony. You are defending the idea that words are useless -- by using words. And you are insisting on the sacredness of a tradition that rejects insisting on the sacredness of tradition.


I'm surprised that you're surprised. Virtually everyone who rejects my religion around here doesn't display any real understanding of what it's about.