Hearing that the Supreme Court is going to take up the case of the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, I started thinking about this again. Usually when you hear people talk about this, all they say is it's ridiculous, outrageous, etc., to take the words out. One sentence in a Times article or so will bother to explain why it's ridiculous. The argument given is that the words have lost their meaning through rote repetition, much like "In God We Trust" on currency or "God save this court" in the Supreme Court itself.

Since my own anger at this subsided a bit, I've really been trying to understand how this argument could possibly be seen as legitimate in a court of law. First, one must grant that it's possible for a word to lose it's meaning in one context, but not another: after all, surely the word God itself hasn't lost its meaning, and if someone says something like "in God I trust," that statement itself also isn't meaningless. So it must be the rote repetition part that does it. But does that mean every other phrase in our pledge of allegiance, national anthem, legal proceedings, and so on, is also meaningless? Probably no one would make this claim.

So clearly there is no scientific method by which one can say that these phrases in particular have lost their meaning. The only other way to be sure about it would be if everyone agreed that saying them meant nothing, but obviously that is not the case, or this would not be a bitterly contested issue about to be decided by the Supreme Court! The mere fact of this situation is perhaps the strongest argument that the words have not lost their meaning, rather ironically. So it is purely subjective, we are simply being told that we should not worry about saying these words because they mean nothing, by the people who are fighting vehemently to keep them in.

It is important however to distinguish between the pledge of allegiance and the other governmental God statements, because some people say we should not take the words out of the pledge for fear that our currency would be next. I think a much better common sense argument could be made that the phrases on currency and in the national anthem have lost their meaning; I don't think an atheist would be as likely to object to their presence, or a religious person to their being taken away. Of course no one ever sings the fourth verse of the national anthem anyway. But there's something about the pledge, the fact that children are being made to recite it daily in plain speech, that seems objectionable. Let me say that things like swearing on the bible in a court fall into the same category as the pledge for me.

In a time when our president considers faith a very important part of policy, and a general makes statements about God being on our side in Iraq and such, and ten years or so after a president said he didn't know if atheists should be considered citizens, I cannot agree that issues of separation of church and state are no longer so relevant. Atheists may not be the most persecuted group in history going by total numbers, but adjusted for the total amount of people in each group, they probably are. And after a more careful consideration, I still find the "lost meaning" argument to be about the most nonsensical legal argument I've ever heard. So I will be very interested to read the Court's resulting writeup.