Thanks~ @Erinja and @Miland for the info!

RiotNrrd:

Oŝo-Jabe:That bit added to the pledge is actually an idiom meaning "god willing" and was added (if I'm not mistaken) after the Civil War...

Louis A. Bowman, who started the campaign, stated that it came from the Gettysburg Address (which is its only link with the Civil War, which had ended nearly nine decades earlier).
...
According to what I have read, it doesn't mean "God willing"; it means exactly what it says.

So, I wasn't mistaken. I was just woefully unspecific. The McCarthy era was after the Civil War, just too long after for it to be reasonable for me to have worded my sentence the way I did.

Anyways, Wikipedia says it is an idiom, but adds that the way it is used in the pledge is grammatically incorrect: However, Nunberg said that to Lincoln and his contemporaries, "under God" meant "God willing" and they would have found its use in the Pledge of Allegiance grammatically incorrect.

Here's some more info on the subject of the pledge, if you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance.

It states, in part, that: "The Pledge is predominantly sworn by children in public schools in response to state laws requiring the Pledge to be offered. Congressional sessions open with the swearing of the Pledge, as do government meetings at local levels, meetings held by the Boy Scouts of America, the Freemasons and their concordant bodies, other organizations, and some sporting events."

I can attest that the Freemasons definitely recite the pledge before opening any meeting and we are a worldwide fraternity that has nothing whatsoever to do with any organized religion or governmental agency. Here in the U.S., we recite the pledge. Lodges in other countries have their own customs and we freely welcome each other into our lodges. I am also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and we also recite the pledge, believe it or not.

I stated above that Masons do not recognize the authority of any religion or government agency. It would be good for the Esperanto movement to accept the same policy. Language is a tool that allows individual human beings to intermingle and communicate with each other. Bringing religion and politics into the picture just introduces disharmony and discord.

It is very surprising to me that the Sons of Confederate Veterans would recite the pledge.

But then, I am a little mystified by the whole confederate thing, entirely. I grew up in the north (at least, in a "northern culture" area of Maryland, since we have "southern culture" areas as well, as we are a border state). The idea of confederate pride is super confusing to me, and when I cross the border into Virginia, it's like being in a weird parallel universe to find so many highways and schools named after confederate VIPs. These people hated the USA so much that they seceded to make their own country and then attacked the USA, and now we are naming a highway after them, right next to the Pentagon, no less? (Jefferson Davis Highway, it runs right by the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery).

I guess that as a northerner, I can't understand this aspect of southern pride. But that's ok, I don't live in the south and probably never will, so whether I understand or not, it doesn't really affect my life.

jawq81:Yup. Serious as a heart attack. I think you and I live in alternate universes, that's all.

For the record, the ACLU has indeed defended Christians/Christianity from unfairness (and some of those cases actually involved "Fundies"!).

erinja, I suppose that you and I don't understand each other's world view very well, so I'd like to pass along this editorial to you. It does a good job of explaining how you may view things, versus how I view things. Here is the link to the article and the opening sentence in the article:

http://townhall.com/columnists/MichaelBarone/2010/..., and begins "In his New York Times column last week, David Brooks contrasted "the educated class," which supports Barack Obama and his liberal worldview, with the tea party movement..."

I'm pretty sure that you view yourself as falling into "the educated" class. I like to think that I, too, am educated but I don't necessarily belong to the "educated" class. I very definitely fall into the "tea party movement" class and I make no apology for that. I am politically aware and I am a realist. I am a mixture of Conservative and Libertarian. You consider yourself to be "educated". I and a very large number of today's citizens are beginning to suspect that "educated" may have a different meaning to you than it means to us.

To me, one of the most useful words in the English language is "why?". I use it all the time. For example, I am well aware that there is a vast gulf between classical liberalism and the liberalism practiced today by the leftist crowd. I have read Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and Ayn Rand's Anthem and I don't like what I read. I seriously doubt the sanity of any human being who could like such a world. Yet that is precisely the type of world that many of todays progressives are attempting to lead us into.

People are basically selfish and that explains why capitalism works and why communism has to be enforced.

What does this have to do with Esperanto? Esperanto is an idealistic concept and idealism and liberalism run hand in hand. I am beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable in this world. To me, Esperanto is a matter of practicality, not idealism. I'm beginning to feel more comfortable talking with those not born in the U. S. than I am with liberal Americans.

Glad to see once again the conversation has gone from grammar, to religion, to politics. Now all we need is sport and sex, and we'll have gotten all the "bound to turn into a conversational food fight" topics over and done with

Homosexual people are gay and England and Australia rock at cricket!
There, got that done!

@ Jawq81 - I'm confused - you don't wanna live in Orwell's 1984 world, but you're opposed to liberalism? Or are liberalist Americans different to liberals elsewhere? Or you are a liberal but you're referring to a different kind? Or am I confusing what "liberal" means in this context? I always thought that "liberal" in terms of politics tended to err on the side of Libertarian left, according to this. If so then I'm all for liberalism, but don't see it being perfectly achievable until some day far in the future when humans can be lazy as rocks while machines run our lives (provided we don't do something stupid like give them the ability to enslave us ).

The Political Compass, no doubt some of you will find this interesting, or will have you preconceptions crushed into oblivion - mwahaha!

ceigered, I'm not surprised that you are confused. That link you provided confused me too. Basically, the Libertarian Party in the US (see www.lp.org) just advocates that government get off the backs of the citizens and taxpayers of this country and stop dragging us down with idiotic ideas that have been tried and tried before and have proven themselves to be utterly impractical. Check out the link above and look at the issues. There's nothing radical about them -- just normal, everyday issues. But the political mix in this country is becoming serious. Polls seem to indicate that our society is about 20% Liberal, 40% Conservative and 40% Moderate. The more Liberal segment has the power and is seriously abusing it. I recently saw a message on a T-shirt that read "Jam it down our throats in 2009 and we'll shove it up your a:: in 2010." That's the growing sentiment of millions of Americans. And that's basically what that URL that I gave in my last post was saying.

The tea party - ists seem from my perspective in the UK to be simply Republicans, no more, no less. I certainly have sympathy with those who dislike control freakery by government bureaucrats and their obsession with targets, which creates dishonesty. But to my mind Obama's biggest achievement may prove to be the introduction of a "public option" in health care, as it exists in most Western countries. Americans already have the fire service, police, and the "public option" in education publicly funded. But the idea that the private sector will always do better appears to be a Republican dogma. If so, perhaps this dogma needs to be seriously questioned.

Oddly enough, the Tea Parties are made up of all sorts: Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, Liberals, Conservatives, Moderates, men, women, white, black, you name it. The thing that binds them together is distaste for the spending spree that Obama, Reid and Pelosi are on and opposition to ObamaCare. More than 50% of the population are opposed to it, to no avail, and that is causing much of the trouble. The liberal news media in this country is part of the problem. I've often wondered how this is being reported by the media in other countries.