Most of the information here is from my friend Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. For a couple of years now, he’s been covering not only evolutionary science but the ferocious war waged by religiosity against science.
So that’s how we get this perhaps quixotic effort from Massachusetts humanists to challenge the pledge of allegiance. Which I haven’t thought of much, since I’m decades away from having had to pledge anything. Jerry is younger than I am so he remembers putting his hand over his heart and pledging, to “one nation, under god…” We lucky dopes who were in elementary school before the ’50s just pledged to the “nation, indivisible,” never mind the god bit.
I’m sure my soul is better off, at least in the sense of being unconflicted, for that. (Jerry does remind me now to consider why on earth anybody is pledging anything in elementary school, long before kids can be given an appreciation of the difference between a symbol — a flag — and what it stands for.)