Pledge Videos

A commenter on the Atheist Ethicist blog made a suggestion that he later followed up with on his own blog.

Still, reading one of Alonzo's posts recently got me to thinking about the Blasphemy Challenge that drew a lot of interest last year. As you may recall, the Blasphemy Challenge involved people filming short videos of themselves "denying" the Holy Spirit and posting them on Youtube. Well, I figured, why not adopt the same idea for The Pledge Project? How about we make videos of ourselves and others saying the Pledge of Allegiance sans the words "under God"?

In it, he has taken the next step and produced a video of his kids saying the "Pledge of Allegiance" without the words "under God."

A lot of people come up with ideas. They give their ideas more merit when they act on them.

I think this idea has merit. One of the complaints about the current pledge is that it gives the impression that those who do not believe in God are not patriots - that they are not loyal Americans - in virtue of their unwillingness to pledge allegiance.

They conveniently ignore the fact that this is due to an unwillingness to lie - an unwillingness to say that America is now or ever has been under a being that does not exist.

In my book, A Perspective on the Pledge, I have the protagonist standing after the rest of the class gave a pledge of allegiance to give his own pledge - precisely to illustrate some of the problems with the existing pledge.

I have written to the Rational Response Squad and asked if they would like to take up this idea.

In the main idea, I would like to recommend that readers take up the challenge. Let me know what you do.

Now . . . I gotta go find somebody who can make me a video.