krow's Journal: In God We Trust

A friend got me to thinking about "What if we just started marking out In God We Trust on all of the bills that pass through our hands?

Interesting idea... (yeah, I know, federal crime...)

Since the Fed's redesigning the bills soon anyway,

[Starship Trooper]

why not just petition them to remove the phrase from the new issues of currency?

Re:Since the Fed's redesigning the bills soon anyw

[krow]

I do not think that with the current administration that this is likely to happen.

Re:Since the Fed's redesigning the bills soon anyw

[MousePotato]

I think no matter which administration finally has to do it(it is plausibly inevitable), it will cost us a lot of money... and make us look like a bunch of jackasses in the world political arena for having to hash it out once again.

Could you imagine the laugh they are having at various terrorist headquarters right now?

"Look at the Americans! They are supposed to be fighting a war with us but instead they'd rather fight about whether or not they can even say thier own pledge of alegiance!"

Peace,
Sandor

It's already being done.

[Blue Aardvark House]

The group American Atheists [atheists.org] is already conducting a movement [atheists.org] to rid our currency of the "In God We Trust" motto (which incidentally, is the motto of my home state of Florida) by crossing out the "In God We Trust".

America adopted the motto in 1864, due to a upwelling of religious sentiment during the Civil War. Another proposed motto was "God Our Trust", but it does not make much sense from a religious perspective.

It first appeared on the short-lived 2-cent piece in 1864 (only minted till 1873), followed by quarters, halves, dollars and nickels in 1866 (the article is dead wrong on this one!), cents in 1909 (Lincoln cent) and dimes in 1916.

Paper currency didn't get the motto till 1957. According to the law, defacing money is not a crime. Look at all the bills written on by people, whether an amount or "I love you", Happy Birthday" or some similar saying.

in WHO do we trust?

[JDizzy]

So exactly what, or who, is it that we TRUST?
Apparently this is an issue of separation of church and state, not really that of creationism. Had it been an issue of Darwinism, I might suggest we begin to say 'in APE we trust' on the money. Or if it were a motivation of science (like Carl Sagan'ism) I might say 'in gravity we trust' since most scientists think the unified 'god-particle' is god (aka gravity). If this were an issue of extreme patriotism, I might suggest 'in democracy we trust'.

Why write anything on the money? I just am not that smart as to understand what marking up the cash is to accomplish? Is the idea to advertise to other consumers that somebody who once had the bill was religious? What does that accomplish?

Just curious ;)