Nice editorial. Completely contradicted by history, the Constitution, and common sense, but nice editorial.

"In God we trust" is not our national motto, it is a phrase on our currency. It dates to the Civil War, when the treasury catered to increased religious sentiment. Source, US treasury website.

The phrase, "one nation, under God " (pledge of allegiance) dates only to the 1940's.

The founders of this country, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin, were not Christians, they were Deists. Deism is hard to define concisely, but basically it takes the position that it is unlikely that Earth and humans are the most important things on God's to-do list.

George Washington, in 1796, in the treaty of Tripoli, said, "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, based on the Christian religion." Since he was president when the country started, I'd say he was in a position to know.

While the fervently devout christians are very energetic in trying to paint this as their nation, the fact is, it ain't so. It's everyone's nation, and the founding fathers were very explicit in their desires to keep the Cotton Mathers and Ayatollah Khomeini's of the world from interfering with the freedoms of others. That is why it is illegal, and appropriately so, to put the ten commandments on the wall of a classroom.

The history of the US is rife with cycles of increased evangelical sentiment, followed by legislation to attempt to implement the religious sentiment into law. This gave us prohibition and the war on drugs, among other things. Generally these laws fail. We're in one of those cycles right now. Not surprisingly, these cycles often concide with periods of war and economic uncertainty.

There are numerous nations in the world whose government is religiously based. Most of them are muslim, and they work to implement Sharia as the basis of law. I think we would all agree that that is a disaster. Stoning our daughters for sexual activity and cutting off the hands of petty thieves doesn't meet my definition of civilized law. It ill behooves us as the leader of the free world to not set an example that freedom of worship, or not to worship at all, is such a fundamental right that any attempts to implement religion by the state are inherently suspect.

After all, isn't the freedom of religion one of the freedoms that we are trying to bring to Iraq?