RSS 2.0 FeedSecular Progressives At It Again!
by Brad WarbianyGot this in an email this morning:
You guessed it ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!!
Who originally put ‘In God We Trust’ onto our currency?
My bet is that it was one of the Presidents on these coins.
All our U.S. Government has done is Dishonor them, and disgust me!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!
DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE
Together we can force them out of circulation.
Please send to all on you mail list !!!
Ugh. I normally don’t give much attention to email forwards, but this one takes the cake. They show a picture of the front of a coin, casually leaving off the fact that the “In God We Trust” is printed on the edge. And, of course, they suggest that “one of these presidents” put the motto on the currency, leaving off that it was first done during the Civil War, so 15 presidents saw a currency without this, and that it wasn’t officially done until 1957, in the height of the fight against “godless communism”. But I guess the facts are but a distraction when you’re trying to whip people into a frenzy.
It’s made even worse when understanding that the US Mint recently mis-struck a quantity of coins that went through the QA process without these edge markings, so a portion of these coins were released without this motto or “E Pluribus Unum” appearing at all.
What does this mean? Well, not a whole lot, really. As with most email forwards, getting careless with the facts allows someone out there to sit around and laugh about how many people forwarded his lie. He’ll see who ends up eventually sending the message back to him, and what an uproar it might cause as millions of unthinking netizens have taken his email at face value.
And even more people will believe that there’s a sinister plot out there to remove religion from the public square.
I had to respond to this everyone on this email, to set the record straight. But as I’m known to do, I put a little spin on it with this quote from Napoleon.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Government is, and always has been, incompetent. Now, that’s not to say that the people within government are incompetent, only that the system itself produces worthless and counterproductive outcomes. Our government “forgets” to stamp the edge of coins and lets it through their QA process because there’s no incentive for them not to. Outside of a boycott, those coins are becoming collector’s items, and once the readers of this email forward see the properly-produced coins and read the edge, any potential boycott will evaporate.
If you’re going to boycott this currency due to some worries about a motto, you’re wasting your time. However, there is a very good reason to boycott the government. After all, would you normally patronize a business who has shown anywhere near as much of both incompetence and malice as the government does? Of course, it’s tough to boycott an entity with a gun to your head and its hand in your wallet…
As an added note, when they first discovered that some coins had gotten into circulation without having been stamped around the edge, those coins were selling for as much as $1000.00 each; but when it was discovered that perhaps a thousand or more had escaped that price fell to around $50.00.
To top that, some enterprising con artists were found to have been grinding the edges of coins in order to perpetrate a fraud on unsuspecting coin collectors.
None of this has anything to do with an attack on “In God We Trust” being on our coinage.
Comment by T F Stern — March 12, 2007 @ 11:07 amIf these guys want to boycott the new $1 coins, I am more than willing to take them off their hands :).
Comment by Kevin — March 12, 2007 @ 11:34 amSo, according to this irate e-mailer, only the beliefs of Abrahamic monotheists (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) should find themselves on our coinage? I use the money, too, and I’m an atheist. And I could easily pass the coin of the realm to a Wiccan, a Buddhist, a Taoist, a Hindu, a Shintoist, a Voudoun, or even a neo-pagan who somehow worships both Thor and Athena. Thing is, if we did get rid of “In God We Trust,” it’s not like that would be a step toward illegalizing religion. Hell, you could hand over the coin while quoting John 3:16 for all I care.
Besides, what ever happened to “You cannot worship both God and Mammon”?
Comment by Sean — March 12, 2007 @ 12:40 pmSociety changes the Constitution allows for it. I just hope we find an equilibrium.
Hey don’t hog all the coins for yourself!
Comment by uhm — March 12, 2007 @ 12:53 pmI would very much like to have one of these coins. “In God We Trust” has no place on our currency as it is a blatant violation of the establishment clause of the first amendment (the wall of church and state). This motto is an explicit government establishment in the belief in a single god (though the god is non-specific). Some would argue that because “god” is broad enough to include any god, that this is not an establishment of religion. This is nonsense.
If our currency had a motto such as “In No Gods We trust” (who is this “we” that is being referred to anyway?) or “No Gods, No Masters” I am fairly sure that these same people would say that the government was promoting atheism (and they would be right and thus would also be violating the establishment clause). Though these mottos are ones I live my life by, I would object to having these mottos placed on our currency. Our currency should have no opinion one way or the other on the god issue.
Comment by Stephen Littau — March 12, 2007 @ 1:25 pmStephen…
I don’t know about this being unconstitutional. I don’t think this really falls under the “promoting an establishment of religion” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” An “establishment” of religion, understood narrowly, would be a state-financed religion with the backing of the government. Only when understood broadly does it fall into the question of whether the government is able to put fairly generic messages like this onto currency.
The “wall of separation” is another matter, but that’s more of a jurisprudence test that has been applied over time to support the broad definition of establishment. The “wall of separation” is a quote from Jefferson in 1802, and while his ideas where important to the formation of the Constitution, I wouldn’t personally consider it to have relevance. Even then, without any actual force behind the motto “in god we trust”, I don’t consider it to be something I’m worried about.
I’m an atheist, and I’ll use money with a picture of Jesus on it if someone will take it in exchange for debts. I’d much prefer that they take it off the currency, for personal reasons, but I have a much bigger problem with our government’s ability to print dollars and inflate the money supply whenever they’d like than what motto is printed on the coins.
Comment by Brad Warbiany — March 12, 2007 @ 1:37 pmYeah. It’s one of those cases where I don’t really like it, but it doesn’t exactly fill me with anger. Just, as an intellectual exercise, I’d say take it off if it were my decision. Just not going to support a revolution over it or anything. :-) There are certainly bigger worries in the struggle for greater liberty.
Comment by Sean — March 12, 2007 @ 4:13 pmBrad/Sean, don’t get me wrong; it isn’t like I’m going to march on Washington over this issue. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being my greatest concern), this probably ranks at about 2 and would not even crack the top 300 of issues I’m concerned about.
I’m really just reacting to the e-mail that inspired Brad to write this post (great job by the way Brad). I mean look at the hysteria that was caused by the U.S. Mint failing to place “In God We Trust” on a coin! Are they that insecure that if the motto is taken off our money that somehow we would become a nation of atheists? If only it were that simple.
There is another issue that bothers me that Brad alluded to: the way people are so easily believe what they read in their email. I have plans to write on that issue on my other blog sometime because forwards such as what Brad received just irk me. Far too many people accept messages such as this as truth and forward the message without doing any fact checking. The first thing I do when I get an e-mail that purports to be fact is check snopes.com or truthorfiction.com . If I find that the e-mail has been debunked, I send a link to the person that sent it to me. The bottom line is this: don’t believe anything in your inbox.
Comment by Stephen Littau — March 12, 2007 @ 7:31 pmThe missing text was accidental, “an act of God” if you will.
Comment by Thomas Pained — March 14, 2007 @ 1:14 pmOnce upon a time, those who used money didn’t give a rat’s ass what images were carved, impressed or molded onto the face, but what it was made of, how pure, and how much of it by weight. Just a reminder.
Comment by Rick Wolff — March 17, 2007 @ 7:33 am