“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”
—Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1758

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
—Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794

Yes, the use of pronouns can be quite mischievous when they are not clearly defined.

Well said.

IMO, your attempt to make the atheist’s sentiment sound bigotted highlights the vast gulf between the atheist’s and homophobic asshole’s respective stances.

You began, “I do not care that you are religious; I just don’t want to be forced to accept it…”

I only had to read this far to know you were up to something; something about it gave me a hinky feeling that you were using a sly word play to trick me into a silly conclusion (e.g. “Reading gives knowledge, knowledge is power, power corrupts, and corruption is crime; ergo, reading will lead to crime”).

A quick reread of your opening reveals the problem: what is “it” in your sentence? In context, it can only refer to “that you are religious”, making the entire statement “I do not care that you are religious; I just don’t want to be forced to accept that you are religious…”

So closer examination reveals a absurd, nonsenical, or clearly false premise; there’s no need to read further (unless we actually want to see what conclusion you are able to derive from a false premise).

Anyway, when you eliminate the wordplay, you get a much more illuminating comparison:

ATHEIST: “I don’t care that you are religious, but I want you to have the same rights, privileges, and restrictions for expressing your belief as I have for expressing my disbelief.”

HOMOPHOBIC ASSHOLE: “I don’t care that you are gay, but I don’t want you to have the same rights, privileges, and restrictions for expressing your homosexuality as I have for expressing my heterosexuality.”

However, in this case, I think you’re wrong. Some of the reasons have been set out above. But for a closer analogy, the gay/straight marriage issue would, if transformed into religion, become an issue over whether or not the State allowed religious and secular weddings, or only secular (or only religious) weddings. I think we here would all agree that the latter case is not acceptable.

I agree the motto thing doesn’t have nearly the impact of wedding laws, but ignoring this is a mistake. Atheists are regularly trampled and vilified, and we should stand up. In cases like this, where we’ve got the Bill of Rights on our side, it should be a no-brainer! Letting people ignore the Constitution when they happen to agree with the exception (as many Christian legislators do, I suppose) is not a good precedent to set.

yeah I definitely should have thought that through more considering license plates, although a god license plate should be treated the same as any other vanity license plate rather than costing the same as a normal plate. the whole thing goes back to having IGWT as our national motto. as long as IGWT’s our motto the state government can get away with putting it on a license plate without any fee.

As long as IGWT is the national motto, it is perhaps a bit harder to make the case that it’s inappropriate to put it on a state license plate without any fee. However, it would not be a violation of the First Amendment to do so, whether IGWT is the national motto or not.

That way we move overton’s window back to a reasonable center.

Seriously, we’ve been reasonable and pragmatic far too long. Time for “government neutral toward religion” to stop being an extreme radical view on the far left of the spectrum.

Let’s leave aside for now the Constitutionality of the thing. It’s obviously unconstitutional, as it is on our money. Let’s also leave aside how annoying it is. For most of us I’d wager that it’s mildly annoying most of the time and extremely irritating when a point is made about it, like in this case with Congress or those really annoying people who insist on SHOUTING UNDER GOD!! in that portion of the pledge.
However I think there is a valid case to be made on a purely pragmatic level. Our community does not have unlimited resources and hence it is perfectly valid to argue that a given cause costs us too much money, time and public good will for the corresponding benefit. It is not a crime to care about public relations you know. I’m well aware of the “screw’em” mentality that overtakes so many of us on almost any given issue, since we know that whenever we ask for anything, no matter how innocuous, we are certain to cause comical amounts of outrage, so why bother being careful? I think that we should, to a certain extent, fight that mentality.
This isn’t just about the law or our rights, or it doesn’t have to be. It’s also about increasing our visibility and our acceptability, to send a message to those in the closet that they can come out, that it’s safe out in the sun. So we have to make choices about where we put our efforts. These symbolic things tend to be the most controversial and while I don’t pretend to know the answer, I think that an admission that pragmatism, as well as principle, should be taken into account is in order.

However, the same First Amendment argument cannot plausibly be made against IGWT on a license plate issued under the auspices of a state government.

yeah I definitely should have thought that through more considering license plates, although a god license plate should be treated the same as any other vanity license plate rather than costing the same as a normal plate. the whole thing goes back to having IGWT as our national motto. as long as IGWT’s our motto the state government can get away with putting it on a license plate without any fee. if it were not our motto, then a religious group would have to request plates recognizing them that would cost extra to purchase in order to have a phrase such as IGWT on the plates, the same process any university or cause has to go through to have special plates.