:wtf: is that supposed to mean? By most accounts roughly %15 of the population doesn't believe in a supreme being yet they bully the %85 remaining with the removal of the 10 commandments from court houses; prayer in school; the drive to remove "In God we Trust" from currency; and the phrase "One nation under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance. They are more than equal than the other pigs in the regard of representation.
I see a direct correlation between the removal of any appearance of belief from schools and the steady decline of American society at large. That is, the landmark cases brought to the forefront by Madeline Murray O'Hare and her constituants follow the time line of our decay since the early 1970's.
You haven't got any rights? Fuck that! Your rights are infringing on the majority in this and all other instances.
Oh please. If anything lead to the recent decline of our society it was creating an economic environment, which Republicans are more to blame, where it forced two parents to have to work instead of one actually being available to raise their children. Yet all those neocons and religious nuts don't even think twice about things like that.
Even if atheist aren't a majority they don't try to force their non-religion down other people's throats, not in the way fundamentalist and evangelicals do. All the religious people can do about doing what they have always done, just without government blessing of favoritism, as it should be. If people want to show some of our nation's religious background put it in a museum (and only a separate dedicated museum) somewhere where it belongs. If they want to show that some of our ideas came from the religion some of our founders had then show that in a technical way in a textbook using only the proven facts and truth, and don't make a bigger deal out of it other than stating the plain facts about it.
I'm a religious person but I don't see any legitimate reason we need to purposely inundate our government with it or force people that aren't religious or of different religions than Christianity to have to be exposed to regions they don't believe in. In fact, the Pledge of Allegiance is a prime example of that. The phrase "One nation under God" wasn't even in it until 1956 when the Knights of Columbus got it in because of the fear from communist and their wanting to push religion on as many people as they could. (By the way this was also the time where people were persecuted in this country for even the accusation that one might be communist even when they didn't do anything wrong.) Today the Pledge of Allegiance is used as a minor form of brainwashing for school age children. It's especially bad considering at that age they have no concept of the gravity what "pledging your allegiance" really means or that they are almost forced to go along with it's religious overtones when they say it or face being a pariah to everybody else when they don't. Considering it's an almost mindlessly said bunch of lines now, it looses both it's original meaning, and ironically the one the religious fanatics wanted if for.
Finally, it doesn't matter how many people do or do not believe in a religion or religious concepts. People's rights are to have free religion and from that right to also be free from religion because it's impossible to have one without the other. Their is no right to force your religion on somebody else. I'm sure if instead of school prayers if the government was run by Islamist and forced it to shut down several times a day so people could pray towards Mecca all those Christians that want the 10 commandments in school, school prayer, or the Pledge of Allegiance would be yelling at the top of their lungs to change it.
Except the R in BART doesn't stand for Regional it's "Bay Area Rapid Transit".
About 20 years ago nearby Santa Clara Co decided to call their expanded system SCAT Santa Clara Area Transit, then many people told them what else scat meant. ;-) They went with something else.
Seattle has that beat. They once came up with South Lake Union Trolley for one of their mass transit systems. Of course then people started calling it the SLUT.
