Atheist must swear to God -- or leave US Air Force

[commandrix]

America seems to pull this kind of shit a lot I've noticed, after doing some digging a lot of them make a big deal about swearing allegiance to the flag, sounds pretty brainwashed to me no matter how you try to paint it because they try to push this stuff on  school children as well.

True...I didn't think much of swearing allegiance to the flag when I was a kid because I figured it was something everybody did and they're just sounds until somebody assigns meaning to them. And there are days when St. Kitts sounds very attractive if only I could scrape together the $400,000 to buy a chunk of real estate, so maybe the brainwashing didn't work quite as well on us Bitcoiners, am I right?

[Lethn]

lol well I'm British so we didn't get as much of that bullshit here thankfuly and it was when I was about 16 that I started learning some real history that I learned the flag saluting is a load of crap, you still do get people like the BBC who genuinely act as if it's your sworn duty to worship a country though, you know, just because you were born there and that's your fault.

[cryptodevil]

Patriotism is such an absurd notion anyway. It's tribalism dressed up in pomp and ceremony.

That's why it's such a go-to for fundies, because it suits their self-important alliance with the image of a powerful entity.

[ReserviorHunt]

Too bad.

All these uppity fools thinking universe revolves around them and their feelings.

[dontCAREhair]

America seems to pull this kind of shit a lot I've noticed, after doing some digging a lot of them make a big deal about swearing allegiance to the flag, sounds pretty brainwashed to me no matter how you try to paint it because they try to push this stuff on  school children as well.

searing allegiance to the flag is probably not going to go away. It is really something that I have really never understood (and cannot give an explanation) however it is something that many administrations have supported across both political parties. Although the supreme court has found somewhat recently (~10 years ago) that students can choose to remain silent when the pledge of alliance (to the flag) is recited