Trust in God? Or trust in man?
It’s interesting how insecure some people can be when they perceive their safety blanket being taken away from them. As is typical with some religious thought, an op-ed to the Lawrence Journal-World today bemoaned those who wish to remove the motto ‘In God We Trust’ from our money.
“In God We Trust.” To have this on our currency is to say that we trust in something higher than ourselves, namely God. For those who wish its inscription removed, I would ask them where we should put our trust and most importantly, to whom we are accountable.
It’s as if removing a phrase of private devotion to the God of your choice on the public currency of a secular state somehow diminishes their own faith.
I am accountable to those around me and to myself. I far prefer being accountable to those who are actually affected by my actions rather than to some invisible omnipotent being.
Many people have said that the result of the November election was a wakeup call that the government, and namely the president, is still accountable to the American people. I would agree, but then we face the question: To whom are the people accountable? Themselves? Look at what happened in Nazi Germany. Hitler did atrocious things, but with the people behind him, inspired by their leader whom they elected. Perhaps we are accountable to the rest of the world, but what if the rest of the world had joined in on the call to exterminate this “inferior” race? Would it still be wrong? It would not have been if we as humans are only accountable to ourselves.
That line of thinking might almost make sense if it weren’t for the fact that putting a phrase on money has no bearing on it’s validity, nor makes people actually believe it. If you’re so concerned with people believing in God, go out and try to convert someone, but putting it on my money is not going to convince any atheist to believe in God.
The argument might also have validity if people who believed in God were good, and those who don’t, bad. One need only look at the religious convictions of Muslim terrorists, or Catholic Inquisitors, or pedophile priests, or televangelists, or any other number of immoral religious people to see that it isn’t the case.
Oh, and you also have to deal with the fact that the Nazi movement wasn’t entirely secular either. Many, if not most Nazis were Christian in some form or another. Nazism rose with help from the German Christian community, and Nazi soldiers wore the inscription “God With Us” on their belt buckles.
Now, you can argue about someone having true religious convictions, or what “true” Christianity is, but that’s not what this is about. If Muslim terrorists who say “God is Great” throughout their lives can commit atrocities, and German soldiers who wear symbols saying “God With Us” can commit genocidal acts, how is putting “In God We Trust” on our money going to ensure all Americans are “good”?
If anything, these symbols show how dangerous putting our accountability into a deity can be. When you put your sole accountability in God, the actual consequences of your actions can be ignored as long as your faith is strong enough. I’d much rather put my trust in those who are concerned about accountability in this life, where their actions have consequences, rather than in an afterlife where they don’t.
Update:
My friend Bruce has written a rebuttal in the Journal-World.