From the Slate Daily podcast, I learned something (with the risk of  invoking Godwin’s Law) about the origins of the Pledge of Allegiance controversy:

For those who may have skipped that day in your constitutional-law class, it’s worth repeating that the pledge controversy began in Hitler’s Germany when the Nazis sent thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses to concentration camps to punish them for refusing to make the Hitler salute to the Nazi flag on the grounds that they don’t believe in swearing allegiance to any worldly government and didn’t recognize Adolf as a semi-demi-divinity.

As a result, the American leader of the Witnesses denounced the hand-over-heart flag-salute American Pledge of Allegiance on similar grounds. The flag as false idol. It would seem to me other religions should have joined in.

Just to reminds us what we mean by false idol; Cue Exodus 20:4-5:

4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,

Maybe the point of having the “under god” line added, to make sure it’s clear that country is second before religion, although I think there are some wouldn’t like that interpretation. Of course if one believes that the American government is fundamentally supposed to be a religious organization, then that might be a way out  of the contradiction too.