that old issue again

A comment to the saint in a straight-jacket who writes about a school counsellor in the US who created a stink by altering a school pledge speech from ‘our nation under God to ‘our nation under your belief system’:

Trying to work out what I would say if I was thrust into counsellor Lucero's position. As an unbeliever, and a proselytising atheist, I would never be able to say 'under God'. Never never never. As a kid, being forced to repeat some chant with God in it (or some cliché about our Wonderful Nation for that matter) would leave me fuming with resentment for days. So I would never want to subject anyone else to that sort of stuff - even if there was only one mini-me out there among a thousand.
If there was no way of getting round it though, I'd just drop the 'under God' phrase and hope the kids didn't notice, whereas 'under your belief system' is so clunky, and it seems, so deliberately designed to draw attention to itself, that it could hardly fail to do just that. And I wouldn't delete the offending (to me) phrase because I wanted to be more inclusive, but for the far more selfish reason that if I said it I wou
ldn't be able to look myself in the mirror afterwards.