Ha! I agree with SRS. What bugs me about the pledge of allegiance is not so much the "Under God" as the fact that I am pledging allegiance to a flag, which in MY religion comes close to idolatry.

I don't think you'll find a purely secular society. Possibly the closest are the communist countries. I don't think they replace their religions with atheism so much as they replace them with internationalist communism itself.

States like the United States are not secular per se. They are carefully non-denominational. It is the non-denominational aspect that I think is being threatened now by the "religious right" (if you want to call it that). We are a country that tries to respect freedom of religion, which means we ideally keep religion out of government. But we are also a "society" more broadly speaking, that is predominantly of one religous group (Christian and within that, Protestant), with minorities of other religious groups. Self-described atheists are a rarity.

In practice, this means ridiculous blue laws like Bert describes here in Pennsylvania, where you can't buy wine or liquor on a Sunday. This discriminates, for exaple, against observant Jews, for the following reason: if a practicing Christian wine merchant wants to observe the sabbath, he can do so with no penalty--his customers couldn't buy booze then anyway. But if a Jewish merchant wants to observe the Sabbath, he must close on Saturday, and his customers then can go to other stores. He ALSO has to close on Sunday, by law.

Why Sunday? This law can only be interpreted as religiously motivated. And we mention God on our money. And our attorney general prays in his office and anoints himself with oil. So we're not as secular as we might look.