To the editor:

In her reply to Hoversten’s Article, Christina Young tries to convince us that removing “In God we trust” would be more trouble than it’s worth. She seems to think the government cannot round up out of date currency. Stopping all financial transactions, while they distribute the new non-religious money, would be quite a stretch.

However, the federal reserve system DOES collect old and mutilated coins and paper money. After all, that’s the reason old 20s are rare now.

The average lifespan for a coin is 30 years and paper is only six months. Why should our non-Christian children and grandchildren be alienated by their currency as we unfortunately are?

I’m all for removing the “Nature’s God” part of the Declaration of Independence, even though it is clear to me that nature’s god isn’t necessarily the Christians’ God. Creator needn’t be removed, however.

Creator needn’t be God, or any deity; my Creators were my parents, and I was endowed by them, etc. etc. But, now that you mention it, we should probably chuck that as well; I’m pretty sick of listening to Christians misinterpreting our Declaration of Independence like they do to their Bible.

Scrubbing our history of the influence of religion is not very smart because some religious people have done good things in the name of their gods.

Please don’t assume that non-religious people are naive enough to ask the undoing of otherwise good acts. The Declaration needn’t be changed because it really doesn’t form any of our laws, but the Constitution? Where does that mention god or any specific religion? Furthermore, I see no reason to not change the way presidents are sworn in, what harm would that do?

Then, Young has the gall to say that with the Ten Commandments in the classroom, maybe the six year old boy wouldn’t have shot his classmate.

I respectfully ask, where the hell do you get off? Most people in this country are Christian, most people in prison are Christian and most criminals are Christians.

I’m sure that the boy was aware of “Thou shalt not kill,” as are most death row inmates. What we need in this country is MORE thinking, and LESS religious dogmatism.

Finally, by appealing to the wisdom of our founding fathers you show your lack of careful thought on the subject. Our founding fathers set up this country so that you, a woman, could not vote. It was set up so that slaves could be bought and sold. One thing they did not do, however, was put “In God We Trust” on our money.

The McCarthy-Era folks did. Our founding fathers also set our government up to be self modifying so that when (not “if”) we discovered a mistake they made, we could fix it. This is a mistake to put “In God we trust” on our money, so let’s fix it.

Keith Twombley

Sophomore

Computer science