The Star Tribune reports:

The nation’s largest group of atheists and agnostics filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block an architect from engraving “In God We Trust” and the Pledge of Allegiance at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington.

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in western Wisconsin, claims the taxpayer-funded engravings would be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

The House and Senate passed identical resolutions this month directing the Architect of the Capitol to engrave “In God We Trust” and the pledge in prominent places at the entrance for 3 million tourists who visit the Capitol each year…

The foundation is seeking a court order to stop the engravings, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost less than $100,000.

“In God We Trust” has been the national motto since 1956 and has appeared on U.S. currency since 1957.

The lawsuit says both the motto and the words “under God” in the pledge were adopted during the Cold War as anti-communism measures. Engraving them at the entrance to the U.S. Capitol would discriminate against those who do not practice religion and unfairly promote a Judeo-Christian perspective, it says.

Members of Congress who supported the measure swiftly denounced the lawsuit.

“This lawsuit is another attempt by liberal activists to rewrite history and deny that America’s Judeo-Christian heritage is an essential foundation stone of our great nation,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

King has a valid point. On the one hand, this is typical atheist grandstanding. But these kinds of lawsuits are a very real threat to our country and shouldn’t only bother religious people but anyone with common sense.

If you ignore God you ignore the source of all of our rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The whole idea of inviolable worth of each individual this country is based on is at heart a Christian concept. That’s why the whole argument over whether the Founding Fathers were deists, theists or Christians is almost beside the point in that their whole frame of thinking was Christian. All of their assumptions were Christian.

One of the marks of tyranny is the refusal to grant personhood to “the other.” You see it through history that when a government doesn’t recognize the rights of certain individuals be they the disabled or a certain ethnic group a body count is sure to follow. Our Founding Fathers knew this and made our rights “unalienable” precisely because they emanated not from government but from God.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

If our country doesn’t allow a God or a Creator to be acknowledged, our rights are therefore given or taken at the whim of the government.

Ironically, atheists have the right to protest in these asinine ways precisely because we are a Christian country. God help us and them if we cease to be.