The important bit in the pledge of allegiance and in the US Constitution isn’t that we are one nation under God; it’s that we are one nation under God.
Whether you decide to psychologically position yourself under the authority of an abstract divinity and it’s associated writings or reject them entirely, the concept of the Nation placing itself under God (a god, many gods, any god) should supersede and subsume your desire for rebellion against or abject rejection of such a god. The reason for this is simple: when Congress no longer considers themselves under God, then like Nietzche’s Madman in book 4 of The Gay Science, has it, they are likely to presume that they “must become gods in order to be worthy of such a great feat.” (That feat being our having killed God.)
In short: if there is no conceptual God above the state, then the state is the highest concept in the human mind—both yours and your betters’—and this matters.
This matters because the principal of individual freedom of choice, distinction from the animalic herd, the recognition of speciality (a reflection of divinity in you, the individual), the sanctity of each individual life in recognition of such a case, and personal sovereignty all rest upon WHO has granted you such rights and whether or not those rights are inalienable.
I see our institutions attempting to grant and revoke rights based on capitulation to a government. I see it
Where there is no God, there is only government. Where there is only government, there is only man. Where there is only man, there is only Will to power. Where there is will to power, there will be found subjugation in the name of common good. Where common good is concerned, there will be equity. Where there is equity, differences disappear. Absent differences, time stops. Where there is no time, life is valueless. Where life is valueless, genocide is permitted. Where genocide is permitted, is hell. Kill your god, kill yourself.
God or Nature’s god, as Jefferson had it, must be the grantor of inalienable rights—Truthfully ANY god will do, as science whittles away at the abstractions; hell, science as god would be fine if we had proper reverence for its boundless ignorance rather than its meager and constantly shifting discoveries temporarily counted as capital ‘T’ Truths. It is only the conflation of science with absolute Truth that runs us flat into a wall: if government sponsors science, science itself is Truth, then government develops our god and thereby situates itself above god, the magic that is in us. This reduces us, at bottom, to wards of the state whose individual truths are meager fractions or fractal distillates of yet to be discovered matter; whereas we are indeed matter, but importantly, also matter’s root, mater, mother inspired (breathed into) by spirit—the animating spirit of God, the divine; this is what instantiates our being; the spirit, the father, not simply the matter, the mother. We come from Mother Earth, but we are inspired by god the father, the patriarchal spirit of all of humanity history. …which I suppose is at bottom an argument for natural selection combined with cultural construction informer by that selection and it’s accompanied randomness.
Perhaps there is no God; but we do need him. If god is not sovereign, then you are only matter—only comprised of Mother, missing the spirit of the father.