Here's your sign.

Well. here we go. Seems like there are rocks being thrown back and forth about the "Pledge of Allegiance" again.

Apparently, someone decided that the "Billy Graham Parkway" in Charlotte was a good place to put up a billboard. I'm unfamiliar with that particular road but I am assuming that it is a major thoroughfare with heavy traffic. Sounds like a good place for an advertising billboard.

And so a private organization practiced one of the grand acts of capitalism and entered into an advertising campaign agreement with the owner of the sign. Money was paid for the right to post the sign and up it went.

Now, before you get upset that the atheist group that sponsored the sign was trying to take a swipe a t minister Graham, these signs went up in several locations in North Carolina. It isn't just this road.

The Pledge has become a major battleground in this culture war that, to quote Marco Ramius, has "no battles, no monuments... only casualties". But the war continues just the same. Now, I have my own take on "Pledge controversy" and the sign shows the problem I have with the Pledge. This is country is neither "One Nation" nor "indivisible". It is 50 nations that have the right, even the responsibility to dissolve their union if it becomes detrimental to the well-being of their people. But no one ever seems to complain about that. They are too busy trying to either drag God into it or extricate Him from it. And it is a sad state on both fronts.

However, in this particular instance, the atheists have done nothing wrong. They broke no laws, trespassed on no other person's property and damaged nothing. But some vandals trespassed on private property and spray painted the name of their deity on a legally placed message that had been properly secured and paid for. The vandals have interfered with capitalist enterprise - they have in effect, broken a few of the 10 Commandments in an attempt to defend the honor of the all-seeing, all-powerful, all knowing God. Covetousness, thievery, and maybe even idolatry.

Idolatry? Yes. You see, in the book of Colossians, Paul tells us that Jesus is the "image of the invisible God". He is the God we see. By stepping in and trying to put a substitute for God on the atheists' sign, they may have placed a god (one of their own creation) above the very Christ they claim to worship and who should be evident through the way they live their lives - like love before vandalism. This is a terrible crime that all Christians should look upon as a moment of shame.

We took our sons to see the new "Karate Kid" movie this week and I heard something in it that I think speaks volumes to this crime. Mr Han is explaining to Dre why the lessons he has been learning are important to Kung Fu. He tells him "Kung Fu lives in everything we do. It lives in how we put on a jacket. It lives in how we treat people. Everything is Kung Fu". The same is supposed to be true of faith in Christ - to paraphrase: Jesus lives in everything we do. He lives in how we react to atheists, in how we love our neighbors, everything is Jesus.

Spray painting "God" on someone's property is not Jesus.