Loyalty Oath

I haven’t taken a loyalty oath since back when I was a Cub Scout drawing on cave walls. “I, Bob Englehart, promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, to be square and obey the law of the pack.” Well, that’s what it used to be, or something like it. It wasn’t advertised as an oath, but as a promise.

An oath is one of those things in the Bible that good Christian cherry-pickers routinely ignore, such as: “When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand.” Deuteronomy 25:11-12. Well, OK, that actually applies to trump and women, but he’s a guy so he gets away with it. I’ve taken oaths in courtroom proceedings, but it wasn’t to a person as much as it was to the truth.

I suppose the Pledge of Allegiance is an oath of a sort. I recited that at a Farmington Rotary meeting a couple of years ago. But as far as oaths go, Jesus said this: “I say to you, ‘Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.” He left out trump, but he would've certainly included him if he’d known him.