The 1st Amendment Establishment Clause, its violations and its enemies

• Justice Hugo Black: In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and State."
• Pick a founding father and you'll find a similar expression of views. 
• James Madison: a  practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
• Based on the above, "In God we Trust" shouldn't be codified by law as a national motto nor should it be on our coins. The history of this practice is recent and rooted in wartime paranoia and it has continued support among the current political party that seems to oppose any "wall of separation."

• I'm going to defend my views against some anticipated objections:

• "Your views are rooted in disbelief in God."
• They're really not. They're rooted in: 
• Acknowledgement that the Constitution is the Supreme law of the land, that there's a right way and a wrong way to interpret it and that laws establishing a preference for any sort of deity - in this case an Abrahamic one, the same one prayed to by Jews, Muslims and Christians - should be struck down. 
• "This country was founded by Christians, this is a Christian nation, etc."
• I'm ignoring that:
• This doesn't change the Constitutionality of anything. 
• The men who drafted the Constitution really weren't Christians, that the Puritans founded Massachusetts, not America, etc.
• I'm granting that many early settlers of this nation were religious refugees and that, like most anyone else in Britain at the time, were Christians. 
• Go read about Roger Williams, who was kicked out of Massachusetts bay for believing the wrong things and then decided to establish a colony, proclaiming that no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be anywise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion ... but that all persons may ... enjoy their own judgments and consciences in matters of religious concernments. He established republican government, another shared feature of his colony and the realized United States. 
• Conclusion: if you hold the "This country was founded by Christians so this is a Christian nation, etc." view you have a warped or woefully limited understanding of American history. More importantly, you don't understand what makes America a great and special place. You probably base your "patriotism" on being born here, your religious beliefs on what you were born into, and never learned enough about your country to reconcile its preference for allowing any religion by keeping all of them out of government. In this sense, the only fundamental difference between you and the Eastern, Islamic worshipers of Abraham's God that you probably fear/loathe are where you happened to be born - in your case, a place whose unique and wonderful protection of personal belief you, consciously or unconsciously, wish to destroy...all people who wish to inject their religion into public policy should consider how often their objects of fear and loathing share the same desire.