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Pledge of Allegiance

An atheist family is suing the Matawan-Aberdeen Regional School District for having classroom recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge contains the words "under God," which the New Jersey family finds offensive.

Identifying themselves only as John Doe, Jane Doe, and Doechild, the family retained the American Humanist Association (AHA) for representation in the religious discrimination lawsuit.

The AHA works to advance a humanist viewpoint encompassing atheism, agnosticism, secularism, naturalism, rationalism, and other "nontheistic views," according to their website.

The Does' lawsuit states that each school day, Doechild recites the Pledge of Allegiance as part of a "flag-salute exercise."

According to the lawsuit,the AHA maintains that "by affirming that the United States is one nation 'under God,' the daily classroom Pledge recitation directly contradicts the religious beliefs and principles of the plaintiffs."

The suit goes on to compare the Does' plight to that of all non-Christians in America.

"Just as America's Jews, Hindus, and Muslims would feel excluded, marginalized and stigmatized if they were told by their government on a daily basis that the United States is one nation 'under Jesus,'" the suit reads, "so do the Does feel about their government affirming to them through a regular public school exercise that their country is 'under God.'"

School district attorney David Rubin stated that students do not have to participate in the Pledge, but New Jersey state law requires schools to have a daily recitation.

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NJ school sued after atheists object to 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance

Agnosticism vs Gnosticism | VEDA Day Eleven
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By: TonneofAsh

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Agnosticism vs Gnosticism | VEDA Day Eleven - Video

It's time we developed a new "life perspective" how humans understand where life begins, what happens when life ends and what humans should do in between to gain a meaningful existence.

Like the Model T, the sextant and the typewriter, current life perspectives are out of date because they haven't kept pace with the evolution of human thought.

Some perspectives include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Hinduism, agnosticism, atheism and tribalism, though there are others.

In the new life perspective, the archaic tenets from the old life perspectives are discarded or modified.

For example, the tenet of sin in which a human is automatically born with imperfections needing forgiveness will be chucked in favor of a new tenet called "A-OK," which assumes that humans are born good and can continue as such.

Another tenet, that of an afterlife, will be reformed.

No longer will humans be judged at death as to whether their soul will proceed to a blissful place or purgatory. Instead, this tenet will merge reincarnation with chemistry to explain that humans perpetually extend their physical presence after their death, because their bodies break down into molecules that disperse across the universe.

Another tenet, the concept of guilt and its associated feeling of regret, will be sent packing. It will be replaced with the tenet of personal comfort, which states that if humans behave badly, then they can still be comfortable with themselves because they are learning from their mistakes instead of feeling badly about themselves.

And a final tenet, that people must pledge their devotion to a higher authority, will be tossed.

No longer will the higher authority be an intangible entity residing somewhere up above. The new authority receiving devotion will be a more powerful entity: one's self, right here on earth.

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Ambiquity a New Life Perspective

Magnasoft Northstar is a provider of comprehensive, integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution. The services enable children's safety and security when they travel to and from school.

During the beta phase, Magnasoft Northstar hosted and managed dedicated hardware on its own. But this had its own set of challenges in terms of increasing capex and inability to scale, which led to the adoption of cloud. The human resource thus freed were put to efficient use on advancing business and providing better quality of service and agility to customers at lower prices and become a force to reckon with amongst competition.

TECH DUE DILIGENCE

Before evaluating the solutions by different vendors, MagnaSoft NorthStar team laid down some parameters aimed at zeroing on the right and best solution available in the market. In the end it took the cloud plunge. It also created a roadmap and listed its expectations from the cloud roll out. The key considerations were:

THE EUREKA MOMENT

After screening various solutions, the management identified that Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the right solution. According to company sources, the key considerations for choosing AWS were pricing, support, reliability, and technology agnosticism. AWS won on all parameters, with the cost-effective plan and a huge set of AMIs that helped to pick the right technology platform with ease.

"Moving to the AWS cloud platform, we have experienced savings of 40% versus renting or purchasing dedicated hardware and hosting it ourselves. We were also able to go to market 60% faster with our roll-outs. It enabled us to push out our new releases in a matter of a few hours down from three days," adds Kunal Ashar, Head of Product Development Division, Magnasoft Northstar. He further adds, "As we continue to add over 100GB of new data every week, using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) has helped us save 70% in new RAID hardware."

With this, Magnasoft Northstar can provide updates to customers from 85% (on-premise hosting) to 100%. However, with AWS, the deployment, management, and monitoring of very large infrastructure is handled and maintained by just a fraction of the human resources required as compared to a traditional box & wire' data center-based infrastructure. This is because a significant amount of automation is enabled by the likes of monitoring services offered by Amazon CloudWatch which aims to build auto-scaling triggers into the application layer itself.

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The New Safety Umbrella for school children