Why Do Americans Go To Church?

Americans go to church on Sundays because American culture is completely amoral. It is, after all, a nation built upon the expropriation of land from its previous occupants by wholesale violence and genocide. Slavery was its foundation and the consequences of that remain in the inequality and obvious racism and ethnicism of American society. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, Native Americans are all routinely demarcated as different, and therefore not to be trusted. Conformity to social norms is an absolute requirement, and conformity to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal is best.

American business is no more than legitimised brigandry. It maintains a Spartan philosophy—do what you like as long as it makes money, just don't get caught. American tobacco companies fought tooth and nail for decades, to prevent the fact that their product was packaged death being publicised. Now, American oil companies spend millions to try to pretend that climate change is not happening, while Monsanto, makers of the deadly Roundup weedkiller and chief promoter of the anti-social technology of genetically modified crop production, carries on as usual. Had Bernie Madoff not been tripped up by the banking crash, he would still be lionised as a hero, and what about that banking crash? Caused by American bankers lending money to people who could not afford the repayments on property that had no value, then cynically packaging that debt and selling it to others without telling them that it was a dud buy. Throughout the world, American business is a synonym for bullying and chicanery, not to mention outright dishonesty and corruption.

And this 'land of the free' (to rob, cheat and plunder) denies to its citizenry the basic comfort of universal health-care; murders civilians across the globe on the whim of its 'security' services; engages in illegal wars and genocide for domestic political reasons. American politics are at best reprehensible and in all honesty, despicable. Witness the so-called 'Whitewatergate scandal', collection of trumped-up lies about perfectly legitimate business dealings invented, as the perpetrators subsequently admitted, to embarrass or impeach a President of a different persuasion. And of the Presidency, the same is true, lest we forget that the model for 'Whitewatergate' was Watergate, a real conspiracy created by a sitting President, Richard Nixon.

Three-Mile Island was a domestic catastrophe brought about by an American company's determination to circumvent basic safety requirements. They tightened up the rules back home after that so the Americans took their practices overseas, as the disaster at Bhopal, caused by the Union Carbide company, bears witness. And politically, while pretending to uphold the rights of humans, the American administration has not shrunk from the systematic torture and murder of its victims all over the globe. If that were not bad enough, it seeks to drag people who would be guilty of no crime in the territory they are in, back to America, so that they can be punished for what might be a crime there, in the most gross abuse of extradition treaty agreements in recent history.

While routinely bilking its payments to, and continuously denigrating the United Nations, America still uses that organisation to ensure that its will is imposed, unelected, on the rest of the world.

American society, founded in violence, remains drenched in blood. Gun ownership is high, but gun killing is disproportionate, displaying a deep-seated contempt for the value of human life, no surprise in a society built on genocide. Many states still practise the obscenity of judicial murder, and America gives the lie to the claim that guns kill, as if an inanimate object were possessed of sentience: actually, Americans kill, on the grand scale.

And that is why they go to church on Sundays. Because that makes it all okay again. For it is all right to kill, steal, torture, plunder, cheat, bully, coerce and altogether be as despicable as some Americans really are, as long as you pray once a week. After all, that is what religion is for.

Isn't it?