Take your "O" somewhere else. This isn't the place for making borderline offensive generalizations about people's cultures.
Appeals to "God" in the official American symbolisms and language are both throw-backs to history, which should be removed, and hypocrisy, as the system is run by Man, wholesale.
Maybe you take offense to my opinion, and you're the one who shouldn't be offended and/or take his thin skin elsewhere? It's sometimes healthier to detach yourself from the subject of a discussion, if you identify with it, at least long enough to understand the other :-)
I think my objection to your generalizations about Americans was fully justified. The US is an extremely diverse country, and trying to paint Americans as materialistic or less-holy-than-thou is really, well, stupid.
"Nations" are composed of diverse individuals and groups, but they also have their unique, combined national identity[1]. I am not making sweeping generalizations about "Americans", I am taking their self-identification and their actions at face value and looking to see whether those words and actions are inline with the profession of "In God We Trust."
Everything, from the declaration of independence, to the conquest of the South/Western Mexican states, to becoming a sea-faring world power, to occupation of Philippines to the industrial revolution, mass immigration and everything. All the "American Dream" mythology, upward mobility, white-picket-fence and two-car-garage house, competition, excellence in sports, variously named "Generations" (an age-demographic category that has no other peer in the world) .. this is not exactly a defeatist nation that believes in predestination. No where in the this massive running engine that we call American daily life does God figure in; just look at the morning rush, when Americans go through the ritual of drive-through breakfast and traffic jams. That's an all too human pursuit of life, driven by selfish interests. And there is nothing wrong with it.
But it mocks one's intelligence to see these very people tack random trite quotes and slogans from their religious past onto their current everyday life. It would be honest of them to fucking come clean, or sit together in a massive group-therapy session to reflect on the disparity between their words and their actions. And I say that as a person who prefers their actions, over their phony appeal to scripted/printed moral aphorisms. Cut the judeo-christian faux-altruistic crap already.
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[1] ignore for now existence of consensus on national-unity by all the alleged members/citizens.
