Poll says “U.S. is blessed”
26 October 2008 by Stardust
. . . even though we fuck things up. Most Christians believe that their God picks favorite countries to bless more than others, and believes that this God likes the U.S. best.
Poll: U.S. is blessed, but troublesome in the world
WASHINGTON — Six in 10 Americans think the U.S. is “uniquely blessed” by God, but a higher percentage — almost eight in 10 — think the country sometimes does more harm than good when it relates to the rest of the world, according to a new study on religion and America’s role in the world.
Overall, the study commissioned by the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and the United Nations Foundation found that Americans, including majorities of religiously involved citizens, think the country should be involved on the world scene.
But researchers found that 79 percent of Americans feel that U.S. involvement abroad sometimes does more harm than good, and 44 percent feel that view strongly.
Globally, do we more harm than good, or more good than harm?
26 October 2008, on 7:05 pm
Wonder if gawd chooses sports teams too.
26 October 2008, on 8:19 pm
AUM, according to god botherers, God chooses
who wins on American Idol
America’s Best Dance Crew
neighborhood kid sports teams
schools
beauty contests
Olympic teams and individuals
Actors and actresses
Daytime television programs
The list is endless…then when you consider all the individuals god has to make a choice about who lives or dies, who’s houses burn down and whose doesn’t, who wins the lottery and who starves, and so on and so forth, god is a pretty busy deity!
26 October 2008, on 8:28 pm
We are blessed by God, in that we are not affected by how much we fuck other countries up. Only Jesus’s awesome might could protect us from the woeful errors that we are so kindly obliged to make in his name time and time and go, which other, less God-favored countries, rightfully suffer for. And, due to this blessing, we are compelled to continue to interfere, and wreak havoc on others from the comfort of our living rooms, as God clearly wants us to do, due to the safety and prosperity which we continue to enjoy while doing so.
Our country is just plain schizo…
26 October 2008, on 8:55 pm
Sometimes, I just don’t understand people. 40% think we’re “blessed,” yet 80% think we do more harm than good. So, as least 20% hold both views. Isn’t that contradictory?
26 October 2008, on 9:24 pm
D’oh. “and go” in my original blurb should be “again”. Okay, carry on people.
26 October 2008, on 10:51 pm
Hmmm…A Poll from the “PEW” Foundation, huh?
Ever smell a Church pew? Or…Did you ever have a CHANCE (or even want) to smell one?
[As in...when you were a kid and somebody (accidentally?) let a fart during Church service. Which is probably, like an old joke, exactly why they were called pews...roit?]
Somehow, I can imagine there are Sheeple…and some Preachers?…that have a pew smelling fetish.
[Scene: RCC confessional]:
[Sheeple]: “Bless me Farter…I mean, Father…for I have sinned. I smelled a St. Looney’s pew…erm…4…NO…5 times!…
(Thwang…off the bridge?)…”
[Priest]: “For your penance, my child…say 5 Our Farters and 3 Inhale Mary’s…
and dammit…stop leaving your bubble gum on the floor, if you happen to slip up and smell again!…
Now, go and smell no more…I mean…ummmm…just get the hell outa here…
you filthy, friggin’, sniffing little sinful weirdo!”
[What...Exit stage left?]
Anyway…”PEW!” Me thinks that poll stinks!
27 October 2008, on 1:45 pm
It sounds better in the original German: “Gott mit uns.”
27 October 2008, on 6:44 pm
Globally, do we more harm than good, or more good than harm?
That’s a tough one, but my inclination is to go with the first option. Our sense of entitlement and that we always act correctly tends to blind us as a society to the fact that we’ve largely become a colonial power. Furthermore, we pollute, we waste, we impose our worldview, we allow our corporations to exploit the poor in third world countries, and we have the military power to put down anyone who gets uppity. The most dangerous thing for me is that whenever anyone in other countries shows any resistance to our practices, they’re terrorists who attack our freedoms. The subtext here is that “freedoms” tends to refer to the notion that we feel that we can do whatever the fuck we want to globally since gawd is on our side.
28 October 2008, on 4:13 pm
Don’t forget all those children all around the globe who are horribly abused every day just because it’s part of doG’s mysterious plan that we mustn’t ever question and must simply trust in. Hallelujah! Glory! (Howdy from a pile of paperwork, y’all)
28 October 2008, on 6:22 pm
Hey Eve! Hope you can get unburied soon and give us a post! Maybe another mythology post?
Yep, never question the abuse the Lawd dishes out because it’s all fer our own good, especially the young ‘uns.
28 October 2008, on 8:08 pm
Love America or we’ll bring you Democracy.
28 October 2008, on 8:18 pm
With the exception of the British Empire spreading her civilized institutions across the globe, no political entity has done more for the good of mankind than the United States.
During WWII, the United States was not only instrumental in defeating the fascism in both Germany and Japan– it successfully brought them into the modern world.
The United States did almost all of the heavy lifting to defeat Communism in the period of 1945-1991– no other country had the military capacity to do so after the Second World War.
Today, the United States is doing most of the world to make sure the future of the Islamic world looks like Dubai, not Mogadishu.
The argument shouldn’t be whether the America does good. That’s a no-brainer. The more interesting question is whether the Americans are greater than the British at the height of their powers — they spread civilization to Australia, India, Canada, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore — and the world is a much better place because of it.
29 October 2008, on 11:12 am
If ‘merika is blessed I’d hate to see the ‘unblessed’ countries.
And J.H. I expect that most of the countries Britain and the US helped “civilize” would not agree with your assessment.
Good v harm depends on who you’re talking to. That’s for sure.
29 October 2008, on 12:48 pm
OloPM–
Whether people agree with me is irrelevant to the truth-value of the proposition under discussion. If every single person in Australia was taught by progressives that the institutions of the United Kingdom brought them great misery, it would not change reality either way. Your position that good and harm don’t exist, that is, are things that can be subjectively decided, isn’t even coherent, since the opinion of the majority changes. For example, in 2002, a majority thought regime change in Iraq was good for America, today most Americans think it was harmful, perhaps in the future Americans may think it was good if their holy Obamessiah flipflops again. What counts as help or harm is a matter of objective fact. Progressives, who believe in forcing benighted proles to do things for their own good, ought to be acutely aware of this. Reality is not a contradiction; people have the capacity to get things right or wrong. That’s why arguments require evidence.
What the British brought — Rule of Law, free enterprise, educational institutions, liberty of thought, limitations on the state — has been a great benefit for most of the peoples they have touched. After all, civilization is a great thing; it does not deserve your sneer quotes.
29 October 2008, on 2:06 pm
What counts as help or harm is a matter of objective fact.
This is where I think we’ll reach in impasse with each other, although I can’t speak for Our Lady. Help or harm are entirely up for subjective interpretation along anything from individual to cultural lines. The idea that there is an objective notion of “help” has allowed for any number of problems in the world and is exactly the type of thinking that allowed for Manifest Destiny. You note that he British, through their colonial enterprises, brought positives to their subjects but you ignore what was their main motivation for doing so – economic exploitation. The British didn’t go into India to bring culture to the natives, they went their to expand their empire and economic and global influence.
Also, you mention that “people have the capacity to get things right or wrong.” I would argue that this is because people are enculturated to accept something as right or wrong, not because there exists either a faculty in the mind for discerning right or wrong nor because there is an objective right or wrong that exist outside of or apart from human existence but because we tend to internalize the values of our culture.
What any of this has to do with Obama is beyond me, other than the sense I get that your main problem is that any complaints just sound too liberal, as in your pejorative use of the word progressives, a camp I happily include myself in.
29 October 2008, on 2:40 pm
JH we have one thing in common. I find your response incoherent as well.
29 October 2008, on 2:48 pm
JH Bowden, I understood Stardust’s post as being about the US’s influence today based on its current policies – which are in many respects quite different from what they were vis-a-vis WWII and its aftermath – and what the religious American majority felt about it, not specific points in the nation’s past. After all, a sovereign nation’s military response to an attack on its soil by another sovereign nation is very different from a sovereign nation invading another sovereign nation unprovoked on trumped-up charges.
29 October 2008, on 4:10 pm
Eve,
Isn’t that something. I got the same understanding of Stardust’s post.
29 October 2008, on 5:37 pm
666, great minds think alike…
30 October 2008, on 7:23 am
JH Bowden:
Bullshit. You’re an apologist for the ruinous foreign policy that has largely CAUSED this nation to be in the crosshairs of the OTHER fundie nutjobs on the planet.
Old Viking:
“America. Love it, or we’ll level you!”
30 October 2008, on 12:48 pm
The United States has been “blessed,” though not by any deity. Most of our good fortune is owed to accidents of history and geography.
We have been blessed by our geographic isolation, protected on either side by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. When you consider how logistically difficult it was to conduct an invasion across the English Channel to Normandy in June of 1944, a cross ocean invasion in force would have been many times more difficult.
We have also been extremely fortunate not to have strong and aggressive neighbors. Once the population reached a certain tipping point, the Native Americans never had a chance of seriously threatening the existence of the United States. Our territory was doubled by the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, who was looking to unload it at a bargain price. Mexico was too weak and politically unstable to ever contest our hunger for more land.
As for whether or not we do more harm than good in the world, I would say that we are a mixed bag. As one of the few, if not the only, nations in the world that can project force to just about any part of the globe in short notice, we have to capacity to do either harm or good like no other. The assistance we provided after the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2004 certainly demonstrated our capacity to do good and helped boost our image in that part of the world. As for Iraq, I always believed it was a bad idea to go in there, and so far very little has happened to make me change my mind. It’s great that the violence has declined in recent months, but over 4 million Iraqis are either refugees or internally displaced, mixed neighborhoods ethnically cleansed, the country’s middle class and Christian minorities have fled in high numbers, and Islamic fundamentalists have increasingly asserted themselves.
As for the British Empire being a force for civilization in the world, I am not so sure I see that. Maybe if you look at its offshoots, like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, primarily, you could say that part of their relative success comes from the country that birthed them. But when you look at countries that they took over during the high tide of European colonialism in the 19th century, then the record does not look so rosy. One could hardly call the British policy of dumping highly addictive opium on the Chinese, and then smashing their navy when the Chinese had the audacity to protest this, as the advancement of civilization. While once having great promise, countries like Kenya and Nigeria have not turned out so well. India has been making great leaps of late, though it took quite a while to get to where they are today.
2 November 2008, on 11:30 am
The less obvious, and more sinister implication being, of course, that there are nations that are either ignored, or downright detested by the allmighty.
The world is getting much too small for such nationallistic egotism. We have to change our mindset.
2 November 2008, on 7:58 pm
fritzy:
Well, there is no Trailerparkistan; but if there was it would prolly be hell on earth.
10 November 2008, on 6:55 am
Adding 2 cents from Scandinavia: more harm than good. No question. Unfortunately.
10 November 2008, on 10:32 am
I still haven’t come to an answer to the question if the US does more harm than good. I write to many people around the world, and a few in Africa and parts of Asia where they look to the U.S. as very good. One woman I write to in Kampala, Uganda sends kisses to our whole country in every letter and praises any president no matter who it be. They are very glad for the help we have given, and the aid we provide…and allowing some to immigrate here to reach a higher level of education and higher standard of living. There are many immigrants here who praise the USA for providing and opportunity for better lives. Most of the ones I hear saying how bad the US is are the people who have reaped the benefits of being born here and having comfort and freedom their whole lives.
Then a few years back I did an investigative type report about the banana and fruit industries owned by Americans and learned about all of the exploitation of workers in central American countries and how people were forced off their own land, and then they had no choice but to work for the same companies who chased them out of their homes. When money and profit are involved, the US businesses take advantage with the help of our government.
On the other hand, people risk their lives trying to get here and to get out of the poverty and oppression of where they live. So many want to come here and their dream will never be realized and they are stuck living out their entire lives with corrupt governments run my military regimes and no chance ever for a comfortable life. As for the goods that people send, religious groups and private citizens. Much of that aid is stolen from the authorities at customs. I sent my pal in Uganda many nice clothes for her and her sons and she never received them. She never received the little pieces of jewelry I sent her so she could sell it to get some cash for her family. We don’t realize how good we have it.