"Christians built America"

A long-running fiction repeated in churches and by Republican politicians is that Christians built America. As usual, they are lying.

The Chinese built America's railroads. Jews are behind much of its science, finances, journalism and film. Deists wrote American constitution and based it upon the work of European Enlightenment intellectuals. A motley crew of Hindus, agnostics and minority religions run America's computer industry that was the true source of 1980s and 1990s prosperity.

Americans drive cars built in Japan, own domestic appliances made in China, use DVD technology developed in India, and work on computers made in Japan and China with software written in the very non-Christian San Francisco Bay Area and Washington State.

This technology is based on the work of scientists, most of whom are Jewish, atheist or agnostic.

A related claim is that the liberties that Americans enjoy come from "God." If that had been the case, then all Christians throughout history would have enjoyed the same rights and liberties. In fact, Christianity pre-exists America by 1700 years, and most Christian societies had none of these rights and liberties. In fact most Christian societies were disaster zones for the bulk of the time that Christianity existed, and in the most aggressively Christian Middle Ages the white man was at the bottom of the world and could not hold his head up to China, India, Baghdad or Timbuktu. America's rights and liberties were put into place by deists and are based on the work of European Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire, who challenged most Christian teachings; and a document signed by American government in 1790 stated explicitly that American system of governance was in no way based upon the Christian religion.

In a country of 300 million people, there will be people possessing any number of different attitudes who will contribute in any number of ways. Some of these people will be Christians and others won't. The greatest problem with Christian teachings is that they claim that everything that does not come from Jesus comes from Satan. If this is true, then most of what an average American has comes from Satan: His car, his TV, his computer, his DVDs, and - yes - his democracy.

I've heard many Christians say that there's no pussy-footing around with Jesus: Either you're for him or you are against him. By that standard, just about every contemporary Christian is against Jesus, as most of what he has is the work of people who aren't Christians. As for America, it owes to everyone who has contributed to it, including the Jews, the Chinese, the Hindus, the minority religions, the atheists and the agnostics; and it's wrong for Christian-affiliated conmen to steal the credit for these people's work.

So every time one sees a preacher or a politician claiming that Christians built America, the correct response is: You Lie. America owes to all sorts of people who aren't Christian. As for American system of governance, it has no basis in Christianity and is based instead on European Enlightenment philosophy. The more people understand this, the more they can actually benefit America.