Sorry, more on this, I know people's conceptions of God are like assholes – everyone's got one and thinks that everyone else's stinks, but I saw a car sticker that said "God Bless America", with a stars and stripes motif, and a huge Virgin Mary beside the image of the Twin Towers.

I've been taking all this "God bless America" crap since September 11 as ballyhoo, grandstanding, whatever. It's just an expression of whatever, patriotism or whatever bullshit reason to wage war, be xenophobic, or discriminate against Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians. My use of "whatever" three times in row is an indication of how much thought I gave to it.

It didn't really occur to me that people actually believe that God has something to do with all this, and that God specifically "blesses" America over everyone else (whatever that means, if God blessed America on September 11, I hope He doesn't do it again).

That image of the Virgin Mary with the Twin Towers really hammered home that people really do believe that it isn't just political, that there's a twisted theological component to what happened on September 11 and what America has become and done since then, and "God bless America" is meant somehow literally.

I'm appalled speechless. I don't know where to begin. I don't even want to touch the minor fact that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Allah is Arabic for God (although the etymology is more complicated (and rich), which is why it has become custom for Muslims to retain "Allah" even in translation).

The split comes from both sides with Christians separating their "God" from "Allah" by constantly referring to the Muslim God as "Allah" as if it was something foreign to them, and Muslims criticizing the Christian conception and treatment of the One and Only True God. Whose approval do you need to split God into theirs and ours anyway?

But this is what I was getting at in my previous post. We have this twisted notion that "God blesses America", and we have such conviction and faith in it that it has become a rallying cry to wage war against Iraq and create untold suffering with no end to it anywhere in sight.

"God Bless America" and we create these divisions, these separations, this "otherness", this "us and them", and us have no responsibility for them suffering. But only if we could see their suffering first hand, be there and live it. But we can't so we continue to deliver suffering to them, and they try to deliver suffering to us, all in the name of some concept of God, a human-made veil of God.

Believing that there is a theological, "God bless America" component to the aftermath of September 11 is just as bad, and almost the same thing, as the terrorists believing what they did was in the name of God. It never ends when you have a faulty, dualistic conception of God.