The non-conformist religious origin of many of America's early settlers, such as the 41 Pilgrim Fathers who signed the Mayflower Compact, the Quaker religious background to the founding of Pennsylvania, the Calvinism of Massachusetts, etc.

have been material used in the development of this deceptively damaging myth.

Sentiment aside however, the eventual formation of the United States of America and its founding leaders held a very different position.

26 May, 1647, In Hartford, Connecticut – 47-year-old Alse Young is executed on the accusation against her of practicing witchcraft.

1692– In Salem Village (now Danvers), Salem Town, Ipswich, and Andover, Massachusetts –

The 'Salem Witch Trials' result in the execution of twenty people (14 of them woman) and two dogs,
all but one by hanging by the neck, and the death of five others in prison (two of them being infants).

In 1797, an international treaty of twelve articles, known as the Treaty of Tripoli, which had been negotiated under George Washington, was ratified by the American Senate on June 7, and then proclaimed by President John Adams on June 10 of that year, which stated rather hypocritically in its Article Eleven –

article of the Treaty of Tripoli, entitled Religious Liberty, was dishonestly omitted from the Arabic version of the Treaty for obvious reasons in a Muslim dominated religious state.

consequence, some in opposing the actions of the United States Supreme Court in 1947 (Everson school bus case) and 1948 (McCollum 'released time' case) concerning America as a secular state have dishonestly also tried to cast doubt on the existence of the above article in the agreement ratified by the US Senate in 1797, by pretending that the Arabic version was the true version.

religious liberty reflected in this Article simply expresses a national doctrine formulated by Roger Williams and later championed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (so-called 'Father of the Constitution') –

that the American government has no competence in matters of religion
and must preserve a strict neutrality toward persons of all faiths and of none.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that the slave trade was an "execrable commerce ...this assemblage of horrors," a "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties." Yet when he himself had the opportunity in 1817 due to a bequest from Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, he did not free his own slaves.

Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves in his lifetime and at any given time approximately 100 slaves lived on Monticello.

In 1792, Jefferson calculated that he was making a 4% profit per year on the birth of black children.
Jefferson's nail boys alone produced 5,000 to 10,000 nails a day, for a gross income of $2000 in 1796 ($35,000 value in 2013).

some of these myth-makers have denigrated President Obama's consistency with this as a 'betrayal' of America's past.

The myth-makers of modern America therefore, no matter how religiously sincere their zeal may be, are simply not truthful,
and if God meets mankind anywhere – it is always only at the point of honesty.

it is written to Christians as a precondition that –

This precondition is not because God needs to be informed, for He knows all things, but simply to be honest before Him.

The current Christian-sounding US national motto of "In God we trust" was simply an ideological reaction (in 1956) to atheistic communism during the Cold War, and so replaced the original US national motto of "E Pluribus Unum" (From Many, One).

October 27: in Boston, Mary Dyer and three others are hanged by the neck until dead for being a member of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers.

May 10: In New York City, American troops fire into a crowd of protesters outside the Astor Place Opera House, protesting against British actor Charles Macready for his scorn of American vulgarity, killing 22 and injuring 56.

January 31: All American 'Indians' (First Nations) are ordered to move on to reservations.

Deciphered secret Japanese messages are given to the Hoover administration Secretary of State Henry Stimson, to which he responds –

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail".

Consequently, Stimson shuts down the cryptographic service that was cracking Japanese codes. (Fortunately the US military continues code-breaking efforts).

Eight saboteurs are secretly landed in the United States from two German submarines (George Dasch who had married an American citizen during his earlier days in the US, and Ernest Burger a naturalized American, at Amagansett beach, Long Island; the others at Jacksonville, Florida).
Dasch and Burger decide to defect, contact the FBI but are not believed, so on June 18 they go to FBI headquarters and demand to see J,Edgar Hoover, then show him the cash with which they had been supplied ($82,350), and give the FBI all information on the German sabotage operation.
Insanely criminal, they are then charged with High Treason and tried before a secret military tribunal and sentenced to death.

(The FBI lie and pretend that they were arrested June 22, four days after they defected, to gain credit).

June 30: Two days after the arrests are announced in the newspapers, US Attorney General Biddle receives a note from US President Roosevelt, which reads as follows (Biddle's personal comments, which he added to the note, are shown in italics in square brackets) –

Roosevelt immediately signs an executive order creating the military commission. The following week their secret trial begins in a closed chamber on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, with seven army generals presiding. The seven generals left it to the President to pass sentence. The six Germans are executed by electric-chair, but Biddle persuades the President to commute Burger's sentence to life-imprisonment and Dasch's to 30-years imprisonment.

and 1973, during the Vietnam War, the US military dropped more than 2 million tons of explosive ordnance over Laos – the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every 8 seconds, round the clock, for nine years. The covert operation was designed to cut North Vietnamese supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through eastern Laos to southern Vietnam. It left Laos with the unwanted tag of being the world's most heavily bombed country in history, on a per capita basis. The “land of a million elephants” has since been referred to as the “land of a million bombs”. The ordnance dropped includes more than 260 million submunitions released from cluster bombs, each filled with hundreds of metal shards designed to inflict maximum damage on enemy troops. An estimated 30 percent failed to explode, often cushioned by damp soil, turning large swathes of the country into a deadly minefield. These “Bombies”, as they are referred to in Laos, have caused more than 20,000 casualties since the end of the war, and continue to maim and kill to this day. Almost half the accidents have involved children, who are attracted by the munitions’ bright colours and interesting shapes.

May 4: In Ohio, at Kent State University, US National Guardsmen fire into an unarmed crowd of antiwar protesters, killing 4 and wounding 9, after President Nixon sends US troops into Cambodia.

Two more students are shot dead at Jackson State University in Mississippi during protests.

The United States, through the University of Nebraska at Omaha's (UNO) Center for Afghanistan Studies program, funded by USAID, develops and radicalises the Taliban as an Islamic instrument against the Soviet Cold War occupation of Afghanistan.

to be honest, when he stated in 1989 –

during the Reagan administration, Reagan officials illegally sell missiles to Iran (under an arms embargo) then secretly funnel the money to support the Nicaraguan Contras (expressly forbidden by Congress by the Boland Amendment.).

Oliver North, a key figure in the scandal, later admitted to lying to Congress while a military officer.

Jesus Christ said that "by their fruit you will know them" (Matthew 7:20), behaviour attests spiritual identity, the outward (international) behaviour of the United States thus expresses its national spiritual identity.

withholding military assistance under the programs for Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) from certain States Parties to the ICC Rome Statute came into effect on July 1, 2003.

109th Congress re-authorized the Nethercutt Amendment as part of the FY2006 Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 3057/P.L. 109-102). Unless specifically waived by the President, it bars Economic Support Funds (ESF) assistance to countries that have not agreed to protect U.S. citizens from being turned over to the ICC for criminal prosecution.

Article 5 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) reads –

understood then that, for communities in foreign nations who have suffered at the hands of the US military machine either deliberately or by accident, to identify the United Sates to them as 'Christian' is to blaspheme Christ and the essential nature of Christianity.

consequence of this in 2012 alone in the –
• 'inadvertent' Qur'an burning in Afghanistan (when up to 100 Qur'ans and other religious texts were incinerated at Bagram Air Field, a US air base north of Kabul);
• the video of US troops urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans;
• the merciless killing of Afghan civilians, including children shot dead as they slept, by a US soldier/soldiers,

is then understandably associated with Christianity because of this US Christian Identity Myth.

repercussions for Christian missions are adequately expressed below in the cross to be burnt in an Afghanistan public protest held on Tuesday 13 March 2012.

21 August 2013, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal dismisses the South Africa Apartheid Lawsuit filed in 2002. The basis of the dismissal was the argument that “the Alien Tort Statute does not reach the extraterritorial conduct in this case”, a judgment of the US Supreme Court of Appeals in the Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. case, handed down in April 2013. After this Kiobel judgment –

September 2013, George Monbiot comments appropriately in the UK Guardian –
"For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice."

INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled 2,700 ground-launched nuclear missiles with a range of 500-5,500km that put European deterrence on a hair-trigger.

March 1, Vladimir Putin brandishes exotic new nuclear weapons that he would soon deploy to counter future American missile defences.

the Second World War, appropriately, Germany did what it could to compensate for atrocities committed in its name against civilians.

happened with the United States of America, and is a further reason why it therefore should not in any sense be regarded as a 'Christian' nation,

though it may contain many very sincere Christians, as many other countries also do...                                        

—  IN MEMORY OF THE MANY THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED IN THE ATOMED CITIES OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI  —

On Thursday, 22 December 2016, US President-elect Donald Trump tweets that
"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capabilities until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes."

(U.S. arms control experts say the US and Russia possess roughly the same number of weapons in their nuclear arsenals – more than 7,000 each).

January 28: Donald Trump tells Vladimir Putin of Russia in a phone call that he does not want to renew a 2010 arms control treaty that limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons the US and Russia can deploy. The phone call began with a friendly exchange, with both leaders stressing their own popularity and complimenting each other on their domestic support.

when Putin brought up two issues on which their countries had cooperated, New Start and the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,

Trump lost his temper, dismissing both as strategic losses for the US given away by Barack Obama.

The New START treaty set limits on both countries’ deployed strategic warheads to no more than 1,550 each. But it does not limit non-deployed warheads.

s have now confirmed that the U.S. military, despite vowing not to use depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, fired thousands of rounds of the such munitions during two high-profile raids on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled Syria in late 2015. Depleted uranium munitions cause birth mutations in the civilian population of the conflict area.

forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.
The revolutionary increase in the lethality of submarine-borne US nuclear forces comes from a "super-fuze" device that since 2009 has been incorporated into the Navy’s W76-1/Mk4A warhead as part of a decade-long life-extension program. It is estimated that all warheads deployed on US ballistic missile submarines now have this fuzing capability. Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

military stockpile currently contains approximately 4,300 nuclear warheads,

with 45% (˜1,950 warheads) currently deployed on ballistic missiles and/or heavy bomber bases.

Bible's instruction to all real Christians is –

of February 23, 1903 between the United States of America and the Republic of Cuba for the lease (subject to terms to be agreed upon by the two Governments) to the United States of lands in Cuba for coaling and naval stations.
"The grant of the foregoing Article shall include the right to use and occupy the waters adjacent to said areas of land and water, and to improve and deepen the entrances thereto and the anchorages therein, and generally to do any and all things necessary to fit the premises for use as coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose."

Aamer, the last British inmate to be held at Guantanamo Bay, has been there for 13 years without charge or trial – but he was cleared for release last month (September 2015) and is expected to be back in Britain 'soon'.

2003: While ‘assigned’ to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, longtime Chicago detective and US Naval reservist Richard Zuley leads one of the most brutal interrogations ever conducted at the prison. Inmates later said they confessed untruthfully to try and stop their pain/abuse by Zuley. Zuley designs a plan so brutal it receives personal sign-off from then-US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"I’ve never seen anyone stoop to these levels," a former Marine Corps prosecutor later says of Zuley.

2006, three men die here in separate cells on the same day under questionable circumstances.

"Three detainees die in a maximum security section of the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility. The military‘s initial press releases reports not only that the detainees were 'found hanging' in their cells but also that their actions were a conspiracy as part of "asymmetrical warfare" against the United States. At the same time, the military orders all media off the 'island' and prevents all lawyers from visiting their clients. ...

There is no explanation of how the supposed acts of 'asymmetrical warfare' could have been coordinated by the three detainees, who had been on the same cell block fewer than 72 hours with occupied and unoccupied cells between them and under constant supervision."

investigation into their deaths results in more questions than answers. It is unclear how such a reputable investigative service produces such an incompetent investigation. The Center for Policy and Research is unable to resolve whether the facts led to the investigation or the investigation led to the facts. What is clear is that the true circumstances surrounding the detainees‘ deaths cannot be discerned from the investigative file or the statement of findings. Without a proper investigation, it is impossible to determine the circumstances of three detainees‘ deaths."

The annual cost to US taxpayers of maintaining this camp was $454 million in 2013.

2015: On Tuesday 22, Saudi citizen Abdul Shalabi is sent home. He had been hunger-striking for 10 years of his more than 13 years held at the US naval prison in Cuba.
• Moroccan Younous Chekkouri was repatriated last week, though it is unclear if he's a free man back home. But remaining are 52 men approved for transfer, and there are countries willing to except them. All but a handful of those 52 prisoners have been cleared since 2009.
• Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantanamo, was cleared then and previously in 2007 by the George W Bush administration. The refusal by the United States to send home Aamer, who suffers from chronic psychological and physical conditions, is perhaps the biggest contradiction in the US administration's stated commitment that it wants to close the infamous detention facility.
The British government has repeatedly requested that the US allow Aamer to return to the UK to rejoin his British wife and four children – including a child born the day he arrived at Guantanamo. (See September 25 below).

Of the 18 Guantanamo prisoners who have appeared before the review board, decisions are pending in four cases. But 11 men have been cleared for transfer, including most recently the last Kuwaiti prisoner, Fayiz al-Kandari, and a Libyan, Omar Khalif Mohammed, whose right leg is missing below the knee, has metal pins in his left leg, and is blind in one eye.

Friday: The US informs the UK that Shaker Aamer will be released, after a Congress 30-day notice period (i.e. October 25), although cleared for release twice since 2002 and never tried. Former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg states that Mr Aamer is probably the "most well-known prisoner there" because "he has been fighting and advocating for the rights of the prisoners from inside the prison".

Mr Begg said "no amount of therapy" would replace the years Mr Aamer has spent (unjustly) imprisoned.

2015: Shaker Aamer (cleared twice since 2002) is eventually released to the UK. Aamer (48) was born in Saudi Arabia and settled in the UK in the mid 1990s where he married his British wife, Zin Siddique. Before that he lived and studied in the US and acted as a translator for US personnel during the first Gulf War (a verifiable statement). After coming to the UK he was granted indefinite leave to remain and was applying for British citizenship when he was captured by bounty hunters and handed to the US. Aamer had taken his family to Afghanistan soon after the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001. He says he was working for an Islamic charity. The US insists he was a senior terrorist with links to top ranking al-Qa’ida figures including its former leader Osama bin Laden. But he says he was carrying out humanitarian aid work when he was picked up by bounty hunters and passed to US forces.

Republican George W Bush issued 291 executive orders and
FD Roosevelt issued 3,721 Executive Orders. (more than 307 per year)

2016: The Pentagon has proposed transferring the remaining 91 detainees at its Guantánamo Bay prison on south eastern Cuba to their home countries, or to US military or civilian prisons.
But the US Republican controlled Congress is deeply opposed (such as Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas) and

expected to block the move, as it did previously.

US president-elect Donald Trump’s tweet January 3 that everyone held at Guantanamo Bay is “extremely dangerous” is ill-informed. What’s worse, his proposed course of action – stopping all releases – shows a lack of understanding about the danger of keeping Guantanamo open poses to US National Security.

majority of the 720 men released from Guantanamo, many after years of wrongful detention and torture, have been getting on with their lives around the world without incident. A total of 59 men remain there; most have been held without charge or trial for close to 14 years. Only 10 have been charged with a crime, most notably the five charged for their role in the September 11 attacks.

Negotiations on a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons have begun in New York, but have been publicly condemned by the United States, which is leading a coalition of more than 40 countries – including Australia – boycotting the talks. At least 113 countries are part of the negotiations which have begun at UN headquarters in New York this week, aiming to negotiate a

"legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination".

Russia is aggressively building up its nuclear forces and is expected to deploy a total force of 8,000 warheads by 2026 along with modernizing deep underground bunkers, according to Pentagon officials. The 8,000 warheads will include both large strategic warheads and thousands of new low-yield and very low-yield warheads to circumvent arms treaty limits and support Moscow's new doctrine of using nuclear arms early in any conflict. In addition to expanding its warheads,

Russia is also fortifying underground facilities for command and control during a nuclear conflict.

30: President Donald Trump issues an executive order Tuesday to keep open the detention-without-trial facility at American controlled Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, rolling back his predecessor’s order to close the prison for suspected terrorists.

*Very questionable as a nuclear technician with a conscience who had worked at Israel's Dimona
reports that Israel has more than 300 atomic bombs in underground storage north of Tel Aviv.

More than any other single factor, to turn the tide, the United States as a whole needs to learn humility in its relation to the rest of humanity.
See: Anti-Empire Report pdf by William Blum (Nov. 2010)     and the     Citizen Four video of Glen Greenwald and Assange, etc.

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