<p>Dude, everything about us was ultimately developed to help mankind deal with death, beginning with hunger pangs. Saying that culture was designed to help man cope with death adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. And it can hardly mean that someone’s motivations have a dubious origin because it serves that ultimate purpose.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that you’re asking people to draw conclusions about the “world-deleter” person’s motivations while you’re apparently drawing conclusions (ones that can be applied universally, no less) about the “America-deleter” person’s motivations.</p>
<p>It could be that the “world-deleter” person interpreted the “America-deleter” person’s defacing in a way that you hadn’t considered. Perhaps, if you were the “America-deleter” you are assuming that everyone should have known your purpose and, more amazingly, you are assuming that there’s one and only one purpose behind what drove your actions and what you intended.</p>
<p>In your example, the first person to alter the message vandalized a message that attempted to express good will. Maybe the second person to alter the original sign simply wanted to show solidarity against an act of vandalism. You can call that ethnocentric, too, but then every human response would fall under that umbrella, making your distinction analytically useless. Still, I now see that your goal is to resist all possible responses that are at odds with your unflappable view that ethnocentrism is working its dark magic here.</p>
<p>And I should have understood your rigidity from the git-go because you asked us three questions:</p>
<p>***How come people say “God Bless America” and not “God Bless the World”?</p>
<p>Why the ethnocentrism?</p>
<p>Why do people want God to bless only this country?***</p>
<p>You’ve received several answers here to the first question that don’t square with the premise you seem to believe drives those people: that they are ethnocentric and want God to bless only this country. You’ve received several answers explaining the ways that your presumptions about people’s motivations behind the actions of defacing the school bulletin board don’t need to fall within those presumptions. </p>
<p>You’re cleaving to your presumption that the second person is necessarily acting out of ethnocentrism, yet you object to people presuming what drove the first person to deface school property (an exercise that I’m personally just as disinclined to engage in as I’m not a mind reader). </p>
<p>I can see now, with those questions, that you really weren’t asking three questions, but making a statement that you refuse to have altered in any way. Your second and third questions are answers to the first, making it not so much a statement as it is an accusation, and a narrow-minded one at that. I thought this was a discussion, but you want this thread to beat down anyone who disagrees with you for not being as open-minded and progressive as you are…which just strikes me as being more than a tad ironic. And a waste of time to engage you any further.</p>