Looking for the words to one of my all-time favorite songs, I am amused to find most of it at the bottom of this page: “The Discipleship of Marriage, Part 3 – ChristianSinglesDating.com Article”. The opening/closing stanza is omitted, presumably because it frames the song as a letter to the lover being dumped (“when you waken I’ll be gone”). But much of what remains can be read as an attack on organized religion:

. . . They’ll try to stop you singing in the middle of your song
for they do not want you free, and they will not make you strong . . . .
[They’ll] tell you that the darkness is a blessing in disguise,
for you never have to notice if you’re sighted or you’re blind;
and they’ll do their best to keep you from the light.

Well okay, I suppose Jack Chick feels the same way about evilutionists.

(The song: “From me to you” was sung by Janis Ian:, but is out of place in a woman’s mouth, Woman was not designed to lead; 1Pet.3:1-7)

Where did she say anything about leading?

Yeah, okay, I guess it’s not hard to picture Ben Grimm with a yarmulke. (By way of Meryl Yourish by way of Gary Farber)

I applaud the Ninth Circuit for recognizing that teaching schoolchildren to recite “one nation under God” is an establishment of religion; though without the offending phrase the tots are still being taught that their first duty is to “the republic for which it [the flag] stands”. I dimly remember (or imagine that I remember) being bothered by the implication that whatever conditions prevail in my “nation indivisible” are the definition of liberty and justice.

Let it not be forgotten:

The Pledge of Allegiance . . . was written by an avowed Socialist, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. Bellamy was at one time the vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists, and once delivered a sermon entitled “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy wrote the pledge to help a Boston publisher sell flags through one of his magazines . . . he also saw it as a way to instill veneration of the state and its symbols in the hearts and minds of schoolchildren . . . . —David F Nolan, Libertarian Party News, September 1995

Got a spam (three or four times now) from a Christian kook. In the middle of the prophecies about nuclear war and the biochip of the beast is a paragraph about Creation, including:

THE LATEST RESEARCH IN MOLECULAR PHYSICS HAS COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (APPROXIMATLY 10 TO THE 34th POWER) JEWLS (POWER UNIT) NEEDS TO BE INPUTED INTO THE WHOLE UNVERSE EVERY SECOND TO KEEP IT FROM FALLING COMPLETELY APART. THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THIS ENERGY COME S FROM BUT (— THIS IS ENOUGH ENERGY TO LIGHT NEW YORK CITY FOR 200 YEARS –) THIS IS PART OF THE WILL OF GOD- PLAIN AND SIMPLE-.

Whee! Where do they find this stuff? Of what is it a distortion?

If my figures are right 10^33 watts is about 3 million suns; negligible in the Galaxy, beneath measure in the Universe. But 10^33 joules is indeed enough to power New York City for two hundred years – assuming 8 million people each using twenty terawatts.

David Kopel: Does God Believe in Gun Control?

Wow . . this Indian matchmaking site starts with a bewildering menu of religions: Buddhist, Christian (10 flavors), Hindu (132 flavors), Jain, Jewish, Muslim (7 flavors), Sikh (7 flavors), No Religion, Other. 132 kinds of Hindu? And no subflavors of Buddhist? TWIAVBP.

Review of a German book which “tries to show that many of the obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic.”