A Penny for the Guy

Dumb All Over – Frank Zappa

Remember, remember the Fifth of November the gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Penny for the Guy, anyone?

I’m enjoying a traditional Guy Fawkes Day. The effigy of Guy is roasting nicely on top of the bonfire.

This year the only effigy I could find had a rather orange complexion, ridiculous hair, and a red ball cap. But it’s the spirit that counts.

I know the bloody yanks in fb land are clueless about Guy Fawkes and why his has his own day. All we be revealed. And, the reason for the Frank Zappa soundtrack will be apparent. People we are Dumb All Over.

Guy Fawkes Day is kind of a mixture of Halloween and the Fourth of July. Children go from door to door, saying ‘Penny for the Guy?’. The money is for the children to build their Guy effigy and fireworks for the bonfire. Although some of the Guy money is generally used for candy.

We’re getting to the Dumb All Over bit soon. Hang in there.

Christianity professes love, but what they really love is demonizing, oppressing, and killing anyone with a different religion. When they don’t have Jews, or Muslims, … they turn on fellow Christians? for not being the right flavour of Christian? Yes we are Dumb All Over.

When Henry VIII got pissed at the Pope for not granting him divorces, he turned Protestant, creating the Church of England. In the process he made Catholicism a capital offense. It didn’t stop there. Being a Lutheran, Baptist, … could also get you done for heresy.

When Henry died, Mary became queen and everybody had to be Catholic again, or else. Then Elizabeth I reversed the country to the C of E again. When she died, they had to find a Protestant monarch. James the VI of Scotland fit the Protestant requirement, and became James I of England

Now we’re up to Guy. He was part of a Catholic conspiracy to get rid of the Protestant King and government by blowing up Parliament while the King was opening it. The group loaded the basement of the building with barrels of gunpowder. Guy Fawkes was discovered just before the session began. Plot foiled and the Fifth of November is celebrated as a thanksgiving day.

All the death and suffering caused by people not being able to handle people worshiping differently. Yes people we are Dumb All Over and a little ugly on the side.

All the fighting about flavours of Christianity? is the reason for freedom of religion in the 1st Amendment. The fights were imported to the American colonies. People were hanged in Boston for the crimes of being Baptist or Quaker, etc. That’s why New England is a bunch of little states. If you didn’t practice the right flavour of Christianity, you were run out and had to start another colony where yours was the correct flavour.

In Massachusetts there were two groups, both Puritan, but the ones in Boston were always at odds with the Pilgrim Puritans in the Plymouth colony for being the wrong flavour of Puritan. Miles Standish was locked up for heresy when he visited the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony in Boston. Dumb All Over!

Every cloud has a silver lining. Religious intolerance sparked the industrial revolution. Merchants and industrialists who were non-conformists, couldn’t send their children to places like Oxford or Cambridge. You had to be C of E to enroll. The non-conformists started their own universities that taught practical subjects, instead of classical subjects. Those graduates were the ones using science to revolutionize industry.

If you listen to Queen Elizabeth II announced with all her formal titles, one of those is “Defender of the Faith.”
 
Henry VIII was the first to bear that title. It was bestowed on him by the Pope for writing a thesis condemning Martin Luther and defending the Catholic church. Don’t you think it’s a bit cheeky to keep that title after abandoning the Catholic church and starting your own church?