Presidential Prayer Team

[Darth Wong]

I pray that You will always help the President to have a gentle answer that turns away wrath, keeping him from harsh words that stir up anger. ? Proverbs 15:1

That one's pretty good, actually.

Yeah, better to speak muddled words so you can maintain plausible deniability.

[Jalinth]

Rule Britannia would go down worse than "the Maple Leaf Forever" in Canada. It is too much about "Britons" - remember, the UK has Irish, Welsh and Scottish.

This would be a good anthem for a legislative assembly in England, but not for the UK as a whole.

[Gandalf]

Did you see their recommended prayers which were converted from lines in the Bible to insert President Bush's name?

Snip.

Unbelievable.

Wouldn't inserting oneself in parts of the bible be a sign of megalomania or some such?

[Plekhanov]

How come no one has touched the idea of prayer vending machines? Insert a quarter and you get a standard prayer spoken back on a set topic. For bonus forgiveness, spend one dollar on any of the main sins and get a political forgiveness absolutely free. Guaranteed by the man upstairs to help you succeed in politics or love or...

Margaret Atwood had a similar idea in The Handmaid’s Tale some kind of a shop that printed and then shredded prayers for a small fee.

For those of you who’ve never read it the Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic dystopian novel (up there with 1984 as the best in genre) set in a near future where much of America has become a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship, a vision that is terrifyingly looking increasingly less far-fetched as time goes by.

Rule Britannia would go down worse than "the Maple Leaf Forever" in Canada. It is too much about "Britons" - remember, the UK has Irish, Welsh and Scottish.

This would be a good anthem for a legislative assembly in England, but not for the UK as a whole.

I think you are a little confused the term British doesn’t just apply to the English but also to the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish. Our country is known collectively as the United Kingdom and also Great Britain this means England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The British team at the Olympics includes athletes from all over the UK (and also the occasional South African) and is supported by the entire nation in contrast to the football when the Scots and to a lesser extent the Welsh (I’m not sure about the Northern Irish Republicans will no doubt support Ireland but I expect the Orange Order at least support England) want abe (anybody but England) to win.

As it happens Jerusalem my favoured alternative national anthem does refer specifically to England a few times:

Walk upon England's mountains green
....
In England's green and pleasant land

However this isn’t really a problem as you can easily substituted “Britain” for “England” with no major ill effects.

Either that or we can have Rule Britannia as the national anthem and Jerusalem as the English anthem.

[Plekhanov]

Wouldn't inserting oneself in parts of the bible be a sign of megalomania or some such?

Didn’t Napoleon once summon the Pope to demand that he (that is Napoleon) be put into the Bible (or was it enquire why he wasn’t already in it?), or did I just dream that up whilst dozing off in a lecture?

[Frank Hipper]

How come no one has touched the idea of prayer vending machines? Insert a quarter and you get a standard prayer spoken back on a set topic. For bonus forgiveness, spend one dollar on any of the main sins and get a political forgiveness absolutely free. Guaranteed by the man upstairs to help you succeed in politics or love or...

Tibetan prayer wheels come to mind, and prayer flags, too.

[Gil Hamilton]

It reminds me of a song by the Chad Mitchell Trio. The one about God being on our side.