Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three tracks might fairly be called "experimental": "Theme," "Fodderstomf," and "Religion I and II." "Theme" grates along for over nine minutes, with Lydon repeatedly wailing in a disembodied voice "I wish I could die" over a ponderous bass line. At the coda, Lydon intones "terminal boredom," an apparent gloss to the song. "Fodderstomf" features a disco bass line and the refrain "We only wanted to be loved" chanted in a sort of Monty Python falsetto. In the background we hear Lydon variously maundering belching, and playing with a fire extinguisher, for almost eight minutes. One manifest fault of these tracks...
Lydon overreaches his intellect as well. The political and social critique of Bollocks was acceptable because it was sincere and angry; the critique in Public Image rings hollow, the dull abstractions of a pseudo intellectual. Consider "Religion," a tedious diatribe against the Church, which is trite and too long...
...This is religion...
Einstein soon found himself embroiled in controversy. Some churchmen perceived his theory, which did not rely on the old Newtonian absolutes, as an attack on religion. Boston's Cardinal O'Connell charged that relativity was "cloaked in the ghastly apparition of atheism." For a rabbi who asked him frankly if he believed in God, Einstein recalled a famous Jewish apostate: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of all that exists, not in the God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings...
...easy to see why Einstein aroused ire. Revolutionary in nature, his ideas about space and time collided directly with ancient prejudices and seemed to contradict everyday experience. In ad dition, there were his outspoken antinationalism and, ironically in light of his own lack of belief in formal religion, the fact that he was a Jew. But criticism abroad was muted compared with that in Germany, where Jews were being made the scapegoats for loss of the war and Einstein's pacifism was bitterly remembered. Einstein and his "Jewish physics" became the object of increasingly scurrilous denunciations. Fellow German scientists turned...