Today’s op-ed page is filled with self-congratulatory Letters to the Editor on the Prayer issue, with headlines such as “Public roars, Star listens; results are good”. I would have thought there might be more important things to devote space to on a day like this. Like, for instance, I hear a rumor there is some new guy taking over as President of the country around noon-ish.

For the morbidly interested, today’s Indy Star Prayer is for God to bless and hold Biden and Obama so that they do a good job so that we’ll all be blessed.

I know.

I’m confident that people will continue to offer their own prayers reflecting their own lives and faith needs.

I don’t know why I think that’s so funny…probably because there’s the implication that some people think that the end of the newspaper-provided prayer will somehow diminish the number of prayers going up:

“Marge, we can’t say prayers anymore! The newspaper stopped printing them!”

I’m familiar with the paper, and always thought the inclusion of a prayer undermined its credibility.

If the major Midwestern papers (and the cities that support them) want to increase their prominence, they need to be letting go of these backwoods “traditions”.

Galileo was an astrologer.

Astrology, at the time, was considered a legitimate field of human endeavour. Like alchemy, today we properly think of the astrology of Galileo, Newton etc as “proto-science”, not “pseudo-science”.

The main difference between them and what we see today is that today’s astrologers rarely, if ever, look at the sky, let alone try to determine what’s up there.

I do happen to agree that it’s rich that they dumped prayer but kept the astrology column. Surely the only correct answer is to ditch both.

“Oh Lord, help us in our financial endeavours, remember us during our love troubles on the nineteenth, and protect those Cancers who have unwanted relatives dropping by.”

But I’m looking at a copy on my table right now, and it still has a prominent biblical quote centered right below the main masthead. It’s the first thing you see when you pick up an Indy Star: “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” II Corinthians 3:17.

So if they’re a newspaper and not a church, that quote would be the thing to remove. Methinks Mr. Lockwood need not fret too much about religion losing its sway in these parts. Time for a letter to the editor!

The linked page helpfully quotes from the book The Jesus Mysteries by Freke & Gandy (whose claims should be taken with about 12 grains of salt): “Jesus surrounds himself with 12 disciples. This is usually taken to be symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. This notion of 12 tribes, however, is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac in Babylonian astrology, which the Jews adopted whilst in exile in Babylon. The zodiac was an extremely important symbol in the Pagan world.”