I Am The Blog

Music for the holidays: Two Lennon songs

John Lennon’s view on Christmas (or X-Mas in the official title) is unfortunately just as timely today as ever. It’s a song I always make sure to listen to every year around this time. I had also thought about posting “Imagine” here as well (if you’ve seen the icon I often use on the web, you’ll have figured out I’m a big fan of “Imagine”), but I decided to post another, lesser-known song of Lennon’s entitled “God”. If anyone has a doubt as to whether or not John Lennon was religious, this song should put it to rest. People don’t need gods or celebrities to idolize. We can learn from the good (and bad) examples of the past, but we should believe in ourselves, and our own ability to do good in this world.

Furniture has surpassed Christianity as world religion (IKEA overtakes INRI)

My parody of an INRI cross I found on fotosearch.com

Well, it’s official — furniture has surpassed Christianity as the most important religion in the world. Specifically, according to a number of sources (Business Week , mental_floss , Wikipedia etc.), there are more IKEA catalogues printed every year than there are bibles. So I guess IKEA is in and INRI (the initials seen on many crucifixes) is out.

This apparently isn’t exactly news, as it’s been the case since at least 2006, but I hadn’t heard about it until now. (Thanks to Twitter users amiable84 and mental_floss for pointing this out.) The Bible still holds the all-time record apparently, and it would take IKEA some time to catch up considering the Bible’s over 500 year head start .

Based on the Business Week article, IKEA seems to have been the one to have publicized their achievement originally, but I can’t find this information on their site now. Maybe they remembered what happened what happened to John Lennon when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was.

I have mixed feelings on this. While I’m glad that the Bible is no longer the most printed book in the world, couldn’t something else besides a catalogue have surpassed it? We’ve gone from worshiping God to worshiping furniture. I guess it’s a step up, since furniture actually exists.

I might have preferred something else overtake the Bible in number of copies printed: a science book, a freethought book, a work promoting peace, or pretty much any (other) work of fiction besides the Bible (since the Bible is, of course, largely fictional). Maybe in another 500 years?