Hello,

I just ran across your webpage and thought you might want to know that there are a few errors in your use of the song "If You're Anxious For to Shine" in relationship to Christian philosophy and theological arguments. You may be a "commoner," but that’s no reason to "muck up" your argument through faulty reasoning. So here’s a little lesson in Gilbert and Sullivan:

1. The operetta "Patience," from which the song comes, is written as a spoof of a late-Victorian English movement represented by such figures as Oscar Wilde, known as "aestheticism." Aesthetes were into art and literature and music, and liked to dress in flowing clothes and spout high-sounding nonsense in order to sound "complicated" and profound.
2. Aesthetes were certainly not religious, but their babble tended to sound a lot like the philosophy represented by such literary figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (neither of whom were even remotely Christian), who were part of a movement known as "transcendentalism." Transcendentalists talked in terms of generic spirituality and inspiration, and loved nature, just like the aesthetes, who acted wispy and spiritual and liked to drape themselves with flowers. So that’s what G&S mean when they refer to "idle chatter of a Transcendental kind."
3. "The very dull old days" refers to the society led by monarchs like "good Queen Anne," who espoused family life and the home and hearth, and weren’t into free love and pointless philosophizing and draping themselves with flowers, NOT to biblical days.
4. Plato was Greek. He lived B.C.E. (before the common era)—i.e., before the birth of Jesus. Therefore, he was not a Christian.
5. The Philistines were a pagan tribe that also existed B.C.E. They were not Christian. I think you may have mistaken the word for Pharisees, who were a Jewish sect that existed at the time of Jesus, but the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus and were instrumental in arranging his execution, so I don’t think they could be called Christians either. G&S are using the term as the aesthetes did, to describe anyone who stands in the way of their fun or isn’t "with it" or is a nay-sayer to someone’s philosophy.
6. "Apostle" is a generic Greek term meaning "follower." In context, it is being used to contrast with "Philistine"—someone who is not a follower.

It may amuse/interest/confuse you to know that Gilbert and Sullivan WERE Christians. They each wrote several hymns, in fact.

Does the fact that I know this stuff and you obviously didn’t (and didn’t care to find out) make me an "intellectual geek," and therefore, by your argument, actually INFERIOR to someone who hasn’t bothered to check his facts before posting them on a webpage for all to see? Your webpage seems to suggest that people who don’t know stuff are actually superior to and should instruct those who do and are thus able to speak using "big words" and "philosophical gobbledygook," and the inherent lack of logic in that particular statement should be obvious even to a "commoner." The fact that you use such logic in approaching a topic as philosophically inconsequential as Gilbert and Sullivan casts rather a foolish light on any arguments you might make about so weighty an issue as religion. 

But then, I'm an "intellectual geek."  What would I know?