In memory of Dennis Ritchie, or I love the internet

...so I bought some really tasty liverwurst, and the sign said it had in it "Kassler." What's that? Let's look it up, and here's Kasseler, could be named after the city of Kassel, and it is an item in the category of [German] [cuisine].

Thence to "Germans," illustrated in Wikipedia with an awesome quilt made of pictures of the faces of:

on the first row, Luther, Bismarck, Beethoven, Kant and Goethe,
on the second, Gutenberg, Bach, Wagner, Hegel and Durer,
on the third, Marx, Weber, Adenauer, Schiller, Benz,
the fourth row, Zuse, Dietrich, Kohl, von Clausewitz and Planck,
and on the fift row, Merkel, Einstein (so even you can't renounce your Germanity, Albert, no matter how much you desire to evade the damned draft!), Kepler, Nietzsche, Diesel!

Oh My God, must read! Down, down, down we go, until we hit the noble and glorious Peace of Westphalia, q.v..

Where for peace's holy sake they decided on Cuius regio, eius religio. Which of course, q.v.. Where we learn that the Anabaptists were outside the tent, alas for them! Now to me with my rudimentary Latin, "Ana" + "Baptist" equals "no Baptists" in the same sense that "anisotropic" means "not isotropic" (having similar characteristics in any direction) and "Annapolis" means "not a polis, or city". So q.v..

No, they're not zero Baptists, they're double baptists, with the sensible though heretical opinion that an unthinking infant's confession of faith is, perforce, meaningless. Indeed, how do you think I got all tied up in the Pledge of Allegiance way back in eleemosynary school! And for this basic good sense, now codified into public laws everywhere which deny banksters the Galt-given right to extract a signature on a mortgage from a five-year-old, they were flogged extinct by both Catholic and Protestant, of course.

So anyway, one exotic aspect of their sixteenth-century heresy - to be specific, that Jesus did not absorb the impure flesh of his mother, but either a.) brought his body from heaven into her womb, or b.) had one made for him in situ by the omnipotent Lord, or c.) that he "passed through his mother, as water through a pipe, into the world" - from one Marcion, Bishop, of the 2nd Century, prior to the bureaucratic deadening of Christianity which started at Nicaea. Q.v..

Bringing us to a real, genuine heresiarch, Marcion of Sinope. How heretical was he? Heretical enough, and that's quite heretical, to note that the all-loving God Jesus went on about was somewhat different from the wild-eyed butcher of Joshua, in turn quite not the same fellow as the drunk, querulous gambler in Job. And thence to the Tetragrammaton. And thence a side trip to investigate "matres lectionis," or vowels for people too proud and traditional to break down and use vowels. Which brings us to the Masorah, to Cantillation, to the Tanakh, to the Didache...

C? You're swimming in it.