The brief version, in epitaph form:
“John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”
This is true in some strains of Christian thought, and not in others. There’s no logical connection–people can need saving without being “wretched scum,” indeed, without being horrible.
That reads as saying “…that saved my soul free,” which is not quite ungrammatical but seems meaningless in the “colorless green ideas” sense.
I am pretty sure that this angry, little comic pamphlet I found said that happened a while ago. 
So he rented a boat, bought back a bunch of Black people and took them home, right?
And when did they change the second line of “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island” to “A tale of a faithful switch”?
I post this often enough, I’m somewhat afraid of becoming boring, but … All these songs can each be sung to the others:
Amazing Grace
Mickey Mouse Club Theme Song
Stairway to Heaven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG2lTB-UVvs
House of the Rising Sun
Yankee Doodle
Pop Goes the Weasel
Peaceful Easy Feeling
I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing
Yellow Rose of Texas
Ghost Riders of the Sky
Rocky Top
Lion Sleeps Tonight
Tangled Up in Blue
Whiter Shade of Pale
Light My Fire
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Jingle Bells
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Greensleeves
Jolly Old St. Nicholas
The First Noel
O Tannenbaum
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
In-a-Gadda-da-Vida
Marines’ Hymn
Wabash Cannonball
America the Beautiful
The Internationale
Onward Christian Soldiers
Ode to Joy
Mack the Knife
A Hundred Bottles of Beer
Clementine
La Cucaracha
Semper Paratus
The Wearing of the Green
(The Rising of the Moon)
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
Sympathy for the Devil
Rollin’ Down to Old Maui
Acres of Clams
Bread and Roses
Sink the Bismarck
Forest Green (UK “Little Town of Bethlehem”)
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
The Girl I Left Behind Me
The Wabash Cannonball
MacNamara’s Band
Poems that apply:
Jabberwocky
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Little Miss Muffet
Jack and Jill
Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
Little Jack Horner
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Mary Mary Quite Contrary
Anything by Emily Dickinson
If there are any more, I’d love to add them to the list!
I started a new thread so as not to get this one off the island-- I mean topic.
(Now, how do I delete my previous post?)
Linky?
here it is!
Correction–the doctrine of Total Depravity is a CHRISTIAN doctrine. It has nothing to do with Calvinism per se.
The Bible is extremely clear in many different places that while God does indeed love mankind, man without God is in fact a vile, worthless creature.
Psalm 14:2, 3–
“The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”
Proverbs 30:12–
“There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.”
Isaiah 64:6–
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
And this is how the Apostle Paul put it in I Timothy 1:15 (emphasis added)–
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”
Something about this sent me off to do a little research, and I found this very disappointing factoid:
Feh.
Yes, I had heard that before. I forget about it when I listen to the song, though.
Soylent Juicy, who started this thread, told me I could comment on other hymns that had been changed.
One change I dislike is in the Christmas carol “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” The final verse I learned as
For lo the days are hastening on
By prophets seen of old
When with the ever circling years
Shall come the time foretold
When the new heaven and Earth shall own
The Prince of Peace their king*
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.
*own is used in the sense of “to acknowledge”
Lines five and six I’ve seen changed in some places to
When peace shall over all the world
It’s ancient splendors fling
Namby pamby change.
I’m sorry to say the Episcopal hymnal where I attend church has mutilated
“What Child is This?”
Each of the three verses is supposed to have a different ending. But ours wimped out and has the same ending for each verse, the second and third being the same as the first, “Haste, haste to bring him laud, the babe, the son of Mary”
This negates the future happenings being foreshadowed in this hymn. I guess some people think it’s squicky to think of a sleeping baby, and then follow it with "Nails, spear, shall pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you.
Some changes I do like. In “Joy to the World” it would read “Born to raise the sons of Earth” Even as a girl I wondered about that line, now our hymnal reads “Born to raise each child of Earth”
I’m Episcopalian now, but I was raised in a very conservative Lutheran church. The well-known hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” in our hymnal contained the lines
*And take they our life,
Goods, fame, child and wife
Let these all be gone
They yet have nothing won
The Kingdom’s ours forever!
*
Okay, I tought as a kid, what does that mean? I’ll never have a wife, so what am I, chopped liver?
I much prefer the following
Let goods and kindred go
this mortal life also
The body they may kill
God’s truth abideth still
And He shall reign forever!
It’s the sense of the thing that matters, isn’t it? After all AMF wasn’t written in English anyway, so there’s at least four or five different translations of the whole thing that I’ve seen.
Yes, it does. Like Skammer says, it’s “the idea that apart from the grace of God, we are completely incapable of refraining from evil or choosing to follow God,” so only those God elects to be saved can be saved, because we don’t even have enough goodness in ourselves to respond positively to God’s love, so only those whom God has predestined for salvation will be saved.
IOW, it’s the foundation for the linked notions of the ‘elect’ and predestination, which distinguish Calvinism from the rest of Protestantism.
BTW, did you know that the game Candy Land is a very good model for the Calvinist notion of the ‘elect’? Assuming someone wins in the first trip through the deck (not always a valid assumption, which is the only place the model fails), the outcome is predetermined once the cards are shuffled and the order of play is decided. One of the players is the ‘elect,’ the others aren’t, and it’s all predestined.
(The things I think about while playing Candy Land with my son. I hope he outgrows the damned game soon!)
I haven’t heard or read this version.
I think I approve, because I always hated the line “saved a wretch like me”. No matter how awful or downtrodden I’ve felt, I never thought of myself as a “wretch”.
I used to work with someone who thought the line was “Saved a WENCH like me…”
This makes me think of images like this
http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A0PDoYA7GutQ1E0AKPeJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBlMTQ4cGxyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1n?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3Dwench%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D4&w=600&h=750&imgurl=wenchwatch.co.uk%2Fassets%2Fbeerwenches.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwenchwatch.co.uk%2F&size=68.6+KB&name=revision+notes+oop+uml+link+to+ibms+uml+shizzle+class+diagrams+are+the+...&p=wench&oid=d76b8d7a60a47972462be5371000d3ee&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-701&tt=revision%2Bnotes%2Boop%2Buml%2Blink%2Bto%2Bibms%2Buml%2Bshizzle%2Bclass%2Bdiagrams%2Bare%2Bthe%2B...&b=0&ni=200&no=4&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=10ovg4upg&sigb=133hcrt9g&sigi=117q54kgn&.crumb=G.kSrW0OssH
Motivates me, it does, to help bring them back into the fold.
Is “nails” actually the original version, or did the change go the other way around? I’ve always seen it without nails in Catholic hymnals, and only learned of the existence of the nails version a few years ago.
Either way, though, I agree that the nails version is better, just like I’m always annoyed when people skip the myrrh verse of “We Three Kings”. The Crucifiction and Resurrection is what makes Jesus important, and his birthday worth celebrating, and it’s good to have the occasional reminder of that.
Good to see someone agrees with me!
I agree, leaving out the hard parts of songs robs the rest of meaning, or at least changes it.
It’s not a hymn, but “Good King Wenceslas” is often sung with just the first, third, and fifth verses. In the second verse the king is just asking the page who the peasant is, and where he lives. But if you don’t sing the fourth verse you get a different view of the king. In the fourth verse the page calls out to the king telling him he can’t go any further, it’s too cold, so the king tells the page to walk in his footsteps.
So the king is actually conscious of his saintliness, or virtue, not unaware of it as you might think if you don’t sing the fourth verse.