It’s going around as a meme on LiveJournal, for example here. It originated here.
The earliest I’ve found so far is message id <6589@decwrl.UUCP>, posted 29-Mar-1984, as ddb@mrvax.dec, to net.religion. I doubt that’s my actual earliest post, though.
Go though and do likewise!
States have personalities. My perceptions of those personalities are probably as accurate as most people’s perceptions of the personalities of politicians and celebrities, i.e. pretty distantly related to reality. But it’s fun to play with.
“The war on some drugs” is one of the common names for the phenomenon. “Some drugs” refers to the fact that alcohol and caffeine are untouchable. Nicotine seems to be falling, but even it isn’t getting hit by the drug warriors, it’s dying a different death. Politicians tend to call it just “the war on drugs”. I’ve also heard it called “the war on civil rights”, for reasons which should be pretty obvious.
I don’t “get” the religious impulse. It appears to be widespread, appearing in essentially all cultures, across recorded history and most likely back into the realm of archaeology (though we must remember the tendency to categorize anything not understood as “religious artifacts”). It’s quite possibly hard-wired into the human brain. But I still just don’t get it. I don’t understand why people want any religion, or why they pick the ones they do.