In the beginning, the established Christian denomination in Scotland was the
Church of Scotland. Lots of people were unhappy and left to form the
Free Church of Scotland in 1843. Frankly, I find it hard to get excited about
why they split, but it was something about the relationship between church and state. Then, the Free Church of Scotland merged with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland (in 1900) to form the
United Free Church of Scotland. Or rather, most of it did. Some congregations insisted on remaining outside, apparently retaining the name "Free Church of Scotland". Being rather small in number, they became (perhaps affectionately) known as the "Wee Frees". Around the same time however, an even smaller group of congregations (one minister, actually) split from the Free Church to form the
Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. These are, of course, known as the Wee Wee Frees. As far as I can tell, each sect spends most of the time pointing out why all the other indistinguishable sects are wrong. Forget big questions like whether transubstantiation is "real" or not; these guys bicker about whether you can get the bus to chapel on a Sunday.
Personally, I want to join the Wee Wee Frees, just so I can then split and form the Wee Wee
Wee Frees. I shall declare a new doctrine, that of
recursive schisming, whereby members must evangelise and convert others to the true beliefs of the Wee Wee Wee Frees... and then
split to form the Wee^(
n+1) Frees. The prophesies of this newly-made-up religion will only be fulfilled when everyone on earth is a member of their own sect.
At this point, I was going to make some obvious
Pythonesque joke about Judea, but a careless Google-search took me to a Wikipedia entry headed:
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Not to be confused with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command
At which point satire becomes pointless and life a little bit depressing.
