Oh my...

When someone asks me why I care about people's religious beliefs, I answer with this: Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches

I thought it was a local station but it must be national. That same episode was shown here in Georgia. They've rotated back to Seasons 1 & 2 the last several weeks, after having gone through the later seasons and the finale. I've been struck at how "off" everything seems to be compared to the later seasons. The Worf, Data and Wesley characters seem odd in comparison. Whoever wrote your scenes the first two years seemed determined to make Wesley Crusher as awkward a kid as possible. The show definitely improves starting with Season 3 (especially Wesley and Data). I guess there were new writers that season. Whatever it was they changed, it had an obvious effect.

"Is this a common thing?" Yes, but it's meaningless - they're parsing words that don't actually exist. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof We don't have "freedom of religion" in the US. What we have is a government that is forbidden to create or outlaw religion. The same words that give them the right to worship a Bronze Age zombie without government interference gives us the right to ignore them.