Thought I would share some more of my favorite songs of all time with you lovely people, and today, I have a theme. The songs I am sharing with you today are all songs which speak to the spirit of this rudderless atheist who was raised without religion and hence has to find his inspiration where he can.

And nothing inspires me more than music. Music can slip past all my mental defenses and stir my lonely, icy heart. Most of the moments in my life where I came closest to feeling what I assume would be the presence of the divine in another sort of person have been through music.

I hope to share a few of those moments with you today.

One last thing : trigger warning, some of these do mention God and other Christian concepts.

The first song I will share today is “Demons” by Fatboy Slim.

This song really speaks to me, especially the chorus. It speaks of a kind of salvation that I can understand and accept, if not explain or justify. And that gives me a clue as to how religion works for the people who have it. It doesn’t matter if you can’t prove that these deeply moving personal emotional experiences can’t be proven to represent anything in external reality. To you, the believer, they are completely real, realer than real life in some cases. For some atheist to come along and say your experiences with God (or whatever) aren’t real is both offensive and absurd.

Take music, for example, seeing as we are on the subject already. Imagine telling a hardcore Led Zeppelin fan that the joy they felt when they first heard Stairway to Heaven was a delusion and they were crazy for thinking it was anything special.

We’d understand if the Zep fan was offended and got mad, right?

Of course, not all spirituality is about joy. Some is about justice.

Aw yeah. This is also a side of Christianity that I can grok. The Christian Left. The Christian Right makes no sense to me. So much of what they believe seems to me to be the exact opposite of what I see to be Christ’s message of universal love.

I mean, Jesus was a long haired bearded hippie and a hooligan who had no respect for his elders and who caused trouble for everybody with his gang of fellow unemployed misfits.

That’s not just a little different than the version the Christian Right worships. That’s their worst nightmare. That’s the sort of person they are terrified their daughters will date.

Of course, the divine retribution at the end of War Pigs doesn’t jive with Jesus’ message either. It’s just fun.

Inspiration sometimes comes from unexpected places that defy our prejudices and make us rethink a lot of things. That’s what happened when I first heard this song.

By the time I came along and started to develop my cultural consciousness, disco was dead and so was folk music, and John Denver represented all that was wimpy and pathetic about the Seventies and its phony back to nature bullshit. He had been the spiritual leader of that movement, and when the Boomers turned into Yuppies, he became the punchline of their “what were we thinking? ” jokes. That’s the version of him I received through pop culture.

And that version was not updated for a long time. As my cultural consciousness blossomed, I got into punk rock, heavy metal, and industrial. In other words, I was part of the pendulum swinging back from the John Denver’s sunshiney outdoorsy optimism into the dark, brutal, and raw world of depression and rage.

John Denver, in my mind, represented the exact opposite of everything I liked. So imagine my surprise when, relatively recently. I found out that I actually like some of his music.

And then I heard the song I linked above, The Eagle And The Hawk, and it both inspired me spiritually and rocked me the fuck out. To me, that song kicks ass.

Maybe those Seventies hippies had a point after all. Or maybe I have simply reached the point in my life where everything from one’s childhood acquires a halo of nostalgia.

And finally, there is this song, from my main man MC 900 Foot Jesus and some lady with a lovely motherly kind voice.

I feel so strongly about this song that when I discovered it wasn’t on YouTube any more, I decided I would make it so. So here it is, my first time being one of those people who puts songs on YouTube ever!

I had to restrain myself from making the thing a slideshow of pictures of electric organs. Under other circumstances, I would have done that gladly, but I have time restrictions today.

Anyhow, I have never heard anything that made more sense to me. It is religion for the dreamers and visionaries of the world, and I am certainly both. People losing their faith, or becoming angry and bitter because they are trying to cling to the faith of a child while having the mind of an adult, seems about right to me.

Their problem is not one, then, of being oppressed on all sides by the sins of the world. That is merely a projection of the gulf between their understanding of God and their understanding of the world.

The problem is their lack of imagination. Their conception of their God has not grown to keep pace with their perceptions of the world. I have always suspected that a certain type of religion fell all too easily into the trap of encouraging permanent childhood, and this theory would be consistent with that.

The cure, it would seem to me (outsider though I am), would be to tell kids right from the beginning that their understanding of God’s world will grow and change throughout their lives not because God has changed, but because God is infinite and we are finite and thus can only understand the tiny fraction of His being that we can see from where we are.

It is we who change, not Him.

But what do I know? I don’t believe in Him!

I will see you nice people again tomorrow.