Currently stuck in my head :

Especially that sweet electric piano riff right before the lyrics start.

I love a lot of things about that song. I love it’s wholesome peaceful vibe. That’s one of the things the Seventies had that I really miss. There was this marvelous sense that people of peace and goodwill could get together and live in harmony with each other and the land and make something better than modern society. Something that would better suit the true nature of humanity.

That’s what a lot of the Seventies agrarianism was about. Getting in touch with nature and the soil and the processes of life itself. I have said before that every animal knows and loves its own habitat, which is what helps keep it in the areas for which it has evolved. I think that’s where our desire to make contact with nature comes from. Modern civilization creates modern citizens, and for the most part, we adapt well to our urban jungles.

But it’s not a perfect adaptation. There is still a part of us that longs for our natural habitat. Often it operates well below the conscious level, as modern society (at least in the West^[1]) doesn’t give us any frame of reference for these feelings of displacement and wrongness, so we suppress them.

The signs (hah) are all around us, though. Why else would we be so fond of trees and lawns? Our ancestors started in the trees and then moved into the grasslands of the Savannah. So both trees and grass appeal to our habitat instincts. Not only that, but trees make us feel safe, because our monkey instincts associate trees with the ability to escape ground based predators when necessary.

We love trees and lawns so much that neighborhoods with plenty of both always have higher property values. That’s because they feel more “like home”. Wholesome. Natural. Good.

I was lucky enough to grow up on one of the nicest streets in Summerside, Belmont Street, which had loads of horse chestnut trees and lawns and other greenery. The whole neighborhood was like that, to a certain extent. Back then, it was of course merely normal. But looking back, and comparing it to some of the depressingly sterile neighborhoods I’ve seen, I feel like I lucked out on that score.

I mean… imagine a typical suburban neighborhood. Now take away all the trees and grass. Where there was lawn, there’s only pavement. Where there were trees there is now only cell phone towers. No bushes, no shrubs, no birdsong, no dogs barking, no kids playing in the street. Nothing alive. And all the houses are grey slabs of concrete.

Sounds pretty fucking depressing, doesn’t it?

Another thing I like about the song is its left-wing Christianity. First in an angry way, shouting at the “All trespassers will be shot on sight” people “man, you’re some kind of sinner!”. That gives me the same warm feeling that I get when I watch A Christmas Carol and one of the spirits (Marley, I think) calls Scrooge a “greedy old sinner”. Whatever happened to that brand of Christianity? The kind that viewed wrath and greed as sins, and was willing to call out both aggressive rednecks and money-grubbing rich people for the anti-Christian degenerates they were?

Remember, usury used to be considered a sin. And you know what usury means? Charging interest on a debt.

Imagine a world where that kind of Christianity had been the kind that took hold and stayed alive into the modern age. A Christianity where refusing to help those in need was considered a terrible sin, where people did their best to live by Jesus’ exhortations to love thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to be gentle and kind and humble and good, and to strive for forgiveness for both yourself and others, for we are all merely human.

I mean, what could be less Christian than the idea that you have the right to kill someone – shoot them DEAD – just because they are on your land without your permission?

The other left-wing Christian verse is the one with the note that says “Thank you lord for bringing me here… I’m alive, and doing fine!”. That, to me, expresses the kind of simple, humanist Christianity that makes sense to me. It’s not about a church, a set of rules, or any sort of “straight and narrow path”. It’s about that marvelously American idea of a close personal relationship with God with which no human agency can interfere.

This frees people’s idea of God to become whatever that person needs. That seems, to me, to be a lot healthier than dogma, which is suited only for people who hate any situation in which they have to make a decision. They want there to be an all encompassing ruleset that is always “right” and therefore only needs to be applied to situations.

That’s why you have people going around saying they are Biblical literalists who believe that every single word in the Bible is the word of God, despite a) the many ways in which the Bible contradicts itself, b) the parts of the Bible which are just plain horrible, c) the completely arbitrary nature of the document itself, being more or less just a bunch of random religious texts stapled together, and d) the extreme left wing bias of everything Christ said, like how you should sell everything you own and give it to the poor, and all that love thy neighbor crap.

They like the idea of the Bible as a perfect document with all the answers, but they value their simplistic concept of what it says (coincidentally exactly what they want it to say) to ever risk it by actually reading it.

Besides, reading is hard and the Bible is boring. Perfect and infallible, sure, but you know…. hard.

And when has religion been about telling people they have to do things they don’t want to do and that they are not allowed to do things they really want to do?

Everyone knows that the only thing religion is good for is defending your actions and attacking those of others without having to think too hard!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.