"The short answer is: if you saw someone who could fly, you’d want his powers. I regard belief that way: it’s something I know I can’t do (rightly, I think), but something that clearly feels amazing."
A thing I’m thinking about right now, for a variety of reasons.
Reblogging this whole post, because it’s pretty great. Read it!
I feel like a lot of people in my peer group—punk rock, the alt/indie world, whatever—judge other people based on religious beliefs. It seems like for a lot of people, finding out that you believe differently than them is a huge wedge issue. That’s really no different than the way it is in the mainstream; the only difference is that in punk/indie/alt/metal/whatever, it’s atheism that’s the privileged belief system rather than Christianity. But still, it’s the exact same thought pattern, in the end.
I don’t buy into that way of seeing other people at all. I’m totally fine with people believing in a god I don’t believe in (for the record, I am either agnostic or atheist, depending on how you define your terms—and I’m not really interested in any detailed linguistic exercises in which we determine objectively based on some standard or another which one I am. It amounts to the same thing, as far as I’m concerned, so let’s just move on from that right now). What I will judge someone on, though, is their politics. I feel like a lot of my liberal atheist friends are willing to give a conservative atheist the benefit of the doubt, while they are immediately suspicious of a liberal Christian. That seems like a huge pile of bullshit to me. Straight up: I do not care what your religious beliefs are. If you can respect mine, I will totally respect yours. Seems to me we all come to those theories and beliefs based on different lives and different experiences, and none of us can prove that we’re right beyond a shadow of a doubt. So let’s wait until we all know the answer for sure—because we all will, someday—and worry about it then. If we even exist to do any worrying at all.
But if you and I both agree that there probably isn’t such a thing as a higher power or divine animating force or whatever you want to call it, but you voted for George Bush twice and think poor people deserve whatever they get, then I’m going to be innately suspicious of you, and the fact that we agree about religion ain’t going to do anything to lessen my suspicion. Conversely, if your political views are similar to my own, and we agree about what we as people owe to other people and how we should be treating them, the fact that you’re basing your political convictions on what Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed said doesn’t matter to me one iota. I will hang out and talk with you all day about the rights of the working class. Why we believe what we believe does not matter to me enough for it to be an issue that we have different reasons. If we agree on ways to make the world a better place, then let’s work together on that.
These are thoughts inspired by my interview today with the Christian hardcore band The Chariot. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about that interview, and a lot more explanation about why these thoughts were some of the ones that occurred to me as a result of it, once the tape is transcribed. I’ll keep you posted.
"Old Testament fervor transposed to contemporary settings can do some damage."
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All too true, and sadly applicable in a far broader context than talking about the new Mountain Goats album.
Darnielle’s success here comes in the way he approaches his subject matter not as a dogmatic Xtian, but as the kind of flawed, spiritually bereft post-industrial human that modernist novels always used to warn us about, picking up the lessons of the scriptures for the first time and finding them more relevant to his own being than he ever suspected.
