When I was a Christian, one of my favorite songs to sing was a song called Beautiful Things. I loved it not only for the words, but the musicality of it. If you have listened to one contemporary Christian worship song, you've heard them all. But this one was different. Multiple harmonies and a killer bridge, it was a challenge to sing and beautiful when you got it right.
Which is why I am so insanely happy to see that one of the musicians who wrote and sang this song is now an atheist. It is my opinion that musicians who spend their life in service to a religion are wasting their talents. Since the god that they serve is either non-existent or ambivalent at best, it seems a shame for them to be sucked into the religious mold that they are often forced into. Good musicians find themselves playing songs that literally sound exactly like another one because how many ways can you say, "We love you and worship you, Oh God"? Of course, the Christians were quick to throw out some 'No True-Scotsman' fallacies. She was never one of us. Something always felt off about her/their music. I knew she wasn't a TRUE believer. If she had been a real believer she never would have fallen astray. False teacher. A messenger for the devil. You don't have to believe in Satan to be a Satanist. Women shouldn't even be pastors anyway. Once you are born in the spirit, there is no going back. blah blah blah. It's hard for people this "devout" to understand how anyone could possibly change their mind about something. That it is possible for someone to have strong beliefs about one thing and then do a complete about face. My dad was in a band when I was a kid, was unmarried when he got my mom pregnant, and did casual drugs. He also had no problem with this and seemed to be fairly happy. Then he became a Christian and denounced all of that, destroying all his secular music and denouncing pre-marital sex and drugs. For something less extreme: I used to hate artichokes. I now put them on my pizza. People change their minds quite often about a lot of things. I see this as good because it means you were open to new ideas. New ideas aren't to be rejected our of hand, but rather examined to see if they have any merit. Some don't. That's okay. There are many hypothesis out there about a myriad of subjects and some don't hold water. (I'm looking at you essential oils) Others end up holding value and make their way into our personal and social philosophies. In Victorian England it was perfectly legal and acceptable to drop your infant on the street and leave it for dead as long as it was under a year old. Today we call this infanticide and parents would go to jail for doing so. What changed? Someone eventually made an argument that this was wrong and unacceptable. People agreed and eventually this practice became illegal. We all agreed it was inhumane. It is okay to examine things you believe as true and to come to new conclusions. It doesn't mean those people never believed or that when they were believing, their belief was somehow already corrupted. All it means is they re-examined those beliefs and this time, they came to a different conclusion.
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AuthorThis is a personal, but secret, blog archiving my deconversion from a Christian to a non-believer. Archives
December 2020
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