Praise Be

She had blue back ink scratched into her lower back, said “Damn right he’ll rise again.” Yeah damn right you’ll rise again.

As anyone who knows would know, I’m a big fan of religion. I’ll debate theological philosophy until the second coming of Christ or the ninth coming of Buddha. Passionately.
But I guess up until very, very recently, the only religion I’ve not been greatly interested in was Christianity. It seems like if you grow up with it all around you and everything it says seems so massively stupidly wrong, you tend to just get bored and disillusioned. I was trying to get away from that kinda scene.
But the thing that has changed my perspective somewhat is naturally my other great love in the world: Music. We’ll start by looking at the Hold Steady, who the opening quote is taken from. Lead singer Craig Finn has the kind of abusive real-life dogmatism that only comes from the converted-but-cynical. Now here’s someone who doesn’t like to make a big deal out of religious beliefs, but understands the power of the symbology, the stories and force of faith. And he uses it without preaching at all. It’s just part of the mix.
And that’s what I think the main detractors of Christianity and Islam need to contend with. Whilst they fully understand the concepts and precepts, I think for a long time I, and many others, missed the awesome power that it still wields.
On that note, the second musician that got me thinking was Kanye West. I just bought The College Dropout, which among other excellent tracks has “Jesus Walks”, his breakthrough hit. So it got me thinking about the fanatical American bible belt, and the lonely beautiful strength which an embellished and misinformed image of Christ and Christianity gives to poor people around the world. Which almost makes Christianity a forgivable sin. For all the damage and hate, for all the stupidity and cringe… well… maybe it offers some really useful beautiful stuff as well, like stories and support and other nice little things in brown paper packages tied up with string.
The point I’m trying to make is that by no means am I… well, no… what I mean is that no one should ever degrade anything that has influence, nor underestimate it. We might hate the ringtone downloads, but they cannot be ignored, and the clever people can make a lot of big changes about everything from such things. Christianity is like that in this utterly secular age. We’re ignoring a creeping vine of ivy just because we don’t like it.

Now I’m watching Answered By Fire, and it’s really good. I like things that deal with… well, issues now. None of this WW2 crap, this kind of thing is happening now, commenting on the now and the recent. I’m disappointed that entertainment can’t be more like this, and less like Big Brother. Bad example – excessive. I wish it could be more like this and less like channel 7 News.
I would rather die, than not be relevant. You don’t have to be right, you just need to be relevant.

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