Jesus ain’t no friend of mine
Just one look into my baby’s eyes, tells me
That he don’t listen to her prayers
No, he don’t fuckin’ care about her
She cries herself to sleep every night
Clutching his merchandise

Can I get an Amen?

So cry me a river, baby… cry me an ocean.

“For a start, the earth is four and a half billion years old, for gods sake. That unsavoury taste is the palpable palette of your faith-fucked goals.” And so opens the most reasoned atheistic punk and/or rock album I’ve ever heard.

Lungs are an east-coast Australian band headed by ex-Staying at Home guitarist Adam Lees, and musically I find the fast-paced under-40-minute album An Anatomical Guide to be plain orgasmic. Maybe I find the bass a bit boring, but I am a bassist, and as long as it is following Lees’ guitaring then it is going to be good enough for me. Lees, the author of the rationalistic prose contained in the songs, is rather evidently a fan Dawkins and even includes images from The Blind Watchmaker in the album artwork.

Opening track Tens of Thousands doesn’t show any mercy to faith-based religion:

“You can euphemise these insane holy wars to ethnic cleansings of terrorisings, but there’s such an obvious obtrusion behind it all. You’re all just as bad as each other. You’re just as stupid. Promptly decloud your heads and put them together instead”

And the closing track Alone in a Godless Universe makes it even more explicable, paraphrasing Douglas Adams:

“Consciousness beholds the garden in its various beauty. It’s natural. But isn’t it enough without having to believe in fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Backing up popular culture with reason:

“Complexity could never be explained by merely postulating further complexity. An infinite regress.”

Lastly deserving a mention, from their previous EP, off the song Huxley (which I can’t help assume is about T.H. Huxley, agnostic and famously labelled ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his loyal support of Darwinism):

“It’s true that to know is delusional… but not knowing is driving me crazy”

Huxley’s agnosticism was the result of his scientific world view, in which he proposed that beliefs should only be formed on the basis of evidence. Asserting that one could know in such cases that there is no evidence is dogmatism and clearly incorrect. Problem is, most of our everyday beliefs, including much of our social interactions, are based on assumptions that we can’t live without; ie, the notion of another consciousness, or the notion of an outside world. Sceptical arguments from classical empiricists like Locke and Hume seem to be impossible to decisively refute, and yet impossible to rationally accept. This is basis of Camus’ absurdism; that we know things like the outside world (through living in it) and yet can never know such things (through the necessary, if ever-so-small, possibility of intellectual errors). Sure, Camus might have exaggerated how much indeterminate evidence can suck, but he had the right idea. Karl Popper can also be classed an agnostic in this case; falsification only eliminates whatever is incorrect within controlled premises and a controlled environment, but can never give us positive knowledge.

Anyone interested in pop punk that is technical, intelligent, melodic, critical and poetic should check these guys out.

Um… pizza is cool too

I grew up listening to cynical pop punk and shit like that, so I was a big Blink 182 fan-boy. But some of their lyrics used to annoy me with their religious connotations - only occasionally, but enough to stop me getting my lip pierced and hair dyed in worship. Going back over some older music the other day and I’ve learned why I was always slightly concerned, and I’m kinda surprised as to how I didn’t notice it when I was a big’ol rebellious 15 year old… former Blink182 guitarist, Tom DeLonge, is completely insane.

For starters, it seems he believes in the existence of aliens and their coinciding government conspiracy theories. The song ‘Aliens Exist’ is probably where I should have noticed this. He also seems to think that the whole ‘anarchy’ thing is cool and awesome while at the same time criticizing the ‘government’ and ‘corporate leaders’ for corrupting them into it. And in his recent band, he seems to have adopted a 9/11 conspiracy. Wow.

Surprisingly enough, he’s a Christian. Imagine my shock when I found out one of my favourite songs off the Take of Your Pants and Jacket album is just a plea to Jesus. His solo album had a song titled ‘Letters to God’.

Luckily, former Blink 182 bassist Mark Hoppus has saved me from condemning the entirety of my teenage years. His new band, (+44), has convincingly shown that there had to be some reason why I liked most Blink 182 songs. Take the lines from the opening song, ‘Lycanthrope’:

And we’ll be beaten down without mercy or meaning
I turn my face to a careless skyline
I’m searching hard for a sign from heaven
But they’ve forgotten me here

And even more when we get to the third song, ‘When Your Heart Stops Beating’:

I’ll be there when your last breath’s taken away
In the dark when there’s no one listening

Ah! The refreshing sound of real world activity, no transcendental bitching or hoping! It’s getting easier to die every day and at least some pop-culture realizes it. Perhaps there is some alchemical purpose or Aristotelean telos floating around this world; but with the plurality of contradictory answers given throughout history, it is quite silly to assume that anyone could find it. How should we begin extracting purpose from a tree? Perhaps the new age movement can answer us. Perhaps if we squeeze a cross hard enough we can extract some. Where have we come since Aristotle but to the realization that (contra Newton) there are only discernible material causes, mechanical causes and indeterminate probability? Newton the alchemist was as mad as the metaphysicians that he was otherwise criticizing for spinning a web out of their own substance with a priorisms and pure reason.

Another point to be made in the song ‘Little Death’:

Please sleep, my darling, sleep
Your cry for inspiration
Never reaches ears on distant stars
And every night our lonely planet
Slides across the universe
And I won’t pretend I understand

Please sleep, my darling, sleep
Your death by information
Won’t disturb the peace on distant stars
And even when you lock the doors
And slide behind the unlit shades
None of us are strangers anymore

Fall asleep with the windows open
Come to me with the worst you’ve said and done
You’ll close your eyes and see me
A little death makes life more meaningful
I stand no chance at all

David Hume would certainly agree. Our lives are only meaningful in that they are finite; otherwise every one of our actions that we make in this life is meaningless in-itself, just waiting around on the front porch to be let in the house. Pretending that large scale natural disasters, our inevitable deaths and the overall futility of civilization is all part of some loving and meaningful design is delusional and relegates any responsibility from ourselves. The fact that I’m not going to be here in a few decades just can’t stop my present meal from being tasty, and the fact that breakfast doesn’t last the day won’t stop me preparing for and planning my dinner. Lucretius said ‘Where death is I am not’, although I can’t remember where.

So congratulations to Mark Hoppus after such an embarrassingly idiotic partnership. To spend over a decade with someone like Tom DeLonge and still come out of it writing clever pop-punk songs is just astounding.

Oh, and this is the first post that I’ve written this year where I haven’t been drunk.

/end monthly rant

The religious belief that has always made the least sense to me is devil worship. Religioustolerance.org don’t delve to far into what satanism actually is (although they do rule out many things that it isn’t), so I’m at a loss as to what an actual satanist believes. Rock music apparently has a deep connection with the devil, so why not look at prominent satanist musicians?

Slayer’s famous line “God Hates Us All” has always puzzled me. I once met a guy at a festival who was wearing a Slayer jumper, so I asked him what it exactly meant. He told me that it meant exactly what it said; god hates us. I asked him why he believed in god, and secondly, why this god hates him. Apparently he didn’t actually believe in god, but still insisted that god hated everyone. I pointed out the contradiction and left it at that.

Now, I’ve seen some pretty crazy footage of Slayer shows. One guy bit a beer can in half. And I’m pretty sure that I’m safe attacking Slayer over the anonymous interweb, but just in case; I actually like a bit of Slayer stuff! My metal is much blacker than my coffee. The new album has some really nice soloing. I just fail to understand the whole satan thing.

Let’s go to the source of my confusion:

Slayer - Disciple

Drones since the dawn of time
Compelled to live your sheltered lives
Not once has anyone ever seen
Such a rise of pure hypocracy
I’ll instigate I’ll free your mind
I’ll show you what I’ve known all this time

God Hates Us All, God Hates Us All
You know it’s true God hates this place
You know it’s true he hates this race
…
What if there is no God would you think the fuckin’ same
Wasting your life in a leap of blind faith
Wake the fuck up can’t ignore what I say
I got my own philosophy

I hate everyone equally
You can’t tear that out of me
No segregation -separation
Just me in my world of enemies

I never said I wanted to be God’s disciple
I’ll never be the one to blindly follow
I’ll never be the one to bear the cross-disciple

I reject this fuckin’ race
I despise this fuckin’ place

So.. that was.. interesting. They have their own philosophy, but I’m not sure what it is. I think that there’s two parts to their worldview here. The first part is a failure to identify with any traditional omnipotent, omniscient and loving deity. So I think that when they refer to God, they is referring to themselves. This can be supported by the change in the last lines. Secondly, I think that they’re influenced by the argument from moral law: they think that without a God, there is no morality. This isn’t arguing about what morality is, be it absolute, situational, subjective, consequestionalist, etc. It’s arguing for moral nihilism, that there is no morality without the aforementioned deity.

I won’t go into why the latter argument is incorrect and why it shouldn’t be argued because most of the people who will read this will probably understand anyway (and I can’t be bothered.. I’ll save it for another time). I’ll just point out the main incoherence of these lyrics. Apparently they know that God doesn’t exist, but at the same time insist on moral nihilism. But they can’t know that God doesn’t exist just because they’re ignorant of any available evidence - they can only be agnostic. They need an argument to justify their position, and in accepting the argument from moral law they deny and sliding into moral nihilism they’re denying themselves access to the problem of evil in the world.

This probably seems like a stretch for some people - yes, I actually tried to honestly examine Slayer lyrics for philosophical content. Did I succeed? I don’t think so, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I still don’t get the whole satan thing. Do you??

xoxoJames

This blog is going to be about three things that are important to me: music, video and religion. There are many instances atheism can be found in these mediums, and I like to hunt more down in my spare time. I like to watch how religion is portrayed in popular culture, how atheism is (mis)perceived by the general population and how blatantly stupid much of the stuff around is. Many misconceptions about atheism are reinforced by popular songs, television shows and movies while the non-strawman material gets pushed aside. But we all know there is good stuff and bad, and I want to discuss them both.

Starting with one of my favourite songs..

Motörhead - Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me

Little girl sleeping in dreams of peace,
Mommy’s been gone a long time,
Daddy comes home and she still sleeps,
Waiting for the world’s worst crime.
And he comes up the stairs like he always does,
And he never turns on the light,
And she’s wide awake, scared to death,
She smells his lust and she smells his sweat
Curled in a ball she holds her breath
Praying to a God that she’s never met

Don’t let daddy kiss me,
Don’t let daddy kiss me
Good night

Little girl lies by her daddy’s side
And she listens to him breathe
She knows there’s something awful wrong
That she’s far too young to see
And she knows she can’t tell anyone
She’s so full of guilt and shame,
And if she tells she’ll be all alone
They’d steal her daddy and they’d steal her home
And it’s not so bad when daddy leaves her alone
Praying to her God with his heart of stone

Don’t let daddy kiss me,
Don’t let daddy kiss me
Good night

Why, tell me why, the worst crime in the world

And daddy lies by his daughter’s side,
And he sleeps both deep and well
No nightmares come to him tonight,
Though his daughter lives in hell
For his seed is sown where it should not be
And the beast in his mind don’t care
And the only sounds are the tears that fall

Little girl turns her face to the wall
She knows that no one hears her call,
But it seems like God hears nothing at all

Don’t let daddy kiss me,
Don’t let daddy kiss me,
Don’t let daddy kiss me
Good night

This is obviously about the argument from evil, but it deals with a specific strand of apologetic: The free will defense.

According to the free will defense, moral evils are permissible for the greater good, that of free will. Claiming that a benevolent god can let a father rape his daughter seems implausible even on first impressions. Suppose one was in the position to stop this from happening; would we be responsible if we did not intervene? Why would an omnipotent and omni -benevolent god to create agents who do wrong when he could plausibly create agents who did no wrong? Suppose a theist denies that this is possible; they are then making the assumption that god is not benevolent. Perhaps theists arguing the free will defense should avoid discourse all together in an attempt to avoid influencing anyone’s free will.

Of course, people do not have the free will that the defense is suggesting. People are often born with violent inclinations, short tempers, stupidity, mental illness, ADD- and these are just genetically determined. What about socialization? There is too much of a correlation between education and upbringing (i.e. religious indoctrination, political beliefs) for it to be completely coincidental. Whether or not we have any free will at all is irrelevant. If people can’t make free choices, if people do wrong without meaning to at all, the defense doesn’t even begin to work.

If an interventionist God exists, he sure is picky. Everyone reading this blog here probably know all the claims made of miracles.. cancer gone, loved ones healed by faith alone, AA cures after repentance, etc. Why can’t doesn’t he stop this girl being abused? No legs are ever grown back after they’re amputated. If an interventionist God exists, he isn’t omni-benevolent, and he isn’t worthy of worship.

I know this is nothing new to all of you. I know that everything that I’ve talked about is highly simplified. But what I want to know is this:

Why do events like those mentioned in this song not get the thought they deserve? Why does this not make more people think about their religious convictions? What kind of person thinks that events like these are for the greater good?

Listen to the song, it fucking rocks.

James