Comfort Ye: The Religious Power of Music

I can still remember where I was, in 1982, when the sound of Handel’s Messiah, the very beginning of it, flooded through my mind. Comfort ye! I was having difficulty in my graduate program, difficulties that only resolved years later, and what I needed was comfort. Comfort does not mean ease; it contains the root word fort, which means strength.

Here is the performance on YouTube. 

I did not need theology. I already had that, reinforced over and over at church. What I needed was something that would cut through the sticky web of theology and pierce my heart. Music did that.

It is easy to tear apart conservative theology and leave its chunks of flesh all over the floor. I have done it often enough in this very blog. But music contains no theology, just pure emotion. Music will make you say that it is all true, all of this religion stuff, simply because the music is so beautiful.

This can be traced back at least to cave man days. The men (or women) who made the magnificent cave paintings in Lascaux and Altamira painted them in the big rooms near the outside, where people would assemble. Down deep in the caves was where people went for spirit quests, and the paintings and etchings there are much simpler. But the cave paintings in the big sanctuary rooms were meant to be experienced by the light of torches, and accompanied by music that would reverberate from the walls, the music of bone flutes and of voices. It was the power of religion. They had myths, but what united the people together into a spirit of unity was the music. The priests used the power of music to manipulate the minds of the tribal members who would then work and fight very hard to make the tribe prevail over its enemies.

When I hear Handel’s Messiah, especially Behold the Lamb of God and Hallelujah, I am as helpless before religion as I would have been thirty thousand years ago, as if skeptical science and philosophy had never evolved.

Keep this in mind this Christmas season.

Religion Allows No Gray Areas of Uncertainty (for Abortion)

Nearly everything on Earth (and probably every place else in the universe) has areas of uncertainty between opposites. For example, there are plants, and there are animals, but there are some protists that could be considered neither one nor the other.

But religion is in the business of creating absolute distinctions. You are either going to Heaven, or to Hell; something is either sinful, or it is not; there are the sheep, and the goats.

One recent example of the difference between science and fundamentalist religion involves abortion. I have written very little about abortion, since I know little about it, and my opinions have little validity. I will let other people get angry on one side or the other. I am more interested in the light band of grayness between the two sides. Here are two relevant stories.

A Texas couple looked forward to having a child and were overjoyed with preparation for its arrival. Then, mid-pregnancy, an unthinkable tragedy occurred. The woman’s water broke, and all the amniotic fluid was lost. The fetus was thus doomed to death. But Texas has a heartbeat law. Abortion is murder if a heartbeat is detectable. In this case, the fetus still has a heartbeat, and under Texas law a doctor cannot abort the fetus. The woman has to carry the fetus, which has no hope of survival (unless God performs a miracle), perhaps risking her own health, until the heartbeat stops, something that could take a long time. What kind of law would insist that a woman carry a fetus until it inevitably dies? Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

In Ohio, a nine-year-old girl was raped, and became pregnant. But Ohio law forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. She had an abortion in Indiana. What kind of law would force a now ten-year-old girl to carry through a pregnancy from a rape? This assumes that her body would even be capable of handling this. Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

I am not saying whether or not a state should or should not have an anti-abortion law. But it is clear to me that individual exceptions must be allowed. But individual exceptions are something that fundamentalist religions will not allow.

The only thing I am absolutely sure about is that we can trust the women. A mother’s love is a force of nature. Mothers are not looking for a chance to kill their fetuses unless an old white man points a gun and tells them not to. Abortion is an act of desperation, as the above examples and thousands of other news items illustrate.

Among other things, life is about gray areas of uncertainty. An absolute light/dark distinction is a characteristic of death. Science fiction writer Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis made this distinction in his Perelandra novels. In these novels, the forces of evil wanted to make everything black and white, as on the Moon; but on Earth, there is a lot of penumbra. Many religious fundamentalists today would side with Lewis’s forces of evil. But Lewis was a Christian and used to be, at least when I was younger, a very popular Christian writer. Times, apparently, have changed, or at least Christianity has.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part three

This is a continuation of insights that I wrote in my daily journal back in 2005, as I tried to navigate a transition from doctrinal Christianity to a Christian-spirituality-agnosticism.

But if God is in me, as in all creation, he is experiencing creation. He is in me in a way he is not in a rock, because in me he experiences consciousness. As I continued on 24 January 2005, if God pervades all of nature, “occasionally tendrils of the holy come together, coalesce, react, sprout into phenomena that deny explanation…All I know is that music and color and science are all more beautiful than we have any right to expect.” The next month I wrote, God pervades everything but does not actually cause anything in the Newtonian sense.

At the same time, I admitted the truth of agnosticism: “All of conservative Christianity is a scab that hides true religion and, in order to prevent the scab itself from being shed, doctrinal Christianity prevents healing.” It keeps you scratching at the wound. It keeps you going to church, instead of healing your mind and returning to clear and happy thought. “Religion is the great fester on the sick body of humanity.

“There is both senseless chaos and blessed order in the world. There is frightful chaos that is not God’s will…Each day we must reaffirm whether we concentrate on the beauty or on the terror. I have several reasons for choosing the beautiful. First, if I cannot be sure there is no God, then I assume there is. Second, our evolution has made us religious, and the mind requires some kind of religion just as the body requires vitamin C, so I might as well choose a healthy religion. Third, it is deeply, not intermittently, pleasurable to have a good religion. Just as our eyes and mind create a model of the world, with things such as color that are not really there, so our minds create religious order.

“…I swim through a reality of God’s thick presence. Thick light, the antithesis of Thick Darkness. [I am not sure what this means. But I just like the imagery. It helps me live. The Bible in several places used the imagery of thick darkness, the kind of foggy darkness through which you cannot even see a ray of distant light. I wrote a series of novels with this name. Thick light is the kind of light in which you cannot see the light source, but it is all around you.]

“Religion is a coping mechanism. We can face disasters but not chaos. The question Can I trust the world requires a religious, rather than a scientific, answer…We must simultaneously admit suffering yet affirm the good in the world. The mother telling the child everything will be all right, and religion telling us the same thing: both are equally truth or lie. No one would think of censuring the consoling mother.

“…the pursuit of goodness and love is worth it, even if no one ever hears a heavenly voice saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”