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Bright Eyes- At the bottom of everything..
I published a small blog on Community Ideas on Inspiring, Secular Music Secular Perspectives (http://secularhumanist.blogspot.com/) and would be interested in hearing other people's favorite candidates for a family of broadly secular/humanist songs. These could atheist, but I take a song like John Lennon's Image to have a broader message than just being anti-relgious and providing a richer mix of humanist values.
Some good suggestions included Tim Minchin's White Wine In The Sun asone of those Xmas songs that that discusses how how a secular person celebrates the season. I like Vienna Teng's "An atheist Christmas Carol"
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mdmFPMSN-g
It's a quietly powerful about humanistic values in cold Winter Time. It has grace and speaks to the companionship and love that people provide in dark, wounded times. Various religious concepts are humanized just a bit.
Another secular song is Iris Dement's - Let the Mystery Be that nineofnine posted at http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/forums/showthread.php?t=6564&am...
Q1. Never Would Have Made It; Marvin Sapp (Dedicated to the passing of his Dad, sorry but I hate it.)
Q2. Higher; Creed (Rife with supernatural imagery buy catchy.)
Q3. Only The Good Die Young; Billy Joel (A phenomenal social commentary on catholic virtue.)
(Dare I say it?) AMEN! ...But what happened to Mark Cohn's "Walking in Memphis"? (I received your first comment--with said title--in my Gmail.)
All right, I forgive you. (Please note my [somewhat pathetic] attempt to be funny here.) I guess I just happen to like Mark Cohn's song a little better than I like Creed's. My kids are more likely to pick the latter, though.
You've raise another good point, too: It's not a very good idea to be too rigid, especially when choosing what you listen to. After all, music is meant to be enjoyed by the musical parts of our brains, right? Less so by the logical side. We can't expect that, simply because we happen to like what our favorite musicians and/or songwriters have composed, that our philosophies and/or logic will align with theirs. When we feel like being picky about another's rhetoric, we should be searching for books or articles, not music CDs.
Billy Joel's lyrics were a major source of inspiration for me as a young teen. I lived by the line:
"They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place
Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else
Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space
Either way it's okay to wake up with yourself"
Either way you wake up with yourself is one of my mantras in life. :)
I recently started listening to Echoes of Eternity. Of course, the song "Letalis Deus" from their most recent album, As Shadows Burn, caught my attention:
From the void,
Nothingness becomes aware of itself
Consciousness is born
Self realization through creation
And so the universe is born
Lost inside the human maze
Through your mind, you create
Only way to the other side
Is to live and to die
Eons pass by,
Alone with all this power
Sure makes for a stagnant existence
The solution?
Divide into pieces
The immortal ones, long to be flesh
Organized religion
A distortion of the truth
Make your own decision
Ignorance will undo you
I, I am the game
I, I am the player
I'm the creator
I'm the destroyer
In his 1973 hit song "Superstition" Stevie Wonder sings: "If you believe in things you don't understand then you suffer...Super-stition aint the way."
Indeed Stevie!
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