As much as I'd like to write a biting piece about the brilliance with which David Bazan writes and performs his songs, I do not have the time to do so. I do, however, recommend anyone wanting to know more about the song-stylist to read this article about his new album (Curse Your Branches) and why he is no longer into Theism:
Bazan (cont'd): I left church with the question in my mind — "Does God pursue us?" This was in like 2002. I thought, "OK, I understand the Gospel, but I want to find out if God pursues us." It's a very Calvinistic, God-sovereign idea. And I thought, "If this is real, if Christianity is real, I need to feel some kind of intrinsic motivation." There's this bullshit parable about a pastor who goes to a guy's house who's stopped attending church. The guy has a fire going, and so the pastor picks up with the little tongs a lump of coal, and puts it on the end of the hearth. And so they're talking and the pastor asks "Why aren't you going to church?" The guy says, "Oh, I'm just reading the Bible on my own." And so the pastor refers back to the coal that has since burned out, because it wasn’t close to the fire. And I just thought, "If there's a real mystical energy that’s coming from this being, from this belief, then the coal just has to keep burning regardless. The surrounding coals can't be the driving force keeping it alive." And when I realized that, I thought "My gosh, I've been making profound assumptions my entire life that need to be examined before I move forward." And that was basically it.
I mean, for me, I just want to get some distance. I mean, is it OK for a guy just to get some real distance? It takes years to do this. And in Christianity, the answer is, "No, because if you die tonight …" Even in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, he talks about how timeline-obsessed Christians are. Christianity builds in all these motivators — you've got to figure it out now, you don't have the time. And that was one of the first things that I rejected.
[*Link to the full article by clicking the quote.]
2 comments:
I know, I know, you said you don't have time to write about what you think but I am interested in what you think, concerning this article.
Crystal ( The friend "that first spoke with you online and got married and all that.")
I love the way you write and what you say. As much as we've talked about Bazan, this is the most detail I've gotten about his "transition". Thanks for posting, it's very interesting. It is 1:57am Saturday night.
Post a Comment