Are there any songs you listen to or have heard that, while they may have spiritual/religious bits that you don't agree with, have a message overall that you do agree with? If so, what might they be.
My example would be Bob Marley's music. I like quite a few of his songs, and most, if not all, of this have some sort of religious connotation/saying somewere. But the message overall is one that anyone could agree with. For example their song "Get Up, Stand Up" is a song about standing up for your rights. I think anyone could understand that message. In fact, they wrote the song at a time when the Christian Orthodox community was oppressing the Rastafarian community. Seem similar to our situation at all? But I digress. Anything like this with the rest of you?
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Most if not all classical music. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach....
I never really thought of that, but I suppose that would fit.
On a slightly off topic subject, what you said about the metal music I tended to listen to(this has been a bit back). I think I'm getting to the point that I agree.
The pop song "No Matter What" seems overtly religious but I strongly agree with the chorus "I can't deny what I believe, I can't be what I'm not."
Amazing Grace...
Especially when you're hearing a thousand pipers and drummers all out on the field playing this together.
Like above, most of the classical notorieties were commissioned by the church at one time or another. Without the church there would have been no Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, or as we know him, Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel and Pieta fame. Nor would we have Johann (Johnny) Bach's Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring. The church had the cash and were always on the look-out for talented people to glorify it in one medium or another.
The part you're asking about being in agreement with I've never heard. Christmas carols I find beautifully disturbing of my sense of logic and a glaring testimony to man's primitive mind. I could never sing one of them. When I was a kid it was painful for me to be in the midst of people who did sang them each year. Singing the lyrics strips away all intellect a scratch above the sentient. I didn't have the words to describe my feelings back then but the feelings still remain today unchanged.
People who sing religious songs with feeling are, to me, scary. I can't think of a more resolute way to say it and respect the nature of being tactful at the same time. Those are the people I keep a safe distance from as they are most likely prone to fundamentalist approaches to their belief systems. Scary people.
I write songs that attempt to slay the opinion of piety. The one linked below is clearly a slap at the ordinary soldier for seeking religious and secular sanctioned killing, leaving him absolved from any and all blame, and hiding (smokescreened) behind it so he can enjoy killing, which is why he signed up in the first place. I've known many such people. Killing is the common denominator in all men and religious and/or secular sanctioning of it has been the way of the world. Removing that common denominator would herald utopia. But, don't wager on it.
https://app.box.com/s/6ra1s7ohxnh9vvmhg6unpwq3o3pwnbc9
On the topic, there was a pilot in WWII who wrote a poem about flying. His name was John Gillespie MaGee, Jr. He died a young man, as many did in that war. This is a beautiful poem that anyone would agree came straight out of the man's heart. He titled it, innocuously, High Flight and it's been the mantra of every pilot and aspiring student of flying ever since. But, for me, he ended it poorly and I have dismissed it reluctantly to the annals of drivel from brainwashed people.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
I actually can't answer your original post. I like many songs that are religious but only because of the music and not the content.
I feel the same way about patriotic music. I absolutely hate with all my being 'America the Beautiful'. It is a song that demands you to be christian to be patriotic. Basically it states that you are not American unless you are christian. It is the antithesis of being American, and what America stands for.
I like many Woody Guthrie songs even though most have an evangelical underpinning. Those songs are about hard working people fighting just to survive.
For me its this ....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8i5NLyXZdc