Atheism

Ja, ve are nihilists.  We don't believe in anysink!

Any discussion I undertake about music is inevitably going to lead me to talk about metal, and any discussion I undertake about religion is inevitably going to lead me to talk about atheism.  The two are actually more closely linked than a lot of people think, but what links them together may be surprising.  Maybe I can do this in one post; maybe I'll need two.  We'll see.

When I think of metal, I think of a friend I knew when I was younger who I'll call Mike.  Mike has had a huge impact on my life over the years, even though we're no longer speaking.  He really deserves his own post; more than one, actually.  But since this is a post about metal and atheism, I'll talk this time about the greatest thing Mike did for me, which was introduce me to many of the bands and artists who have had the greatest influence over my young life.

The year was 2000, and I'd been "officially" a practictioner of the alternate lifestyle for about three years.  In those three years I was kicked out of two high schools and got into probably three dozen fights.  I was at the age where anger and frustration with the world synergizes so perfectly with adolescent self-absorption, and boy was I ever pissed.  I like to think I had good reason to be: I was dateless, most of my friendships were in ruins, I was going on my third school in as many years, and even though I had plenty of people to blame, in my heart I knew even then that this was all my own damn fault.  In its purest form, I truly believe metal is an expression that one can see little or no beauty in the world, and when that ability is taken away all we're left with is our pain, anguish, anger, and spite at everything else.  For my adolescent years, it was a match made in heaven (or, erm, hell).

Mike ran a website that reviewed popular metal bands and albums of the time, particularly those that were part of a movement in the genre that came out of scandanavia in the mid-to-late 90s and crested in the first half of this decade.  Primarily focused on the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, these included bands that would later find commercial success in the US such as In Flames, Arch Enemy, Soilwork, Children of Bodom, and Dimmu Borgir.  Generally speaking, as far as music goes, if it's popular in the US, I tend to dislike it, but if it's popular in Europe, I tend to like it a lot more (the crossover metal/progressive rock band Dream Theater is a notable exception).  In the span of a year, from late 2000 to the end of 2001, Mike and his website introduced me to literally hundreds of bands that received repeated play time.  I spent probably upwards of two thousand dollars on CDs and merchandise that year, and my collection grew from about 50 albums to close to five hundred.  But it was more than music I'd bought: it was an attitude, an image, a lifestyle.  I grew my hair long and wore dingy band shirts.  I cursed.  I spat.  I was generally an angry dick.  But as far as being an angry dick went, whatever I could do, Mike could do a hundred times better.  The world was as bleak and dark to us as the music we listened to.

One thing people don't seem to appreciate about metal is how much like classical music it is.  Metal, no matter how noise-like and unmusical it may seem, has and always will be about emotion.  In particular, it is about negative emotion, and the intensity of the anger and the bitterness of the music and musicians reflects the anger and bitterness of its listeners.  The whole Satanic motif is only useful as a means to an end as far as imagery goes: the message is really about atheism and nihilism, not a belief or worship of Satan.  This is something the traditional critics of metal have had a really hard time understanding.  Mike was at his core a nihilist, like I was for those years, even though I called myself a Buddhist.

There is an emotional tendency of human beings to view things and speak of them in absolutes.  This is just as true for a belief in nothing as it is a belief in God or the Bible.  As I approach the age of 27, theologically I really only draw two lines in the sand anymore, both of which I learned the hard way. The first is the belief that one's own spiritual or moral problem and prescription is necessarily true of anyone and everyone else.  I resoundly reject this.  The other has to do with the rigidity or absolutism of one's faith and/or practice..  Either one of these beliefs, however they're practiced, at best guarantees the practitioner will do not good in the world and at worst will cause a great deal of damage to those around them and the world at large.  Every atheist and everyone who appreciates metal the way I used to has for whatever reason been unwilling or unable to see beauty in the world.  They have also been unbelievably rigid in their belief of this, and insisted that others come to the same conclusion.  Stephen Prothero, in his various non-fiction books on religion, likes to call a fundamentalist "a religious practitioner who is angry at something."  The same applies here.  Whether you're angry at the world like a metalhead, angry at modernity like a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, or just angry at religion, you have ceded control of that part of yourself to the emotion, and you will cause harm, not the least of which to yourself.  This has not been an easy lesson for me to learn.  Anger and hate are very easy and convenient sentiments, because they allow us to avoid responsibility for our actions.  Which is not to say anger is wholly or inherently bad and call for its elimination: rage is as human as joy and compassion and therefore just as legitimate.  But we have to be careful how we digest and carry that rage, and deny it power over us.  This was to have significant consequences between me and Ken, as I will write in the coming days.  So let this serve not as an admonition, but merely a caution.  When you believe there is nothing good and reedeeming to the world, or even if you simply believe that as a net result on a theological balance sheet, you're going to have a very hard time controlling your anger and your hate, and you're going to have an even harder time maintaining a balance between the positive and the negative: thus you will cause harm to yourself and others.

All this is not to say that I don't still enjoy metal.  Negative emotions are every bit as important to us as positive ones, myself included.  But the dark side does have the ability to infect and take over the light in a way that the light does not really have the ability to do the reverse, at least in most people I know.  So we can't let it be the only way.  There is always beauty and positivity if you're wiling to see it, even in tragedy and misfortune.  The real tragedy, and the true misfortune, is that so few of us are willing to see it.

The Cult of Avril Lavigne's Femininity

I think you might be taking your "punk princess"
title a bit too literally here, Avril.

Bold title, huh?  This post has been a long time in the making.  What side of me it reveals to the world I'm not entirely certain, but it's the next part of my narrative, and thus gets a post like the rest of them.  This post is ostensibly about Avril Lavigne, but it's really about perception, and how things are not always what they appear to be.  I will begin with a confession: I have an incredibly twisted, one-way, love-hate relationship with pop singer Avril Lavigne.  This relationship has existed since the release of her first album in 2002, and it continues to this day.  I have expended great time and effort trying to explain this relationship to myself, and now finally nine years later, I think I can.

I'll begin with some background.  I was not really popular with the ladies until my senior year of college.  I've lived most of my life in abject terror, held hostage to flickering, overwhelming anxiety about people, and in particular women.  I have a long history of run-ins with female authority figures, which while pertinent, are too lengthy to list in any detail here and deserve their own posts, so for now I'll trust that you can take me at my word.  My dating history before the age of 22 is equally dodgy.  I had one significant relationship in 2001, for which to say it ended acrimoniously would be a tremendous understatement.  Then nothing save for an on-again/off-again fling from 2003 to 2005, until finally in 2006 my love life started to pick up, culminating in meeting my fiancée in early 2007.  Social skills are not something that really developed in me until my twenties.  In the meantime, in part because of my romantic experiences and in part because of the way I had been raised (my mother is a radical femininst, but that's a post for another day), I had come to view women and feminine power as a kind of strange magical force -- a force I both feared and sought for myself.  Let's call it femme-manna.  Enter Avril Lavigne, who entered my life while I was working at a bookstore in 2002 and 2003 after dropping out of high school, while all my friends were starting college.

I am obsessed with direction.  There have been long swathes of my life where I felt like I've had very little of it, and I crave it more than anything else.  Presented with anyone young and successful -- their persona and image, but also particularly their confidence -- will quickly become the object of considerable envious obsession.  To me, direction is power.  So when I read an article about Avril Lavigne in 2002 after her debut album began to make it onto the playlist for our overhead sound system at the bookstore where I worked, there was an instant and devastating connection.  She plays hockey with boys.  She's confident and assertive.  Oh yeah, she's only seventeen.

Power.  Pee on me to show your dominance, why don't you?

Yes, like a good dominatrix or reptile, Avril Lavigne is the master of displaying her dominance.  Watch her videos, or read her interviews, or better yet, listen to the lyrics in her songs.  Whether it was her first record LET GO, THE BEST DAMN THING (of Girlfriend fame), or her latest single What the Hell.  I am Avril, she shouts, I am better than you, and I am in charge!  Moreover, she carefully cultivated a personal style that rebuked the loud, sexualized, but also subtly submissive femininity of stars who were popular at the time such as Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson.  At first it was actually quite masculine, evolving into time into the more feminine pink skulls that almost seemed to announce: "I have not only captured my femininity from THEM, but I've conquered it as well."  Not only that, there was this other element to it too: like she was saying "This is who I truly am."  Especially viewed side-by-side with someone like Britney Spears, she certainly made a compelling case.  And if Avril is one thing, she is very good at convincing others of how genuine she is.  In the cult of femme-manna, Avril was High Priestess.

So it went for the better part of a decade.  Avril continued with her message, each record she made seeming to only increase the level of intensity of her message, and me like a hopeless addict worshipping at the altar of the feminine power women seemed to hold over me.  She even managed to penetrate the fantasy world, shaping how I viewed my sexuality and allowing me to warp it around my own delusions of dominance and submission.  This was, in fact, a spell that remained in place even throughout my relationship with Kari.  For years I couldn't explain it.  Except now I think I can, and herein lies the lesson in perception.

There's always been a part of me that wanted to call Avril a fraud.  She didn't really mean any of her lyrics; this was all a sham, a giant dog and pony show fueled by a cynical desire for money, fame, and power.  I won't deny that probably had something to do with it -- after all, why does any artist slave away over their creations but for the glory?  This I can actually relate to.  But there was always something more to it.  I believe very firmly that if we tell a story about ourselves long enough, that story will eventually become us.  This is true regardless of how genuine or deceitful that story is.  Avril has been broadcasting her message for a long time now.  If she didn't start out that way, she certainly seems to be living it now.  In fact, it is because Avril seems so genuine about her message that I feel like I can finally understand it.

For the sake of argument, let's take Avril at face value.  That means we'll take her music, lyrics, and image literally.  What is she?  Avril Lavigne is, quite literally, what we expect a famous empowered young woman to look, act, and feel like.  I'm not using the word "empowered" here in its colloquial sense, but rather a literal one.  She has a lot of power, and she wields it.  Read her lyrics.  Sk8er Boi, Girlfriend, My Happy Ending, What the Hell, the title track from The Best Damn Thing (in which she actually goes to the effort to spell her name out as part of the song, and proclaims herself quite literally "the best damn thing your eyes have ever seen").  She kind of comes across as a selfish bitch.  Not just an allegorical one, either.  She is someone who I genuinely do not wish to meet or get to know.  I've watched video of her concerts: they only seem to reinforce the notion.  I've been to both large and small concerts.  There's always some degree of interaction between artist and audience.  This ain't it.  Rather, it's high mass at the temple of femme-manna to the glory of the high priestess herself.  And before you claim that all pop singers do this, watch any Lady GaGa performance and see if she does the same thing.

Yet, at the heart of it, this doesn't make me enjoy or desire Avril any less.  It's the social equivalent of a highly-sophisticated optical illusion.  I desire her power and prestige and seek it out.  She embodies it.  All this despite the fact that what that power and prestige actually means in functional, literal terms is something highly undesirable to me.  Avril isn't what I actually want.  She's what I think I want.  Therein is the heart of her genius as a pop singer: give us what we think we desire, and make us believe it.  We do want to believe it.  There is some powerful part of our brains that tell us not only that this is the way things are, but that it's desirable and damn the consequences.  To a girl between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I can imagine this message is especially powerful.  It carries all the more weight, because she's been so successful at putting her fame to useful ends.  The fragrance, the clothing line -- she's a brand and her brand is now a business.  The most successful artists all do the same thing.  Artists don't really sell art anymore, or at least the ones who do don't see a whole lot of material success for it.  Materially successful artists sell an image, and that image becomes a brand of which their art is only one interlocking part.  Purists decry this as a corruption, but I don't see it that way.  It's a natural evolution, and there's nothing wrong with it.

We all tell stories about ourselves and the people we meet and see in our lives.  Avril to me is a story, for better and for worse.  There's nothing wrong with that.  The only time it should be considered a problem is if it causes the storyteller distress.  I am not an artistic purist.  It doesn't matter how eloquent and beautiful your message is if you're screaming it into a brick wall.  Rather, let this post just serve as a caution not to let the stories you tell and the beliefs that go with them go to your head.  Things are not always what they seem.

The Prophet Arjen and Notes on Psychosis

Arjen Anthony Lucassen is more epic than you,
as this green screen clearly shows.

Any post that follows my feelings towards the musician Neal Morse and continues to talk about music, spirituality, and life, must inevitably lead to Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his various projects.  Arjen Lucassen is somewhat of an oddity in the metal and progressive rock genre, in that he's known more for being a composer than being in a band.  From the mid-90s to 2008, he had a long-running project of interconnected rock operas featuring a plethora of the best and brightest vocalists in the two genres called Ayreon, and it was Ayreon that provided the soundtrack to most of my lunatic meditation sessions last spring and summer.  I can't talk about myself and what I went through without also talking about Ayreon and the story and the man behind it, too.  Let this post fill in the blanks.

Ayreon is as much a story as it is music.  I'll spare the reader most of the details, as the plot is highly complex with a large cast of characters and many suplots, each told out through five operas, all but one of them double-albums.  At its root, there is a race of aliens, called Forever, who have become so dependent and indistinguishable from their technology that they have ceased to feel, grow, evolve, and change, and are forever frozen in a permanent state of eternal waking stasis, unable to feel either pleasure or pain.  Their home planet is called Y, and is purported to be in the Andromeda galaxy, though in the final opera 01011001 it is claimed they are capable of sending a comet to Earth in a reasonable length of time, so perhaps Planet Y is instead located in the Milky Way.  Mankind is their experiment, designed to help them relearn how to think freely and feel.  Over the millenia, they have conducted various experiments on selected humans to help further this aim.  These experiments form the rock opera INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE.

Separately, on Earth, another plot unfolds regarding the demise of man in a nuclear war in the year 2084, which is witnessed by the last surviving human: a colonist on Mars (which forms the two albums THE DREAM SEQUENCER and FLIGHT OF THE MIGRATOR).  Before the war, a group of scientists attempted to warn the past of impending disaster due to global warming, environmental degredation, disease, and chronic conflict by sending messages into the past.  However, the warning, instead of going where intended, finds itself in the hands of a blind mistrel in Dark Ages England named Ayreon (which forms the basis of the first opera, THE FINAL EXPERIMENT, as well as one of the main plots of the last opera, 01011001).  In addition, one of the Forever uses a device called the Dream Sequencer to complete their experiments and fulfill mankind's intended purpose, which forms the basis of the remaining album THE HUMAN EQUATION.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Admittedly, I am a huge fan.  But it is significant for another, far more important reason.  To explain this, I am going to have to explain a little bit about how my psychosis and my dissociations worked.

Before there was Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, there was a world.  This world took many forms, but it always possessed the same properties: it was utopian to those who had power, dystopian to those who didn't, and in it I forced the will of my beliefs onto its form and shape.  I'm not entirely sure how long it's existed for me.  It seems like it's been a part of me for as long as I can remember.  It started out simplistically, sure -- often the result of an imagined encounter with a djinn.  What I wanted was power.  I was bullied in school, both a scapegoat and target, and my relationship with my parents growing up was both complicated and ambiguous in a way that didn't exactly engender a positive worldview.  I dreamed of escaping it all, and slowly those daydreams coalesced into something living and breathing.  As I grew older, I began to explore the flip-side of all that power, and the dynamic contained therein, and so was born the world.  It was my own private alternate universe, one very few ever got to see.  The world of THE ACADEMY is very loosely based on it, as are a number of my short stories, but the purest expressions of it I never showed to anyone.  Its four prophets were Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley, who came to embody the narrative of the world and how it changed, grew, evolved, and eventually was redeemed.

I would not exactly hallucinate when I lost touch with reality.  The only description I can provide would be for you to try to imagine having two realities superimposed onto each other.  There was me, and my apartment in Portsmouth, and my fiancee, Prescott Park, and the hospital where my psychiatrist works.  There was also Jennifer and her machine world, Emma and her life, AK and his campaign of terror, and Haley and her kingdom.  It was possible for any of them, or me, to slide back and forth between these worlds.  But sliding was just about all I could do, for the most part, unless something else could help me penetrate the barrier between them.

Enter Ayreon, and in particular the opera 01011001.  There were many things that could breach the fantasy world, but 01011001 was always the most effective.  Jennifer identified with the Forever.  Emma liked the theme.  AK identified with the apocalyptic aspects of it, and Haley understood what it meant to me.  01011001 was playing on my headphones on probably at least three-fourths of my meditations.  I could even see myself in there, as Arjen Lucassen's autobiographical hippie character and would-be prophet, by the time of this story now aged and in a mental hospital, his prophecy ignored in one of my favorite songs "The Truth is in Here."  Other things -- songs, people, stories, characters -- could penetrate the world.  Ayreon tied it all together, and grounded me in this world.  It was to Arjen Lucassen's operas that I fought my demons, and slowly began to come to terms with my illness and get it under control.

To that end, as I later learned, 01011001 was written at a time of personal distress for Arjen Lucassen.  My favorite music always seems to be produced during times of great trauma, stress, and pain for the artist that writes it.  As a writer, I can certainly attest to the power of putting yourself into your art.  It's that element of the artist's personal struggle that makes their art so great to me, like I can feel and experience their own pain and suffering in some small way.  01011001 oozes with pain, guilt, regret, and frustration.  Arjen even took it to another level shortly after he concluded the Ayreon saga by creating a side project specifically to address those feelings, Guilt Machine, the year after 01011001 was released.  There are things that I think and things that I feel, and music is something that I feel.  My favorite musicians are all like me: artists for whom the emotion of the music always shows through regardless of the content.  Which is why 01011001 feels as personal to me as one of Neal Morse's TESTIMONY albums: Lucassen's pain is palpable throughout.  When I'm feeling sad or depressed or low, I don't want to be cheered up.  I just don't want to feel alone.  Listened to, really.  01011001 hears those prayers and delivers a resounding response: "I understand."  So I listen, and I feel better.

Some people are like this; some aren't.  Maybe ten years ago I would have felt like there was a right way or a wrong way to appreciate music, but I don't anymore.  What I've come to appreciate the most about people over the past year is just how different our needs can be.  Kari, my fiancee (her real name, used because it would be nearly impossible to conceal her identity), takes quite a different approach.  Her favorite band is The Flower Kings, who she listens to specifically because it cheers her up.  This is not just true of music, either, as I've written about in previous posts.  When I read a story or listen to music, I want something that will break that barrier between me and it, and the barriers within me as well.  To that end, Arjen Lucassen is the master, and I'd be hard-pressed not to like anything he produces.

The Gospel According to Neal

Religion and spirituality has been on my mind a lot these days, and after giving it some thought, I've decided that I can't really talk about my spirituality without also talking about music.  Both are deeply connected to my psyche and my emotions, so much so that they're almost tangled up in one another.  That isn't a problem for me, in fact I enjoy it quite a bit and it brings me tremendous benefits.  It plays into my obsessive nature and my means of regulating myself.  As such, while I want to talk about religion and what it means to me, this post is probably going to turn into a musical review of sorts, because I can't really talk about my religious practices without talking about the prophets of my religion, and one prophet in particular who goes by the name of Neal Morse.

Sorry, Neal.  I love you, but you still look like a church boy.

That's Neal on the right there.  Neal was not the first musical prophet of my life -- in fact, he's one of the most recent.  The first belongs to Jimmy Buffett, the object of much obsession for me as a child.  Jimmy gave way, strangely enough, to Metallica, Metallica begot Corrosion of Conformity, who begot Arcturus, who in turn begot Opeth, then the metal bands Mercenary and Katatonia joined Opeth in a pantheon, who in turn yielded influence to Dream Theater, then Ayreon, which lastly brings me to Spock's Beard, and the man behind Spock's Beard, Neal Morse.  Sound convoluted?  It's enough to make a Yoruba practictioner's head swirl.

For the longest time, I felt trapped when I talked about music.  Like any teenager, I tended to believe that my personal opinion was objective truth, and that led to many an argument over music between friends and enemies alike.  What I've come to realize about music is that it isn't necessarily the quality that makes it for me (though I do primarily listen to progressive rock, so take this with a grain of salt), but rather what it means to me that makes it good.  I used to be one of those metal snobs who wouldn't listen to anything they played on American radio, but for most of my life I probably couldn't tell you what made the bands I listened to good.  Ultimately, what I decided, after I had fully converted to my cult of Ayreon/Arjen Anthony Lucassen- and Spock's Beard/Neal Morse-ism was that it was music's power to affect me positively that ultimately determined its relative strengths and weaknesses.  Had you asked me two years ago what I listen to, I would have unequivocably told you "Metal."  Now, I'd simply say anything that happens to move me, regardless of genre or label.  Arjen Anthony Lucassen, the man behind Ayreon, will get his own post tomorrow, because it's Neal whose personal story compels me more, and that story is reflected through his music.

Like me, Neal was a struggling artist for most of his youth, a musician of immense talent who couldn't quite put it all together into material success until later in his life.  His band, Spock's Beard, became one of the most successful acts of the late 90's prog revival, along with Dream Theater, The Flower Kings, and Porcupine Tree.  In fact, Neal has frequently worked with former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.  Don't get me wrong, I like Dream Theater too, but unique among all the prog bands of that era was the amount of himself Neal put into his music.  He alone wrote almost all of Spock's Beard's songs, and many of them are not only quite technically complex and beautiful, but also mesmerizing in their ability to stir my emotions.  His singing voice, deep for a prog singer and nasal, has always had a tremendous capacity to soothe me.  Over the course of five albums in the span of six years, he poured his heart and soul and all of his energy into some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard.  Then, in 2002, immediately following the release of his magnum opus, the double concept album Snow, he seemingly very suddenly and abruptly became a born-again Christian, left the band, and moved to Nashville, Tennessse to pursue a solo career in gospel and Christian music.

I came to Spock's Beard in the fall of 2010, shortly before I attended Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity (another fulcrum point of my life, which I will write more about as the narrative unfolds).  Spock's Beard has gone on to release another four albums without Neal (drummer Nick D'Virgilio took over the job of vocals), and the change to me was very abrupt.  It had seemed, if the lyrics and Wikipedia were any guide, that Neal had simply gone crazy and had an epic meltdown.  As it turned out, there was a public record of this, as he then recorded a double-album about his experiences becoming born-again, which to me only seemed to deepen the mystery, not solve it.  It wasn't until literally the past month, when I gained access to the album's sequel (and, I came to understand, Neal was ready to tell the rest of his story).  What it told was a story of self-loathing, frustration, hearbreak, longing, and self-doubt that could only be gained by simply listening to what he had to say, rather than trying to study notes or websites.  What astonishes me the most about his story is how close to my story it seems to be.

I know very few people who have as much access to as much of themselves as Neal appears to, and even fewer who can so ably and directly express it through their art.  It is a skill I've had no choice but to learn as I try to fight my own demons.  And yet still, the way in which Neal appears to have broken to me under the weight of his burdens makes me deeply uneasy.  It serves as both a testimony and a reminder that life is not an upward spiral -- that at any moment there can be both a tremendous breakthrough or enormous damage.

I think it's very hard to manage life's complexities and tribulations without having some sort of mythos or spiritual system.  I've yet to meet an avowed atheist who was happy about life or the world they live in.  Most seem to treat nonexistence as a release from their misery, which at least to me seems like kind of a bummer.  Which is not to say that I think their position is any more or less reasonable than living this life for immortality in the next.  Life presents us a great many different existential problems, which we all try to solve in our own way as we live.  But there's a particular kind of self-loathing many born-again Christians seem to embody, and a particular kind a cynicism that seems to go along with it (though which comes first to me is a chicken and egg problem), and while I decided on a different solution to it, I appreciate Neal, his story, and his music and can connect with it as deeply as I do precisely because he can communicate it so well.  Every person I've ever met has had some inclination towarsd nihilism and some inclination towards hope, and it's how exactly the two are balanced (both quantitatively and qualitatively) that seems to shape one's outlook the most.  The two can often be confused for each other, as well.  The Rapture is a story of hope, but that hope is based upon a tremendously nihilistic premise.  Buddhism, my chosen religion, is not immune to this phenomenon, either.  I've used the Dharma both to secure myself and inflict pain on myself.

Whatever the reason, it's clear to me that Neal Morse spent most of the past two decades in unimaginable pain, and he found an outlet for it through his music.  At the end of the day, (incidentally, also the name of my favorite Spock's Beard song), what matters more in life are the outcomes more than the processes themselves that led to them.  I may not know Neal Morse, but I feel like I understand his pain, and I feel like if we met, he could understand mine, too.  For that, he occupies a place in my spiritual life, despite the differences of our respective religions.  And his music always moves me, even his Christian praise songs (for more on my views of God, consult the post "The Day I Met God").  So, to sum up both my feelings on music and religion and tie this all together: in the end, it doesn't really matter what you like and what you believe, as long as it gets you where you need to go.  It's a difficult answer to a complex question, but I believe it to be the truth nonetheless.