ONE LEAF LEFT
4 December 2006

Back out on the ledge. The day is bright and warm enough. Reread what I wrote on Friday (‘Three Leaves Left’), don’t know if I nailed the point. May have to rework it. But not today. What I want to try and explore now is the subject of religion and music.

I grew up with a religious background, my father was a Presbyterian minister in the Church of Scotland. Religion is something I have never felt the need to either embrace or reject. What I have found myself doing over the years is exploring what religion is, why man is drawn to existing religions or to creating new ones, in the same way as I have found man’s relationship to music interesting.

As a teenager so many people I knew rejected religion for the very simplistic reasons that they thought it was all made-up stories used to keep people suppressed and that it didn’t stand up to any rational thinking. The fact that it was also the cause of so much of the conflict in the world went against it as well. This always seemed to me to miss the point and I couldn’t understand how moderately bright people could not get what religion is for and how it works and that it not being rational is irrelevant. The fact that it may have been responsible for much of the conflict in the world is also irrelevant to why it worked.

As far as I am concerned religion gives life meaning for people. When I would heard a passage from the bible about some miraculous act, I wouldn’t be thinking ‘well that obviously never happened’, I’d be into the poetry, the words, and wondering what it meant. Like if I go and see a film, I’m not watching it and thinking ‘that’s just lights on a screen or it’s just actors playing parts, it’s all a fraud, none of that actually happened.’ I allow myself to get enveloped in the drama. The emotions that it triggers are real emotions and I instinctively find meaning in the film even if I’m not doing that in any intellectual way.

It is part of the human condition to want to find meaning in life. We do not have to be aware that we are continually looking for meaning in life, we just do it like we breathe. Religion has been one of the most successful ways man has come up with to give life meaning. Different religions have evolved to do it in different ways. If a religion is no longer able to provide our lives with meaning, it has to evolve or we will look for something else that does.

Before the 20th century religion had far less competition in the marketplace for giving life meaning. During the 20th century the evolution and spread of mass-spectator sport, politics, film and recorded music have all in their own ways been able to give life meaning. The young man of today who gets so much from listening to the tunes stored on his hard drive or watching his team play may look back with incredulity at those who once took mass weekly ‘believing’ they were consuming the flesh and blood of Christ and ‘believing’ in a whole lot of made-up stories.

In 100 years’ time it is just as likely that the equivalent young man may look back at the man of today and wonder how listening to all those tunes on his hard drive could hold so much meaning for him. How the merely made-up rules of football could have provided his life with so many highs and lows and given his life drama, shape and substance. This need for meaning is no different in the man or woman of today than it was 2,000 years ago or in 100 years’ time. (I was going to say 2,000 years but that may be tempting fate). We have a tendency to assume that what gives our life meaning is a fixed thing, that its power is eternal. Maybe to contemplate that it is not fixed and eternal would start to undermine our belief in it, start to weaken its powers to give our life meaning.

If somebody is into a certain composer or recording artist or type of music, it is because it makes them feel a certain way, triggers certain emotions and if it does this, they believe the music to be of a standard, to be worthwhile, to have value, to be great. The person who listens to a lot of music in this day and age is the same person who would have needed a lot of religion in centuries past. The same belief systems are in place, it’s only the packaging that is different. Of course nobody goes to war over what music they think people should be into. The answer to why people go to war would take another whole book altogether, one that I am not going to start writing any time soon.

I no longer believe in recorded music because it no longer triggers the right emotions in me, so no longer helps give my life meaning. In the same way as you may no longer believe in Christianity because it no longer triggers the right emotions in you and gives your life meaning.

If you are thinking, hang on a minute what’s Drummond going on about here? – religion is all about telling you what you should and should not do, listening to music isn’t. That’s maybe how it seems to you at the moment, but the right and wrong thing is only part of Christianity/Islam/Judaism’s window-dressing, a way to entice you in and hold you once you are there. The main deal is what lies beneath our need to give meaning to the mystery of life.

As for Marx and his quote ‘Religion is an opiate of the masses,’ if Marx was alive today, I think he would exchange the word religion for music, sport, film or the internet. That said, whether religion or music is the opiate of the masses, Marx’s understanding of what religion was for was rather shallow and one-dimensional.