Does God love all kinds of music because He invented it all?

[Bert Perry]

RajeshG wrote:

Alrighty then, Rajesh, your version of a “categorical divine prohibition” says that a little bit is OK, but you get to draw the line exactly where. Somehow I’m reminded of the analogy where someone asks their children whether they’d like “just a little bit” of dog waste in their brownies.

For my part, I think it’s important that we understand pagan customs simply because it’s a bit of how we can understand those of Israel and our own. It’s important to know that pagan altars were often the exact same dimensions as the altar to God in Jerusalem. It’s important to understand the significance of groves, Asherah poles, Oral Torah, gnosticism, Arianism, and the like. And if many of us don’t understand these false religions well, good luck showing people the error of their ways and why it’s significant.

And regarding Simmons, OK, not all, but most modern music, yes, you did. Seriously, quibbling over all vs. most? And again, of course you get to be the one to draw the line….

Wrong. Being given brief information warning about evil people and evil practices but not going into details about them and forbidding people to inquire further about them is divine wisdom. If you do not like it, you are the one who has the problem.

Precisely where is this “categorical prohibition”, Rajesh? I think I’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that learning about the practices of the pagans can not be seen as categorically prohibited for the simple reason that Scripture itself teaches us about a lot the practices of the pagans, and going further, every study Bible I’ve ever seen contains further details of the practices of the pagans so that modern readers can understand why Israel and the church were responding as they did. Was, then, John MacArthur in sin for putting this kind of details in the study Bibles he’s edited?

Going further, every language reference I’ve ever seen contains references to other languages as a hint to the Hebrew , Aramaic, and Greek word definitions—and you cannot do that without carefully analyzing the pagan literature. So are Brown, Driver, and Briggs, along with the Kittels and those who wrote for them, in sin for doing serious linguistic work? The men and women who create language references cut their teeth on the works of pagans. More or less, what you propose is to take most of the tools out of the toolbox for serious exegesis.

Which, I guess, explains your great love for guilt by association and other logical fallacies. Lacking the skills to approach the text faithfully, you’ve got to grab for something.

[Bert Perry]

RajeshG wrote:

Kevin Miller wrote:

Quote:
Moreover, Scripture clearly distinguishes between idolatry and the occult. When people engage in occult practices that they explicitly say are designed to put them into direct contact with demons and have the demons direct or control them and at times even possess them, any such instrumental music that they use in those demonic practices is categorically off-limits to all righteous people because it is demonic music.

So how does the use of a particular piece of music make that music demonic? Is the music causing demon control or possession? This is where I think you are making your leaps of logic. Contacting demons is sinful. The Bible doesn’t say that what you wear while contacting demons becomes sinful or demonic, The Bible doesn’t say that what you eat while contacting demons becomes sinful or demonic. The Bible doesn’t say that what you listen to while contacting demons becomes sinful or demonic.

It is not necessary or even necessarily possible to answer the types of questions that you ask here. It is enough to know that something is made by evil humans involved in evil occult activities. All such things must be rejected as demonic unless it can be proven that they are not.

Scripture provides an excellent passage that shows what believers are to do with evil things of the occult that practitioners of the occult have made for their evil practices:

Acts 19:19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.

When they were saved, these new believers in Ephesus instinctively knew that they must destroy the occult books that they used in their occult practices prior to their having been saved.

The physical materials of these books were incredibly valuable from a monetary standpoint and could have been sold for a vast amount of money (if the equivalent of those books would have been burned in 2011, they would have been worth almost $6,000,000). The new believers, however, destroyed those books.

God has provided this passage for our instruction and profit. We do not have to explain how the evil contents and prior uses of these books “tainted” the (supposedly intrinsically good) combinations of physical materials that they were written on—it is enough that God has revealed to us that such occult books were categorically rejected by His people, including the combinations of physical materials of those occult books.

OK, so since the Bible autographs were written on the same kind of parchment and papyrus used by the magicians, and moreover using the same kind of ink, then by your “logic”, Rajesh, it is sin to read the Bible. I also must state that I have in my possession two beautiful, leather-bound volumes of the Berlenburger Bibel (the Torah and the books of history from the OT) that are made of the same materials as books of magic, and which are printed using the same kinds of ink that were used for books of alchemy and magic in the same time period. Those horrible people at Berlenburg even used many of the same fonts!

Moreover, I have it on good authority that one can even today purchase books on magic printed on the very same kinds of acid free paper, and with the very same kinds of soybean oil ink, which are used for printing Bibles today.

Again, by your logic, Rajesh. Don’t you think it’s long past time to stop this farce? To give up your guilt by association logical and rhetorical nightmare?

[Bert Perry]

Larry, the hypothesis that Rajesh offers up is that any tenuous connection to paganism or “the occult” makes that very genre of music an unclean thing that we cannot touch. Ode to Joy is originally a pantheistic (yes, occult) poem by Schiller and put to music by Beethoven, and “Be Still My Soul” is Sibelius’ musical adaptation of the Finnish national epic, which is also part pagan.

So if we’re going to be doing guilt by association fallacies, that’s where I’d recommend Rajesh start to prove he really means business. See here. Otherwise, he’s just proven that he’s not about any coherent theological principle, but rather just about using any club to beat on the rock & roll music he abhors.

Or, as Ron’s wife noted, it’s cultish behavior.

[Bert Perry]

It’s rather puzzling to me as well how someone claiming multiple degrees in Bible, as does Rajesh, would ignore the obvious context of Deuteronomy 12:29-31, which makes clear that what is prohibited is not knowledge itself, but rather knowledge with the intent of following a pagan example. The law of context is, after all, a basic rule of exegesis, and one would at least hope that someone with multiple Bible degrees would have learned and absorbed this principle.

It is even stranger to me to contemplate the fact that someone with multiple Bible degrees—and ample reason to learn these things—would be unaware that historians and archeologists have found that there are a very limited number of forms of books out there, and that there is not, in fact, any huge difference in how books are put together. Any significant ancient manuscript goes under the microscope, mass spectrometer, and the like to figure out its composition, approximate age, and the like. As any modern bookbinder would tell you, you’re dealing with a limited number of types of “paper”, cellulose and protein/skin based, you’ve got a limited number of ways to bind it together, and you’ve got a limited number of types of ink that you can use.

Never mind that if you’ve got a case—which is exactly what Rajesh argues—where you’re claiming a different method, but you don’t know what that is, how exactly is one to “avoid” that, and what exactly is the implication for other areas like music?

It really all comes down at the end to the fallacy of guilt by association, and that’s another point of puzzlement for me. Again, all those degrees, and no comprehension of basic informal logic?

[Bert Perry]

Rajesh,the guilt by association fallacy is called a “law of informal logic”, not a mantra. You hear about it often because you use genetic fallacies like this a lot—and that by necessity, since Scripture really doesn’t tell us anything about which musical forms might be inappropriate, saying nothing about prohibited bass lines, rhythms, and the like.

Hence you are stuck trying to connect modern music, however tenuously, to the abominations of those dancing around the golden calf, to Gene Simmons’ throwaway lines on American Idol (ahem, what’s a nice boy like you doing watching that?), and the like.

The problem is that it’s false reasoning. If we take it to its limits, we would say that because pagan altars were five cubits square, and many of them were, that therefore the altar in the Tabernacle was an abomination—though that size of altar was precisely what God had commanded. Logically and exegetically, you were at a dead end a long time ago, and you’re proceeding to go off the cliff.

It’s fun to watch your blatant hypocrisy as well—you tell us that it’s wrong to learn about the habits of the pagans, and then you proceed to tell us that you know a lot about the occult habits of rock & roll stars. Ahem. You also are blatantly hypocritical when you ignore the fact that, contrary to your hypothesis, Scripture itself describes many of these practices.

Again, applying the principle of context, the fact that Scripture mentions these things means that your interpretation of the passages is wrong. This is basic, something that ought to be known and acted on by anyone who’s taken any introductory exegesis course.

Regarding your notion that believers ought to need to “prove from Scripture” that their choices in music are acceptable, I’m going to cordially refuse your demand to ask “mother may I” to you. Again, the default position for believers is not being bound to legalism, but liberty unless it is proven that there is something sinful in play.

[Kevin Miller]

RajeshG wrote:

Exodus 32 and other passages establish that there is such a thing as demonic music that God rejects.

This is where you are making your leaps of logic again. Please show me WHERE in Exodus 32 God rejects the music. Please show me the verse that specifically establishes the music itself as demonic. You’re the one making the dogmatic assertion here, so you should have to prove it Biblically. Especially since you use this claim as the basis for your next point - “Because Scripture teaches us that there is instrumental music that God rejects, …”

I just DON’T see you as having adequately supported that point. In my opinion, your main support has been your claim that other people must prove you wrong. That’s NOT support for a position. Using your logic, you could claim anything to be evil and then refuse to show Scriptural support. You said “Those of us who reject that wicked music do not have to prove that it is evil—you have to prove that it is acceptable to God.” Switch out the words “that wicked music” for “anything” and you have the statement “Those of us who reject anything do not have to prove that it is evil—you have to prove that it is acceptable to God.” Is that really the logic you would use in regards to any other subject in this life?

You seem to have failed to notice that I said “Exodus 32 and other passages establish …” I am not going to discuss all that material again.
Moreover, Acts 19:19 in principle establishes the same basic point because it proves that people who had been involved in demonic activities and had made combination/composite products (books) that they used for those activities destroyed those products once they became believers. They did not “redeem” them.
The physical materials, including whatever ink(s) was/were used to write the contents of the books, were all substances that originally at some level were made by God yet the combination/composite final products (the books) themselves (and not just their contents and previous uses) were categorically rejected by godly people.

If you want to claim that godly believers should not do the same with the demonic music of occultists, you have the burden of proving that is true biblically.

[Jim]

Bert Perry wrote:

OK, if we want to talk about some truly nasty things that are going to tend to discredit the cause of Christ, I’d like to talk about this. It’s Rajesh’s most recent post on his personal blog, and let’s take a look at the links he provides.

First, he links to a post that talks about “that long snake moan”, a post that argues that the roots of rock & roll are in voodoo. Now, let’s imagine you read that as a black man, one who knows that the roots of rock & roll go through spirituals, black Gospel, jazz, and blues. So what’s being implicitly argued here is that black gospel and spirituals—the music which carried African-Americans of faith through the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow—is functionally equivalent to voodoo.

I’d call that bigotry.

He links to another post linking drums and dancing with the occult arts, arguing from a Grateful Dead drummer (whose playing can really only be described as rather mellow) that because some people made drums from skulls, that all drums are out of line. Keep in mind here, this is something that Rajesh has endorsed.

Reality in music is that pretty much every culture has used percussive instruments, and most cultures have some forms of dancing and danceable music, so to single out African culture as somehow uniquely pagan really hearkens back to the roots of Frank Garlock’s work—the antebellum and Jim Crow era smear of African-American music with language like “voodoo” and “jungle beat”. Garlock santizes it a bit so the racism isn’t as overt as it used to be, but that’s really the roots of the argument.

Rajesh, this kind of nonsense is NOT acceptable.

He does a blog post and then starts a thread on S/I to troll for clicks

[Bert Perry]

Rajesh, you certainly did link to those posts, and those links still worked as of noon (eastern) today.

Here it is. If you try to deny it, I took a screen shot, too.

I’m going to suggest that you need to make an apology for that post of yours, and you need to seriously consider the fact that the Garlockian thesis you champion does indeed have its roots in efforts to assault black culture during the Jim Crow era. It’s been somewhat sanitized for public consumption today, but it still boils down to “white peoples’ music prior to Elvis Presley is fine, along with music in our subculture, but everybody else’s, not so much.”

It’s not Biblical, and it’s not acceptable.

As a result of someone else’s directing attention in this thread to a post on my blog that otherwise had gotten very little previous attention, I may now already have had 28 additional views of that post just today that I very likely would not have ever gotten had that link not been placed in a comment here on SI.

God has a way of turning upside down the ways and efforts of people who continually misrepresent what others say.

[Kevin Miller]

Quote:Moreover, taking tea leaves that God actually created and using them to make a beverage that people drink in a non-worship context is very different from taking instrumental music that evil humans have made and offering it to God in worship.

But I wasn’t talking about tea as a beverage in a non-worship context. I was talking about tea teaves being used as an aid in receiving messages from the spirit world. Tasseography is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds or wine sediments. Shouldn’t we abstain from drinking tea if such a practice is used during a divination session? Or is it okay to use something that, though wicked people may use it in wicked ways, we ourselves have no intention of using it in that wicked way?

[Kevin Miller]

Quote:Moreover, Acts 19:19 in principle establishes the same basic point because it proves that people who had been involved in demonic activities and had made combination/composite products (books) that they used for those activities destroyed those products once they became believers. They did not “redeem” them.

The physical materials, including whatever ink(s) was/were used to write the contents of the books, were all substances that originally at some level were made by God yet the combination/composite final products (the books) themselves (and not just their contents and previous uses) were categorically rejected by godly people.

But weren’t the books destroyed because of their specific content? The words written within those books were specific occultic statements, just as lyrics would be within a song. The books contained specific written messages that were clearly understood as occultic. That’s an entirely different situation from instrumental music.

[Bert Perry]

I was quoting those articles, Rajesh. So I was being “deceitful” in the same way that your mirror might be seen as “deceitful” if you don’t like what you see when you shave.

And like it or not, the musical traits to which guys like you, your source, Frank Garlock, and Bill Gothard object all have roots in spirituals and black Gospel. Rock & roll is derived significantly from blues and jazz, which are in turn derived from spirituals and Black Gospel, which are in turn derived from (among other things) the native music of peoples in Africa. Insult one, you’ve more or less insulted them all.

[Bert Perry]

OK, if we want to talk about some truly nasty things that are going to tend to discredit the cause of Christ, I’d like to talk about this. It’s Rajesh’s most recent post on his personal blog, and let’s take a look at the links he provides… .

He links to another post linking drums and dancing with the occult arts, arguing from a Grateful Dead drummer (whose playing can really only be described as rather mellow) that because some people made drums from skulls, that all drums are out of line. Keep in mind here, this is something that Rajesh has endorsed.

Reality in music is that pretty much every culture has used percussive instruments, and most cultures have some forms of dancing and danceable music, so to single out African culture as somehow uniquely pagan really hearkens back to the roots of Frank Garlock’s work—the antebellum and Jim Crow era smear of African-American music with language like “voodoo” and “jungle beat”. Garlock santizes it a bit so the racism isn’t as overt as it used to be, but that’s really the roots of the argument.

Rajesh, this kind of nonsense is NOT acceptable.

He links to another post linking drums and dancing with the occult arts, arguing from a Grateful Dead drummer (whose playing can really only be described as rather mellow) that because some people made drums from skulls, that all drums are out of line. Keep in mind here, this is something that Rajesh has endorsed.

The shocking and appalling dishonesty of what Bert Perry says here is truly disturbing. I challenge any objective reader on SI to read that 2nd post and provide anywhere in the post where the writer of the post argues “that all drums are out of line.” This is a bald-faced lie that Bert Perry has set forth.
I have never made or endorsed any statements anywhere to the effect “that all drums are out of line.” Had the writer of that post that I linked to on my blog made any such statement in his post, I would have called him out for saying something that is patently false. I would never endorse such a sentiment, regardless of who might express it.
2. Furthermore, Bert Perry asserts that the post somehow does the following: “Reality in music is that pretty much every culture has used percussive instruments, and most cultures have some forms of dancing and danceable music, so to single out African culture as somehow uniquely pagan …”
Any objective reader of that post can plainly see that the writer does not do any such thing. In fact, the writer talks about the occult practices of the following:

1. North American occultists
2. Japanese occultists
3. (East) Indian occultists
4. Venezuelan occultists
5. Greek occultists
6. West African occultists
Plainly, this post therefore does not single out the culture of any group as “uniquely pagan.” That false assertion about the post is a deceitful misrepresentation of the post and of me by asserting that I endorsed a post that supposedly did that.
Also, the vast majority of the post is excerpts directly from Mickey Hart’s book on drumming. The post lays out clearly just how knowledgeable Hart is about occult drumming from many parts of the world.
Early in the post, Brennan relates:

Mickey Hart, born in 1943, came of age in the Sixties and embraced them with all the vigor and enthusiasm of youth. He remained with the band for the totality of its existence. In 1994 he and the rest of the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
As the decades passed Mickey grew to become a world class drummer. Over time, as he traveled around the world playing with the band, he began to collect drums. His drum collection gradually developed into first a fascination and then a full blown obsession with the history of percussion in ancient cultures all around the globe.
In 1998 he published the results of his more than three decades of research as Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion. It is a painstakingly researched synchronization of the best of Western Civilization’s doctorate level research and the myths and legends of ancient cultures. The Library Journal in a recommended review of it said in part, “His spell-binding drumming stories come from his studies and travels and his consultation with anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and students of mythology, Joseph Campbell among them.”
Mickey Hart owns more drums than any man in the world. He has played them in private and in public for tens of thousands of hours. He spent decades collating the legends, myths, and stories surrounding their use for millennia. No man on Earth knows more about drumming than Mickey. It would well behoove us to pay attention to what he says.

Here is how the post ends:

So there it is – a summation of the book that is sitting on my desk that changed my life. What I had long suspected about rock music and its present connection to an ancient demonism had been proven in excruciating detail. And not by some wild eyed ignorant Baptist preacher, but by the rock drummer of our age who knows more about drumming than any other man on the planet. I will leave you with one last quote from Mickey Hart. I urge you to let it soak in for a while…
None of my friends talked about shamans, and yet that’s what we were all trying to become, without knowing it.

Yet Bert Perry thinks that he is the authority who can objectively dismiss all that material from one of the world’s leading experts on drumming by misrepresenting it as he has done.
3. Bert Perry has deceitfully misrepresented me and Tom Brennan through what he has written here on SI. There really should be some mechanism through the moderators of SI to hold members of SI who engage in such deceit accountable. How many times is Bert Perry going to be allowed to lie about me and not be dealt with?

[Bert Perry]

You endorse the post here.

The part about the skulls is midway down here. To quote:

-To all those who feel the power of the drum and don’t know why.

-The most distinctive damarus are made from human skulls.

-“I hope you have been most careful, Mickey Hart. This is a drum of great, great power. It wakes the dead you know.”

-It takes commitment and apprenticeship to learn how to find a drum’s sweet spot. But once you do, the potential arises for contacting the drum’s second voice – one I have come to think of as the spirit side of the drum. Exploring the spirit side of the drum has been the major adventure of my adulthood, if not my whole life.

You endorsed it, buddy. Own up to it.

He links to another post linking drums and dancing with the occult arts, arguing from a Grateful Dead drummer (whose playing can really only be described as rather mellow) that because some people made drums from skulls, that all drums are out of line. Keep in mind here, this is something that Rajesh has endorsed.

Where does the post say that “all drums are out of line”? Where have I ever said that? Prove what you claim.

[Kevin Miller]

Quote:If you want to claim that godly believers should not do the same with the demonic music of occultists, you have the burden of proving that is true biblically.

Of course, you would first need to prove that demonic instrumental music exists, which I know you’ll refuse to do. Oh, I imagine you could go back to verses about the devil being a musical entity, but the Bible doesn’t explain what specific music may or may not have been played by the devil, so we can’t very well abstain from music that we have no information about.

[Kevin Miller]

Quote:Have practitioners of the occult actually said that their garments, food, or tea leaves are themselves evil things that they have made specifically to promote evil in the same ways and for the same purposes that many of them have said that their instrumental music has been made for?

According to the Wikipedia article “social effects of rock music, “rock music and fashion have been inextricably linked.” The article goes on to say ” As rock music genres became more segmented, what an artist wore became as important as the music itself in defining the artist’s intent and relationship to the audience.” Here are a few other quotes from the article - “Heavy Metal bands in the 1980s often favoured a strong visual image. For some bands, this consisted of leather or denim jackets and pants, spike/studs and long hair.” “In the early 1990s, the popularity of grunge brought in a punk influenced fashion of its own, including torn jeans, old shoes, flannel shirts, backwards baseball hats, and people grew their hair against the clean-cut image that was popular at the time in heavily commercialized pop music culture.”

So it certainly seems that the clothing of rock musicians is an integral part of the message they are trying to convey. If it is true that demonic influence is present in the music of rock stars, then wouldn’t it also be present in their attire, seeing as how the attire is so closely related to their intent? I still remember the time one of my daughters came home from a week of Bible camp and told me that her counseler had made her stop wearing her baseball cap backwards. Wouldn’t your position logically be that the clothing of rock stars is unacceptable to God?