Can Christians Create Quality Music?

[istaros]

Misanthropic is at the heart of Christianity in that at its core, it rebukes man and life itself. Revelation is seething with misanthropy.

The problem with Christianity is that it was not tied to a culture, and its progenitors were ignorant of its origins, named borrowings from Sumerian, Phoenician, Hindu and Greek thought.

It's a continuation of the Indo-European religions, just misunderstood. The crowd turned it into dualism; it was more like a primitive pantheism, a pattern pantheism perhaps, in which total submission to God was the goal.

And if God is nature and all that's around you...?

It's submission to God as much to fight and slaughter enemies as it is to garden.

The bias of morons without a cultural anchor misdirected Christianity. To pagans, originally, it was sensible because they did not assume God as a dualistic personality, but an organic mythic-imaginative symbol like Zeus or Thor.

I don't know... New Testament God seems pretty dualistic throughout. Zoroastrianism with extras. Old Testament God, on the other hand, I can see what you mean - but is that really Christian?

[Nimbostratus]

I don’t like the “New Testament”—you will already have guessed as much. It almost disturbs me that I stand alone in my taste with respect to this most highly regarded and most overvalued written work (the taste of two thousand years is against me). But how can I help it! “Here I stand. I can do no other”*—I have the courage of my own bad taste. The Old Testament—now, that’s something totally different: all honour to the Old Testament! In that I find great men, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest of all elements on earth, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; even more—I find a people. In the New Testament, by contrast, I find nothing but small sectarian households, nothing but spiritual rococo, nothing but ornament, twisty little corners, oddities, nothing but conventional air, not to mention an occasional breeze of bucolic sweet sentimentality[...]

Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals. Third Essay: 22

Regarding metal music, it would be great to hear something truly inspired in Al-Qahhār (The All Compelling Subduer) or Elohim Tzevaot (God of Armies).

[mandrake]

(nice Nietzsche quote, Octuple.)

Most Christian bands are a failure, especially contemporary acts. But many early composers (not many romantic era that I know of) are open Christians and often created music for their religion. Can they be imaginative geniuses? What are some composers that were devout Christians or religious in general?

"genius" - isn't that essentialy exceptional? and if it is than esspecialy in a christian world geniuses would be living proof of anti-christianity. (Think Nietzsche, anti-life christianity etc)

[Conservationist]

It's hard to separate dualistic from non-dualistic thought because of the linguistic issues involved. Did someone say the other world or the other dimension? Often languages don't separate those terms (for example, Schopenhauer's "the world" to mean ultimate physical reality in the cosmos).