(November 12, 2024 at 9:17 am)syntheticadrenaline Wrote: ...that people compose so much classical music about an imaginary God. Why not write music about the real world? It's beautiful enough.
There's music about nature I admit but I want more. I composed a choral song about a towering oak tree once and I think I also have one about winter and snow. I also have quite a few about birds.
I just sometimes find it a shame that there's no songs about what a gift the eye and optic nerve are or how spectacular it is that flight evolved in so many species - yet we have umpteen songs about God.
Sometimes we atheists treat religion as a set of propositions to be proved or disproved logically. But I don't think that's how most people in history have experienced it.
It's largely about ceremony, ritual, and the expression of beauty and values. In other words, most people's experience of religion is a kind of aesthetic experience, and the art that comes out of it is a part of that. Most or the art that we value -- from China or Japan or India or Europe or anywhere -- is rooted in religion, and there's certainly a reason for that. The creation of objective correlatives for unseen things seems to be a crucial part of civilization.
And I understand why religion is losing its popularity in our own time, but the values that replace it -- quantifiable facts, technology, economic success -- are not going to inspire the same kind of beauty.
I mean, there's a reason that Elon Musk spends his money on machines, while the Medici spent theirs on splendor.
