I get quickly tired of people not related to me lately. I'm a musician, and I really want to make a righteously awesome band, but it's the people. They're all terrible. The most fickle, judgmental, duplicitous, and truly neurotic people are those who proclaim themselves to be artists. I certainly have my eccentricities, but an artist I am not. Artists worship themselves and their work as their god, and they know it's shallow and destined for the rot and stink of death and decay, so that's why they're always compelled to create, even if what they're creating should never have been created at all. They are compelled by the old Freudian death urge, and their "art" means just about as much as random meaningless fornication. I believe in God as my God. So I don't feel compelled to always create, but when I do pick up an instrument and play it's kind of a mysterious accident when some inspired idea appears out of nothing. Normally, a musician would race to a tape deck or other recording equipment and try to get the idea down as soon as it was conceived, but I rarely do record these mysterious events. I feel like, first and foremost, these songs were not my gifts to the world, but rather they were God's gift to me. It's almost as if that's the most effective way to show me that He's still there. I understand that and acknowledge it, but the world probably would care less. At most, they would attribute a thing from God as merely a thing from a man, and they would give a man the glory for a time, but eventually they would move onto the next trivial novelty once they've used up and destroyed that idol person...kind of like what happened to Kurt Cobain. Don't throw pearls before swine, the good book says... because swine consume anything and everything and don't differentiate holy from mundane. Moreover, they might turn and try to eat you, too.
I believe that's why there are not more signs and miracles in the modern day. People would see and hear about them, but for the most part, they would not be more inclined to attribute those miracles to God than they are to attribute crop circles to advanced inter-dimensional lifeforms. I know people think that we're so much more intellectually advanced today and that people in Jesus's day must have been willing to believe in any irrational thing, but I highly doubt this is true. We've always been a culture full of charlatans, thieves, and false prophets. True spiritual experiences, true men of God, they do not appear often, and especially back then in the time of prophets, they would have been extra suspicious of any sort of holy workers. I believe we live in a time where the exact mediums of cultural skepticism have changed, but the level of weariness to believe remains much the same. Perhaps skepticism was even greater back in the times of Jesus because life was so much harsher and bleaker. To believe in a false teacher or a delusion was literally a matter of life and death. Now,we can sit around in our armchairs and fill our heads with delusions because it doesn't necessarily cost us our ability to survive to believe in extraterrestrial saviors or higher vibrational paradigm shifts. We can just sit in front of the computer and watch endless hours of youtube videos where people say whatever they want... and to believe doesn't cost you your life. Back then... beliefs would regularly get people killed, and those willing to die horrible deaths for their beliefs better have been damn sure it was worth it.
So that's what it comes down to, I guess. Am I willing to die for art? No. Art is nothing more than spiritual vomit. Am I willing to suffer and die for God? I can't say for sure until the day comes when that decision might need to be made, but it certainly seems like a better bet than dying for something which is clearly not everlasting or imbued with any transcendental qualities. Why die for something so ultimately insignificant?
