The Flaming Lips And Atheism

The Flaming Lips, psychedelic rock band du jour, are known for their joyful embrace of atheism (see songs such as ‘Do You Realize??’ which jauntily celebrates death as the end of everything, for example). In the July 2006 (issue number 152) edition of Mojo magazine, Wayne Coyne of the band describes briefly where his attitude to religion began:

When I was 12 years olf my mother worked at a thrift store. And she took toys and clothes that no one wanted and she would take them over to the church. People from the neighbourhood would come into the church and they would thank God for these wonderful toys and clothes. My mom would be like, “You saw me bring them, you saw me bring them to the damn church! Don’t thank God! Thank me!” I suppose I’ve inherited that kind of attitude to religion.

The simplest and smallest of things and faith goes. A lack of appreciation for one woman’s acts of kindness and that’s that. Theologically, you could say the neighbourhood people were right to thank God: “all things come from you and of your own do we give you”, etc. It’s the same thing that Miroslav Volf was at pains to affirm in his book Free Of Charge, which I blogged about in Lent (particularly relevant to this discussion is chapter 1).

But does not purity of theological view divorced from love turn orthodoxy into heresy? I recall a theological student who did a placement with me leading a midweek study group on homosexuality. “Of course I gave them the biblical view,” he told me afterwards. I knew what he meant, and I too believe that the followers of Jesus should conduct sexual relationships solely within the lifelong covenant of marriage, which is between a man and a woman. But I still don’t think he gave them the full biblical view if he only talked about the rights and wrongs and didn’t begin from a point of affirming God’s love for all. Isn’t the most fundamental statement about God in the whole of Scripture that ‘God is love’? (That to me is where Calvinism makes its most fundamental error, in beginning from God’s sovereignty.)

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