Running With The Devil

The other day I was driving home from University, and when I pulled onto the motorway, I saw some enormous words on the back window of the vehicle in front of me in the other lane. The words were "JESUS LOVES YOU", I chuckled to myself at how silly I find that sentence and then stopped thinking about it. No more than 10 seconds later, a new song started playing on the radio, lo and behold it was Van Halen's 'Running With The Devil'. Now as you can imagine, I was quite pleased at the situation I found myself in. Driving alongside a vehicle with "JESUS LOVES YOU" on the back while I'm listening to 'Running With The Devil'. I couldn't resist head-banging, pulling the metal (devil) horns and poking my tongue out à la Gene Simmons at the people in the Jesus car.

Best coincidence ever.

Creationists and Strauss

I was sent a link about a week ago now to a creationist video entitled "Creation is a Scientific Fact". I am led to believe that this is just the first in a series of videos, but my point is not to de-construct their reasoning of why they believe Creation is a Scientific fact, but I would like to simply point out something which I found rather ironic and amusing.


In the opening screen of the video they play the words "In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.. etc. etc. etc." along with some images of stars exploding and such. To dramatise their opening credits they used a famous segment of a piece of music by Richard Strauss called 'Also sprach Zarathustra' (English: Thus Spoke Zarathustra). For those not familiar with the piece, or with Strauss' work in general, you would almost certainly recognise it as the music from the opening scene of the Stanley Kubrick film '2001: A Space Odyssey'. A film that champions the advancement of science, acknowledging the evolution of human beings. If that wasn't irony enough, Strauss' piece was directly inspired by Nietzsche's novel by the same name. Nietzsche's novel is written in the style of some Biblical texts, but presents ideas which are explicitly opposed to the Christian belief system, god and idea of morality.


Who knows, perhaps they planned to use the music because of its familiarity within the realm of science, but I thought it was noteworthy to point out that they are using a piece of music made famous by a film that promoted a worldview that is diametrically opposed to their position, that was written by a composer who was inspired by perhaps the foremost anti-Christian philosopher in history. Even if they intended it to be this way, it sure looks like a failure to me.

Here's a link to the creationist video.


For those who don't want to watch the creationist video, but just want to hear the epic introduction to Also sprach Zarathustra here is the famous performance of it that was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Music Therapy

I'm taking this paper at university called 'Music Now: Understanding Music Through the Lens of the 20th-21st Centuries' most of the subject matter consists of articles from Socialist or Communist magazines, but the other day we had a guest lecture talking about music 'therapy'.

From Wikipedia
"."Music therapy is an interpersonal process in which the therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their health."

The lecturer played various video clips from some 'therapy' sessions, ranging from absurd to offensive to plain boring. One clip was a video of a therapist wailing and screeching at a baby, one of a therapist talking baby talk to a different baby, one of some disabled children banging on drums and one of some criminals playing on kiddy instruments you see, they had been sentenced to music therapy rather than prison.

I'll separate my rant on music therapy into two categories: the Bullshit and the Basic.

The Bullshit:
Music therapists, like other 'alternative medicines' and herbalists claim miraculous things from their so called therapy, from healing to cessation of pain to being an integral part of the cure for cancer (no jokes, the lecturer actually claimed this). When these quacks manage to convince people of their miracles they are potentially endangering lives by leading them away from modern medicine which actually can stop pain, aid the body in healing and we are constantly researching cancer cures. A website I've found quite interesting and helpful in separating the quacks from the real medicine is Quackwatch. As well as their potential for harm, their claims are not proven and some are outright false.

The Basic:
Some of the supposed benefits of music therapy are so ridiculously basic and fundamental to human existence that it's quite ridiculous to think that these people trained for something so simple. Take for example the video of the therapist screeching at the baby, they teach that music stimulates the babies brain and they attach this overinflated sense of profundity to it, when in reality, basic human interaction that engages the senses of a child is just that, BASIC. The fact that we allow these wish-washy quacks to touch our babies and screech at them is sickening, when our parents should be the ones engaging in human interaction, not some stranger.