Joshua Ojeda
The Signal
David Bazan is considered among Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and others to be one of the 100 greatest songwriters alive. This week he played in a Pearland living room where only 30 tickets were sold. I bought one of them.
Bazan’s living room tour is a brilliant idea. Here’s how it works: Bazan announces via Twitter where he will be on what day, and he simply asks for suitable living rooms to play. His manager finishes the booking process and sends Bazan the addresses, who then types them in his GPS and leaves for the road in a 15-passenger van by himself with his guitar, a handful of books, and his records to sell. He does this for more than 100 days out of the year.
I bought my ticket from his website 6 minutes after they went on sale. By the time my check-out was complete, the tickets were sold out. Each living room performance is limited to approximately 30 tickets. The attendee gets to see an artist in an intimate setting and is guaranteed time to hang out with Bazan, all for a $20 ticket. For someone who has followed Bazan for years and had yet to see him play, the experience felt like a fairy tale.
The living room was crowded and dark. Thirty strangers sat in silence drinking beer while trying to hide our smiles. Photography was discouraged, but we couldn’t resist. A number of iPhones were discretely pulled out to capture the memorable evening. As Bazan sang his first song, I mentally scratched the event off my bucket list of things I want to experience before I die.
My girlfriend gave me my first David Bazan CD when I was 16. She gave it to me because it was too sad for her taste. At the time, Bazan played in the band Pedro the Lion. The band made many church boys like myself question our beliefs.
The band was originally rooted in Christian beliefs, making Pedro the Lion an outcast in the Seattle indie music scene. At times, Bazan would even lead worship at churches near Seattle. As time passed, Bazan began to sing about drinking, cigarettes, religious doubts, and even used four-letter words that any church boy wouldn’t dare let his pastor hear.
These songs drew a line in the sand separating Bazan from many of his loyal religious fans. For me, Bazan’s music delivered me from a legalistic path many professed Christians find themselves most comfortable.
After years of studying and teaching the Bible, I found myself in the same season of doubt Bazan openly sang of in his records. Unlike Bazan, I hid my doubts from even my closest friends. His records became the soundtrack for my quest for truth, not in religious rules, but something much deeper.
I realized the more Bazan sang about his doubts, the harder it was to find his music. Christian stores quit selling his records. Christian Festivals no longer invited him on their stages. When I was in high school I heard he played at a bar in Houston, but few people went. Had I been old enough to enter the bar, I would have gone.
ABC News recently reported on David Bazan’s search for religious truth. In the story, he told the journalist that he no longer considers himself a Christian and heavily doubts the existence of a God.
His most recent records are dark-toned. The singer seems to be caught in a season of bitterness. In many of the songs, Bazan directly questions God on His fairness. In other songs, he sings that he does not believe in God. After several years and a number of albums, Bazan is still as doubtful as ever.
As I watched Bazan sing of his doubts, I felt sad for his continuous burden of disbelief. My seasons of doubt pushed me closer to God rather than pulled me away. It left me with an appreciation of freedom rather than the fear of being caught with a beer, a cigarette, or even an occasional four-letter word on my lips. For me, doubt strengthened my relationship with God.
I find it interesting how quickly we look to artists for direction and how tightly we cling to their messages. For some, the living room was a chapel, and they were listening to a prophet. For me, it was entertainment.
At the end of the night, Bazan stood by the door shaking hands like a pastor after a Sunday sermon, thanking everyone for coming.
While listening to his music on the way home, I thanked God for David Bazan.
I don’t think that the author of this story was trying to say that athiests are, as a whole, caught in the rut of thinking this world is a dark, joyless place. However, if you listen to Bazan’s music, it is obvious that he himself views the world in this capacity to some extent because that is what he writes about.
Bazan sings of his lover cheating on him, Christians being fake (which isn’t always untrue), and a lot of other inner struggles he has dealt with. But I doubt that he walks around with a cloud over his head because he doesn’t believe in God. Moreover, I doubt the author of this story thinks that either. Afterall, they are both wearing very huge, genuine smiles in that picture, which leads me to believe they were happy to put aside their differences and enjoy each other’s company.
Not all Christians believe that athiests are horrible depressed people that can’t enjoy the world. In fact, most don’t. You may believe he is wrong about atheists, but I would also argue that you are wrong about Christians as well.
You seem to have misconceptions about atheists.We don’t think that the world is an empty, meaningless place, even though we don’t think a god designed it. We think the world is a fascinating, wonderful, interesting place, and we enjoy living in it. Now, you may think that it’s impossible to “really” enjoy this world without believing of God as the designer. We don’t feel that way.
Suppose you are walking in a beautiful garden with a friend, and your friend says, “I heard there are fairies living in this garden!” You tell your friend that you don’t see any fairies, and you don’t see any particular reason to believe that these fairies are there. You are just enjoying the garden. But your friend insists: “How can you enjoy this place if you don’t believe in fairies?”
Unless you’re a little kid, you would probably feel that your friend missed the point. Here you are, enjoying a nice day and great scenery, and your friend is trying to convince you to stop enjoying the garden the way it really is. He is telling you that you have to make something up, which isn’t real as far as you can see, or else you don’t have as much of an appreciation of the garden as he does.
In fact it is probably the other way around. It’s a fine thing to have an imagination, but it seems like your friend is cheapening the experience, because he can’t just enjoy something beautiful for its own sake.
The world has a lot of things to enjoy in it. Food, music, a well-told story, romance, sex, physical activity, the outdoors, the feeling of solving a difficult puzzle… just to name a few. These are things that most people enjoy on a day-to-day basis. And we don’t appreciate the world around us any less for not thinking that those things come from God.
Also, it’s not like there are no mysterious unknowns or “greater forces” right here in the physical universe. Most likely we will never know everything there is to know about this vast universe or our past. Who really understands quantum mechanics? Are there parallel universes out there? Are they accessible to us? Is time travel possible? Can we find a better way to generate our own energy before our sun burns out billions of years from now? These are all very big mysteries. One of life’s great pleasures is applying your mind to solving hard questions like these. Learning is fun. Knowledge is fun. So it seems likely that we will never run out of things to enjoy in that sense.
You may have plenty of good reasons for believing in God, but if you think it’s bad to be an atheist because atheists lead a cold, barren, loveless, uninteresting life, you are really kidding yourself.