Tag Archives: john lennon imagine

The Soundtrack of my Life

My life has been lived to a soundtrack. Growing up in an age of ubiquitous car radios, restaurant juke boxes, record players and later stereos, it seems like the popular songs of the day were always playing in the background, over and over. Music affects us emotionally and can evoke strong feelings of all sorts in the listener. In my case it also became a sort of storage mechanism for a lot of those strong feelings.

Forty years later I can hear a pretty mundane pop song like Tommy Rowe’s “Dizzy”, which I heard constantly when I was in my junior high years and I can be overcome with the feelings of being that young teenage boy with a crush on a girl but afraid to tell her or even talk to her. Those sort of emotional memories stay with you and I believe shape you subconsciously.

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Religion is Not the Problem… Patriarchy Is

Conventional wisdom of many on the progressive side of politics and social change is that religion, particularly Christianity, is a key source of our culture’s problems if not evil in general. John Lennon’s classic song “Imagine” conjures a utopian world that would be free of this supposed source of division and strife. Many people more on the conservative side of things do not share that concern about the Christian faith and its practice, but see Islam in that same sort of negative light. My take is that neither (nor religion in general) is a source of hate, war and oppression, actually came into being to promote love and humanistic ideals, but have been manipulated as tools of a much older ideology of domination and “us and them” thinking that some would call “Patriarchy”.

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