Dear God

whoa.

some people are getting a little too intense for my tastes, by do what you must, i suppose. at risk of suffering through some relatively stale and boring atheist responses, I'm going to try to work from the song outward, rather than bring my own views in and see how well they fit the lyrics.

there's a fair amount of which-came-first, chicken-egg stuff in these lyrics, and i think that's important and helpful in developing an overall message in the tune. the prime example is "Dear god..." in itself. If god existed, the speaker wouldn't need to write this letter in the first place, but he feels the need to write a letter in the hope of getting a response as confirmation that he/she can exist. I'll admit it may take a little bit of acrobatics as far as considering the order of the lines goes, but i find it kind of fun and interesting to examine the cause and effect throughout the entire piece:

reducing beer prices -goes to- people are starving... but going backwards there, why would anyone be worried about buying drinks when they need food to survive (and yes, for this one i imagine it would seem more of the poet thing to do to buy the booze, but consider mothers/fathers who need to provide for their children. they'd go food first) reducing the world's sorrow -goes to- people are fighting each other... if the fighting ceased, so could the tears things the speaker wonders if god made: 1.) disease (which effects man directly) 2.) I'm going with a blue diamond (as this is indirectly perceived by man's senses) 3.) mankind these three queries seem to go from small to large (man's touch/feel, man's perception of the world, man's history/existence in the world), when it seems the speaker wouldn't be concerned with such a concept as 'what is blue?' when his very next question is "Did all that weird stuff that they wrote about you and the devil really happen? or am i reading the wrong book/asking the wrong guy?" it's the word of god -goes to- and it was written by man... from here the speaker is hoping that god can concede that some of those dead tongue translations have really lost something after thousands of years or rewrites and added color pictures to really draw the crowds in. from here we go to that amazing finish that i don't really want to comment too much on, mainly because of how it always manages to hit me pretty hard. on pretty much every other listen it'll get a tear or two to slowly drift down my cheek. that's a sign of a pretty awesome song, if you ask me. and then the start and finish of the song, one last time: Dear God -to- If there's on thing I don't believe in, it's you -to- Dear God -to- ..???..

sorry if this seems to long, but if you're reading this, i say thanks and just bring up one final point that a lot of other posts brought up in my mind. I'm not one to judge anyone else by what they believe, and i guess that has a lot to do with just how much gray i see in the world every day. seriously, just look a split-second longer and the blacks soften and the whites dim a bit. keep that in mind for each and every line of this tune. they're all at a different hue. there a quite a few religions on this rock, and i imagine the speaker addressing a different being each time he uses the word "god". this division of whatever preceded us into 30 different flavors to mix as well as melt could be his biggest problem. you can write a letter to anyone you'd like. the big step is sending the letter out, which is hard enough as it is, but even more so when you don't have their mailing address...