They Stood Up For Love

I think that this song is trying to say that love is the greatest power we knew and we should fight for it no matter what.

It's a protest against war, and a tribute to love. Simple as that.

It's about realising that love transcends all other emotions, and once you find true love then you are a better person for it.

To me this has always been about human endeavour, and the fact that people are capable of great things. This song has always encouraged me to be one of the ones who 'stood up for love'.

I think there's more to it than just that; yes, it's a song that suggests love is a creative force but it also touches upon the near insanity we experience when trying to figure out why we're put here:

we spend all of our lives goin' out of our minds looking back to our birth, forward to our demise

&

we made it to the moon but we can't make it home waitin' on a rescue that never comes

Aside from the meaning, check out the radio mix. It's so much better than the album version!

this is a rockn song GO LIVE =D

The phrase "simple as that" doesn't describe any Live song I've ever heard. As katerxdaisy points out, this song is a continuing consideration of the philosophical question of whether there's more to existence than physical reality, a question at the heart of the album The Distance to Here. The description of "naked lovers" recalls the opening of the album, "The Dolphin's Cry."

Ed then transitions through the observation that however we might physically describe reality, there's no denying the power of the intangible, of love, something you can't measure like you can a nerve impulse. Furthermore, it is scientific fact that everything is light (literally true, e = mc^2), existing eternally.

This transcendence transitions to the transcendent nature of Jesus (love personified) himself, appearing in the "masters in everytime, lords in everyplace: those who stood up for love down in spite of the hate."

All this is why he gives his heart and soul to the one, as those others have done before him. Musically this determination to give himself to love/Jesus is contrasted with the directionless despair of what it's like to now know all this, to go out of your mind looking back to your birth and forward to your demise, seeing nothing in your life but a physical lifespan and then a meaningless end.

In that last sentence, it should be "NOT know all this," not "NOW know all this."

Also consider the musical climax of the song, where Ed laments that we made it to the moon but we can't make it home in a raging crescendo (I haven't heard the acoustic but I don't know how well this would work in that version) that suddenly drops away to a peaceful revelation that we already are home if only we surrender to love, i.e. wherever we are (in the broad sense) we can be at peace, if only we can understand how to get through "the distance to here" (the title of the album).