I really see this as a rejection of religion (or at least Christianity), but an assertion that being an atheist doesn't mean you're amoral. He declares himself an unbeliever in the first verse "Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name / How come one man got so much fame? / To any me [I don't think it's "to enemy", that doesn't make much sense), it's pointless to anybody / That doesn't have faith / Give me the cloth and I'll wipe my face"
Then later on he talks about the house in the clouds and God and all his dead friends - it sounds to me like he's ridiculing the whole notion of an afterlife! Even the line "So you can burn me" seems like a provocation, kind of like "OK, so I'm a heretic but what are you going to do? Burn me at the stake?"
But the rest of the song is about how you shouldn't need religion, or a rulebook handed down by some supposedly perfect source to tell you how to act. We're all responsible for our own actions - we should understand that what we each do has an effect on everyone else and we should take ownership for our own actions, not justify them in the name of some mystical greater plan.
I really see this as a rejection of religion (or at least Christianity), but an assertion that being an atheist doesn't mean you're amoral. He declares himself an unbeliever in the first verse "Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name / How come one man got so much fame? / To any me [I don't think it's "to enemy", that doesn't make much sense), it's pointless to anybody / That doesn't have faith / Give me the cloth and I'll wipe my face"
Then later on he talks about the house in the clouds and God and all his dead friends - it sounds to me like he's ridiculing the whole notion of an afterlife! Even the line "So you can burn me" seems like a provocation, kind of like "OK, so I'm a heretic but what are you going to do? Burn me at the stake?"
But the rest of the song is about how you shouldn't need religion, or a rulebook handed down by some supposedly perfect source to tell you how to act. We're all responsible for our own actions - we should understand that what we each do has an effect on everyone else and we should take ownership for our own actions, not justify them in the name of some mystical greater plan.