Bad Religion songs that seem to speak about religion in blasphemous ways such as this one usually belie their true meaning .. NOT religion-bashing per se but conformity-bashing.
Consider "American Jesus" which if you take it at face value, the song blames Jesus for creating the KKK, nuclear bombs etc. The give-away lyric is "and I'm fearful that he's inside me". Bad Religion is comprised of a lapsed Catholic (Brett Gurewitz, I think) and several agnostic atheists, so it wouldn't make sense for Jesus to be inside them in a psychic/spiritual sense, right?
Same thing goes here. This song calls itself "god song" but it isn't about God. It's about government. Reference the song on Suffer "Voice of God Is Government".
Consider that the song references an English poem that references a popular superstition that Jesus visited England and bestowed his authority on the British monarchy. Where did America get its form of government? --- from Britain.
Here's the giveaway lyric: "anthropocentric god" - a god who places man at the center of its universe. Anthropocentric doesn't mean human-created, but human-centered. This god isn't Yahweh (hebrew Bible) or Jesus (new testament). Both of them may well have been created by man, but they certainly came up with a lot of rules that aren't well accommodating of human needs and realities, so neither Yahweh nor Jesus is an anthropocentric god.
In the second to last lyric, replace "religion" with "nationalism" or "patriotism" and you start to get the bigger picture.
In the final lyric, governement is described as a god and "austere" (stern, plain, forebidding) and an impasse to the future evolution of mankind.
Bad Religion songs that seem to speak about religion in blasphemous ways such as this one usually belie their true meaning .. NOT religion-bashing per se but conformity-bashing.
Consider "American Jesus" which if you take it at face value, the song blames Jesus for creating the KKK, nuclear bombs etc. The give-away lyric is "and I'm fearful that he's inside me". Bad Religion is comprised of a lapsed Catholic (Brett Gurewitz, I think) and several agnostic atheists, so it wouldn't make sense for Jesus to be inside them in a psychic/spiritual sense, right?
Same thing goes here. This song calls itself "god song" but it isn't about God. It's about government. Reference the song on Suffer "Voice of God Is Government".
Consider that the song references an English poem that references a popular superstition that Jesus visited England and bestowed his authority on the British monarchy. Where did America get its form of government? --- from Britain.
Here's the giveaway lyric: "anthropocentric god" - a god who places man at the center of its universe. Anthropocentric doesn't mean human-created, but human-centered. This god isn't Yahweh (hebrew Bible) or Jesus (new testament). Both of them may well have been created by man, but they certainly came up with a lot of rules that aren't well accommodating of human needs and realities, so neither Yahweh nor Jesus is an anthropocentric god.
In the second to last lyric, replace "religion" with "nationalism" or "patriotism" and you start to get the bigger picture.
In the final lyric, governement is described as a god and "austere" (stern, plain, forebidding) and an impasse to the future evolution of mankind.