The Widetrack Chronicles: Heretic
Ron here... Zach and I are extremely please to present our newest song, Heretic, to you...
Just wanted to share a few thoughts about the lyrics to this one...
*TRIGGER WARNING: The following message may offend the religiously militant.
When I was young, church on Sunday was mandatory... I was baptized at 11 years old... My indoctrination continued all through my childhood, and well into my teens...
I learned many wonderful life lessons from my religious upbringing, to be sure... But terrified of the consequences of questioning the things I was being taught, I never even considered it...
Still, as I grew and gained more life experience, stark inconsistencies began to penetrate my religious bubble...
I saw the way people who presented themselves as “Godly” would talk to/treat others... More often than not, there was a rhetorical sanctimony I found to be deeply nauseating...
But even more distressing were the ones who actually identified with these “authority figures”...
I could see them relishing in the “fire and brimstone” no-mercy approach... They were yearning to find meaning in their suffering, and these “leaders of faith” provided them the scapegoat that others should suffer even worse once “Judgment Day” arrived...
I soon began to loathe this hypocrisy; to the point where the things I’d been taught began breaking down on the most fundamental levels...
I always saw Jesus as a compassionate figure; the ideal embodiment of unconditional love...
This was clearly not that...
Once I became aware of these moral inconsistencies and began demanding evidence for the things I believed, my so-called “faith” (fear, at the end of the day) was replaced with the freedom to grapple with life’s deepest questions in a far more objective, nuanced context...
The shift was a profound one... I was labeled a sinner (aren’t we all?); lost (oh, the irony!); a liberal (I’m not); a heretic...
OK, this one fits...
Presently, I observe the so-called “morally righteous” of the modern age... In the smug, self-assured certainty of their so-called faith, they’ve swallowed and spread these lies without ever once stopping to question their validity...
No consideration whatsoever for whether or not their sources of information are fact-based... Their burden of proof is non-existent... Their threshold for conspiracy theory, beyond all reason...
They’ve made it so easy for demagoguery to infiltrate the public discourse... All these false prophets have to do is tell them what they want to hear and pander to their fear of “the other”, and they are all-in; as if they were already looking for someone to tell them it was OK to believe these things...
And now they’re hopelessly lost in the raptures of this cult-delusion of lunacy... A bubble of toxic, aggressive ignorance where my kind is their sworn enemy...
The infidel... The lost soul... The heretic...
Better to demonize our kind, lest we begin raising (perfectly valid) questions “in the effort to deceive them and lead them astray”...
Better to strive for our annihilation before truly understanding where we’re actually coming from...
Because God forbid someone not have the answers to the mysteries of life...
Yes, I do indeed reject their faith in false messiahs and joyful division between people...
Their relishing in the eternally tormented demise of their earthly brothers and sisters...
Their insufferably prideful arrogance in presenting themselves as “the chosen people” among human history...
Please.
And now, their cause has become more political than ever... They choose to follow literally the least Christ-like figures imaginable, to their Promised Land of a world inhabited only by their kind...
How could enlightenment ever reach truth-haters such as these? What do they honestly and objectively know of humanity, of love?
Their motives of “moral” cleansing are plain for all to see... They don’t even attempt to hide them anymore... They wave their flag of hatred highly and proudly...
Jesus wept.