Apparently Christian metal and metal core bands (Mortification, Underoath, Norma Jean) have been labeled as "fake Chrstians." Apparently, hardcore Christians are rejecting them because of their lyrical themes and vocal screams. I read an article of a Christian magezine (I didn't know that at the time) called "Plugged In." There was an article about Christian Metal an the editors said they are pretending to be Christian bcause they think it will boost their sales. Why do so many people think Metal has to be "evil"? It has been associtated with Satan for many, many years, but that doesn't mean it all has to be "bad". I'm a Satanist and I still listen to Underoath, Mortification and the likes, why can't it be the other way around?

Christians are now even attacked non-rock genres such as rap.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20 ... ip_hop.htm

Simple. Religions think everything that is not explicitly talking about god with a piano and acoustic guitars, is evil.

I am a Roman Catholic living in a country side county in Ohio. Country music is what most of the population listens too, but it seems I am oppressed of what I mainly listen too Slayer. Usually when people come up to me and ask of what I listen too, I say Slayer. And when I let them hear a good song from them like "Eyes of the Insane" they usually say,"TURN THAT SHIT OFF!" like they had some kind of phobia or something towards it. I try to figure out why a lot of people don't like metal and my number reason is IGNORANCE. I have an older brother that is deeply religious and he wonders why I listen to Slayer. I tell him this, "As long as you don't take of what they say seriously then you can listen to them all you want and God won't give a hoot about it".

That's right. Why should god give a flying fuck what are your music tastes are?. If Hitler listened to jazz and classical music, would that make him less evil? Obviously, it wouldn't. Are we (metalheads) more evil, stupid and/or arrongant because we listen to metal? Fuck no. It just shows how utterly fucking stupid people are. They think metal is evil just because it talks about taboos and society's "skeletons in the closet", if you will. Movies and books (among many others) also display unnecessary amounts of violence, drugs, sex, etc. Should we think movies are evil? No. Should we think books are evil? No. Hell, I've seen worse things in the news.

Also concerning your closing quote, yes I'ts also true. However, here in Puerto Rico, it's all about the subliminal messages that metal apparently has. For example, I have said on many occasions that metal doesn't make you a Satanist, no matter how many subliminal messages it has or not. Then people say: "You can't notice subliminal messages, that's why they are so dangerous". What kind of horseshit is that? How are you supposed to understand a message (let alone act upon it) if you don't get the purpose of the message itself? How can you explain then that subliminal messages haven't been used for good, educational purposes?Some scientists say that subliminal messages have a certain effect on people. The rest say it's bullshit.

Besides when a Christian band wants to say they are Christian they simply go: "God is good". When a Satanic band wants to say they are Satanists they say: "Satan is good". Today's society can't get anymore stupid. By the way, keep rockin' out to Slayer and stay true to your religion and beliefs.

I'm actually curious to know how many users around these forums are self-proclaimed Christians. I was raised Roman Catholic but that is all.

That may because Eyes of the Insane is a really boring song, but hey.

Agreed on that point, you may have had better luck with something off of "South Of Heaven", probably the title track since doom-like thrash metal tends to be more accessible to non-metal fans than the extreme stuff on their first 3 albums.

Personally I think that the Christian hostility to metal is as much vernacular as it is theological. You'll find more people open to metal in urban areas than in the country side, at least that's the way it's been in my experience.

In my opinion, if people can't enjoy certain types of art because it offends or questions their beliefs, they probably haven't thought too much about their beliefs with an objective perspective, and they're afraid to face their own insecurity. I believe in many things (I'm not christian, I guess most people would call me a new age person), but I don't get defensive and hurt when people are critical and start asking questions about those things. Believing that you believe something that you don't really believe must be very frustrating in the long run I think.

Oppressed? I don't think I am oppressed because I am an atheist metaller (that's two things that Christfags should hate me for). My distance from most people is a bit of my being 'extreme' (in their eyes) in many facets and me consciously stepping back from the masses. A lot of the kids I am acquainted with find me humorous or 'cool', but I don't make any effort to socialise with most of these people much, so conversation is initiated typically only by other parties.

Oh, and don't try getting everyone into metal - not everyone will like metal, just as you most likely don't enjoy psychobilly, ambient, or noise. If you have friends who have a particular macabre leaning, then I could understand introducing them to metal. Otherwise, don't bother. A homogenous population is a boring one.



You're comparing metal as a genre to actual media. Most Christians don't even say that all music is evil, and the ones that do aren't generally fond of cinema, television, or other entertainment media. Hating metal for the wrong reasons - those being the sheepish, popular-opinion reasons, is indeed wrongheaded. But disliking metal for other reasons or simply out of differing taste is not at all necessarily ignorant or stupid. Plenty of geniuses were bred never hearing anything remotely metal, and retards listen to metal a plenty (even on this here bulletin board).



Asking people to be purely objective and capable of detachment from their emotions is akin to attempting to converse with a wall. Some people can, surely, but most will not; wishing for a more objective/rational collective surrounding you is all good and well, as I do, but many simply lack the intellectual capacity to do so. That they are 'narrow-minded' is their own concern, and to me is a rather trivial thing. A few hundred thousand devoted metallers globally is far better a 'scene' than millions of poseurs who are drifting between transient trends.

I wouldn't call myself Christian. I am theistic though. And if Jesus was real and really died for me than I would happily embrace him as my King after I die.

I would probably wonder why he let Christianity get so out of hand though.... >_>

The amount of empirical evidence for the existence of some guy named Yeshwah or Jesus is nil. There were thousands of 'messiahs' running around Judeah at the time, so it's no surprise that one was formed out of a collective and used as a symbol for a religion that was oddly familiar to the pagans of the era (after all, even the real messiahs based themselves off Horus and other polytheistic gods of ancient religions, meaning Jesus is basically plagiarised from Egyptian and Sumerian lore). I suppose that is a little off-topic though.

Thats cool, I said IF. I used to believe mainly through my family... and the many stories in church about people who said they saw Jesus / heard God.

My Grandpa, for instance is the reason my mom's side of the family is Christian based, as apparently God spoke to him. So....its kinda like for me, always a possibility. If I had personal experience I would believe, thats the only reason my mom's side of the family does. Its kinda hard to tell your mom and Grandpa that you don't believe them when everything else they told me is true (they never told me Santa Clause was real cuz' they didn't want to lie).

While the latter is true, I'm pretty sure that you're exaggerating about the former. The gospels aren't the only documents that refer to Jesus; let's not forget apocryphal texts and Roman records of the spread of Christianity. Most of the historians that I've read assume that a 'Jesus" was real on the basis of overwhelming circumstantial evidence. That might not be what you mean but I just wanted to point out that Jesus probably is based off of a real person.

EDIT: XSpidercideX, you ought to hear the stories my family tells. Generally rational people, I think, can unknowingly delude themselves into believing some strange things.

Yeah, here are mine:

Grandpa: Sitting alone at home. Used to drink and party, problems with family, hated church. God audibly spoke to him and said "read My Word, for in it you will find Truth." He started to read the Bible the whole way through and became born-again. The rest of the family converted. Now he prays with people for deliverance from demons and you should hear the stories.

Mom: After becoming a Christian sitting in her room, had a vision where demons appeared surrounding her and laughing at her. She prayed to Jesus and her spirit came out of her chest with visible hands that clapped in front of the demons and they disappeared.

What does the board think of "black metal" bands such as (but not limited to) Antestor, whose members are Christian?

What would you say about the way in which they are trying to promote God based on a musical subgenre that is completely anti religious?

I may be mistaken, but this Plugged In publication actually offers bands like Underoath and Norma Jean as Christian alternatives to heavy music.

Who says metal is anti religious? I don't care what a band tries to promote, if anything, as long as they make good stuff. I haven't heard Antestor, but Extol are one of the awesomest extreme metal bands I listen to.

Metal is the ultimate embodiment of rock n roll's rebellion against the status quo, which includes (or did include) religion.
It is undeniable that a large portion of metal presents itself as anti-religious.

Further, I was referring specifically to Black Metal.

And here I am thinking metal is a genre of music. Imagine my surprise.

Also, metal was all about "Going against the status-quo", then "Going against the status quo" would be the "Status quo" of metal. Meaning that being Christian is the only way to be a tr00 gr1m metalhead.

So far as I am aware, all documents which in depth mention Jesus were written centuries later, obviously including the gospels (and the other non-canon). There was one contemporary source which corroborated with his supposed life, I believe, but it only mentioned the name, and did not go into any detail whatsoever, and thus was most likely speaking of the myriad of messiahs.

LOL, this is true, I think Christian black metal is as rebellious as you can get. Just about everybody is against you.

On a side note, when I was a Christian, I did not feel like the majority. It seemed I was a minority as most "christians" are not that way at all, and most everybody lived how they wanted to and not how they were supposed to.

That's true, but that's also true of many figures acknowledged by history to be real. Much of premodern history is based off of inference from sources that are very often biased and not contemporary with the events they describe. The reasons that I would infer that Jesus existed is as follows:

1) The sources that discuss him in depth can generally be traced to defined religious communities across the Mediterranean world. While the sources were written years after Jesus was dead, the earliest having been written about sixty to eighty years after his estimated time of death, they all give similar accounts of the events in Jesus' life and refer to him as 'Jesus.' Thus, it is likely that they refer to one person.

2) Other sources indicate that many of the religious communities mentioned in reason (1) developed in the mid to late first century. Most of the rest had developed by the third century. It's therefore reasonable to assume that the early communities were founded by people who knew Jesus or his contemporaries/disciples. Thus, historians tend not to dispute that the disparate religious communities shared a common origin.

While I think it's reasonable to believe that there was a historical Jesus, it's clearly easy to challenge the common account of his life and teachings. Beginning with Paul's work as an evangelist, the Christian communities were gradually homogenized and, in some cases, silenced. There was a lot of disagreement about Jesus' teachings that isn't reflected in the Bible or the Church. Indeed, many tenets of Christian doctrine were the result of compromise between theological positions that were blatantly ignored by later orthodoxy.

In other words, while it's possible that at some point in the process of Christianity's integration into a single structure religious communities that didn't originally follow the same prophet were duped by a myth of a common 'messiah,' it seems a lot more likely that a single prophet inspired many different religious communities that were eventually unified, distorting his ideas out of all recognition in the process.

You may want to differentiate between religion in general and Christianity. Many black metal bands embrace either Satan (questionable, and related to Christianity, or various forms of paganism, another type of religion which is certainly not opposed by black metal bands.

That's my take on it. Besides, the bible's chock full of hardcore br007ality, one would think misanthropes like metalheads would embrace it wholeheartedly. Hell, us Catholics engage in what is effectively ritual cannibalism every Sunday.

Incidentally, my mother is about the biggest bible-basher in the West Coast, and she's the also one who introduced me to Iron Maiden and metal. She listens to more brutal music than I do. So, there you go.



I kind of believe a little bit of everything: God, Jesus, Transubstantiation, Reincarnation, Loch Ness Monster, aliens, Cthulhu, Flying Spaghetti Monster. But Catholic first and foremost, because I'm intellectually lazy and prefer to live in a naive little fantasy world where there's a big beardy dude in the sky instead of the horrifyingly cold and indifferent universe we appear to actually inhabit.

I have great admiration for atheists, because most of them are intelligent people who are comfortable with their conclusion, just as I admire certain christians who are resolute in their faith, though for different reasons.

I think it's pretty obvious as to why Metal is seen as anti-religious; much of it is aggressive, angry/hateful (especially in the more extreme genres) and has some sort of aggressive sexual element to it. All these things are seen as anti-religious. That's not necessarily to say all metal is, but the majority of it- and the inherit nature of it's sound- is at least slightly un-christian.



Try 20-30 years, for the gospels at least.

I will maintain that atheism is infallible until god appears and tells me I'm wrong.

In the interim, I will continue my campaign to rename the Second Coming the Never Coming.

If people want to get into the never ending argument of atheism v religion, there's a bunch of other threads around for it. Instead of trying to prove that you're a fervent atheist (which has nothing to do with the topic), how about you contribute to the thread?

Actually, they kind of are, and even those were written decades after his death.


No one denied that the spread of christianity was real, did they? That's not the same as documenting the existence of a man, of which the historical evidence is flimsy compared to other famous people of the time, such as Plato or Julius Caesar.

Religion has always found a genre of music to target in every generation. They will single one out and define it as the "devil's music." They did it to Country. They hit the blues...and they really came for Metal.

All typical, childish antagonism aside...I'm glad Christians see that stuff as "not christian." Maybe it will persuade them to cease all effort at creating metal. Sure, Christian Metal is "Rebellious," but this isn't punk rock...there's nothing metalheads rebel against...save for intelligence, sobriety, and maintaining virginity...Metal is not for Christians. Any Christian listening to Antichristian music is just as insane as his non-listening brethren. I don't know what else can be said to rationalize this topic. It's all subjective, no matter what.

That really made me laugh.

At some point, religion has singled out any and every form of cultural expression and lambasted it for its immorality, so this is hardly even a debate.

Search hard enough and you'll probably find someone who claims that Bach's cantatas sing out 'HAIL SATAN' if you play them backwards.

Well, I was thinking of apocryphal texts. It occurred to me that most of these referred to themselves as gospels, but I meant that the gospels included in the Bible aren't the only ones that talk about Jesus. For example, The Apocalypse of Peter refers to him as well as the Gnostic Gospels.


I wasn't saying that anyone denied that the spread of Christianity was real. I was only trying to argue that the pattern of its spread seems to indicate that there was a single person who inspired the religion. I agree that the evidence isn't as conclusive as in the cases you mentioned, but there are also figures recognized by history whose existence is documented even more sparsely.

The contemporary evidence for Socrates, for example, comes almost entirely from Plato and Xenophon. (Aristotle refers to him but he wasn't a contemporary and, since he was a student of Plato's, he may refer to Socrates as he appears in the dialogues.) Indeed, some people actually doubt that Socrates existed. You might argue that the evidence for Socrates is still better, but that's not the point. The point is only that the historical evidence for Jesus isn't that flimsy, although I acknowledge that it is largely circumstantial. However, almost all history is based on circumstantial evidence; history is never as certain as it is represented to be publicly.

I was raised Christian, however I am not fond of Christianity at all.
I think its fine to put whatever you feel like writing about into music. Anything from worshipping to eating babies. To each his fucking own, I say.

Yes I agree. It's not that I am against Christianity, obviously shown by ME. I just think it has more holes than a sponge and holds about as many lies as a sponge can hold water.

Let me guess... Morgan county? No, wait, wait... It's gotta be Knox County... J/k. Fellow Ohio metalhead here, as well.

Yeah, Ohio is filled to the brim with hardcore country-lovin Christians. As a non-believing metalhead (and metalheads here are few and far between), it gets a tad rough out here, as most of the Church goers I meet think all metal is devoted to Satan, booze, sex, and drugs. They continually focus on the bad sides of metal, rather than the positive songs as well.

It's somewhat the cause of the media, and the "If I don't know it, then it's Satanic" mentality they're raised to have.

As AnthologyMetal said, it mostly pure ignorance, and lack of willingness to listen to something new or do a little research.

The evidence from Socrates come from testimonies of people who were his contemporaries. This is not the case with Jesus, so the comparison really doesn't fly.
Jesus honestly has more in common with Heracles than Socrates.

This topic for some reason made me want to post this:

http://www.cracked.com/article_15699_9- ... erses.html


I especially like the Samson one. LOL. He kills 1000 men with a donkey's jawbone and then makes a song about it. Now thats HARDCORE.

I have kind of a fantasy that Christian Metal will rise up, become dominant, and destroy not just Satanic and Pagan metal but all neopaganism and satanism. Not because I like Christian metal, but just so that in a few centuries some Religious History textbook on Paganism will contain something like "Then in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries Paganism briefly resurfaced before falling to the exact same strategy from the exact same people who did it last time."

That's true, and I acknowledge the comparison isn't perfect. However, the way that Socrates appears in the contemporary sources is as a character in various stories and dialogues. Nonetheless, let's leave this issue aside. I'm really not an expert on ancient Greek history.


This is definitely an exaggeration. To give examples from my area of expertise, I would say that the evidence for his existence is more like Cerdic of Wessex or, at worst, Vortigern. Like these figures, the evidence for his existence is certainly not reliable or contemporary. However, unlike Heracles, Jesus and the aforementioned rulers impacted history in ways that suggest their existence to some extent or another.

Gods of the polytheistic religions, which clearly impacted their societies greatly, not to mention the monotheistic religions which down the line drew greatly from them, are not excepted as factual entities save by those who believe in them. So simply because a figure has had significant historical impact, either through extension or influence via proxy hardly means that the figure is necessarily concrete. In the case of Jesus/Yeshwah, I think it most likely to have been a synthetic figure derived from the actual 'messiahs' in Judea. One can even consider, for instance, the images of Jesus saturated in so many media, which were actually based on an Italian man, if I recall correctly. Hardly should a Simitic man look as though he was born in the heart of Europe, and yet this is a widely accepted image.

Had Jesus himself received actual recognition during his supposed life, his historical plight would be far more credulous. As it stands, however, he was virtually unrecognised by contemporaries. So I would equate the amount of evidence for Jesus as that for a king Arthur who wielded a magical sword and sat on a democratic/republican kind of council.

This has what to do with the existence of Jesus?

We know that there existed a significant oral and written tradition about Jesus not too far from its time and place of origination. Modern scholarship has generally found it most likely that the traditions are embellished accounts based on some historical figure. The evidence that the gospel accounts are product of some conspiracy or fabrication is less compelling - usually the simplest explanation is the best.