Joe - I know you've used your divine & infallible powers to junk this thread into BS because it offends your righteous sensibilities, but if you do insist on posting here at least try and keep it relevant to the issue - which is my proposal that MUSIC is greater than RELIGION can ever be.

I would argue whilst both MUSIC and RELIGION are entirely HUMAN, MUSIC is more significant because:

1) MUSIC was around before RELIGION and outlives all religious association. Thus ATHIESTS might sing the VIVALDI GLORIA as an act of joyful MUSIC MAKING regardless of the WORDS, which, being in Latin, don't mean a fat lot anyway and any meaning they do have is completely lost in translation.

2) RELIGION amounts to the acculated FOLKLORIC ignorance of a humanity all-too prone to the HEEBIE-JEEBIES, whereas MUSIC indicates a tendancy towards ENLIGHTENMENT in the light of the FALSIFIABLE. Thus, whilst prone to such distractions, MUSIC serves to indicate the COMMON CAUSE which is the joy of simply being alive without troubling over where we end up when we die.

3) MUSICAL truths are self-evident and operate to the greater good; RELIGIOUS truths are so much inhumane HORSESHIT operating to mislead and misinform. RELIGION is designed to exploit and subjugate; to instill fear in our hearts and repress us into servility thereafter. The DIES IRAE is a classic example of this HORSESHIT, but which of us might remain unmoved by, say, Mozart's setting? Likewise Pucell's setting of Verse 1 of Psalm 102 in Common Prayer, in English. Me, I love it all but only in terms of HUMAN RICHNESS. Likewise the ALLEGRI MISERE which also loses much in translation, but the MUSIC remains TRANSCENDANT.

But that's enough about music; we are below the line after all. But just as I certainly ain't heard no HORSE sing a SONG, I ain't heard one preach no SERMON either, which brings me to Walt Whitman, famously misquoted by Christopher Lee in the Wicker Man:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Amen to that!