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Legend, Yes, etc.
> When a product only appeals to a limited audience,
> minimal effort is put forth to make it transcend the
> limitations of said audience. Why bother, time is money.
Very well put, Matt. I'd never seen it that clearly before.
As far as Yes and Legend go, someone described Gates of Delirium as a "new agey
sort of book of Revelation". While I think it's actually about Vietnam, it is
an interesting take on it.
I also love the Legend trilogy (so far), but I've only heard it a couple of
times. Some interesting insights in there, and some really off base ones. All
in all, an excellent effort at translating Revelation to music. I respect that
in some places where the language is so symbolic no one can get a fix on the
meaning, he doesn't mess with it like some people. He simply makes key images
rhyme and leaves it for some future observer to figure out, rather than trying
to pour a literal image into a metaphor that we can't attach to anything yet.
Legend tries to strike a balance, albeit a bit deeper into the woods than I
think prudent or provable. The fact that he even tries to strike that balance
is a very encouraging thing. In the Eighties, I don't think anyone outside a
seminary even tried.
Unfortunately, evangelists in the Seventies and Eighties used prophecy as a
witnessing tool but went so far overboard that they told more conjectures than
facts, and made the whole thing look stupid. It's a deep shame, because so many
prophecies are pretty much irrefutable. No one argues that nuclear weapons, or
Israel, or the UN, or television, or jets, or computers do not exist. Yet 150
years ago, an atheist could be excused for spitting prophecies fulfilled by
these items in your face during a debate. If I were to write a book on
prophecy, I'd forget "Left Behind" and show a fictional conversation between
Pascal and Voltaire, with Voltaire reading biblical prophecies and making
atheistic arguments that would have been perfectly valid then but would look
really, really stupid today in light of what has already happened or been proven
possible.
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