Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #280 - I am finding your religious turn and proselytising difficult. How do you reconcile your faith with the church’s devastating...

we as the voyeurs of conversion experiences may be alternately envious and appalled, excited and critical, provoked and dismayed. The conversion scene, in other words, like the sexual scene, can leave us scrambling around for a satisfactory position, so to speak. It over-organizes and disrupts our attention. It is so unsettling that we need to come

Here was the Church of Our Lady, very old, the adobe blackened with age. For sentimental reasons I will go inside. For sentimental reasons only. I have not read Lenin, but I have heard him quoted, religion is the opium of the people. Talking to myself on the church steps: yeah, the opium of the people. Myself, I am an atheist: I have read The Anti-

But the Church wasn’t Blake’s only target. He found the same passion for order among scientists, their need to mansplain everything squeezing the mystery and magic out of the universe. He longed for them . . . To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour