The Hammer of Thor

I haven’t posted a blog in a long, long time, but I was shown an album today that really caught my ear.  Upon listening to it and reading the lyrics and realizing what it’s about, I found it to be probably the most haunting album I’ve ever listened to.

Oceana - BirthEater

The album is called BirthEater by the band Oceana, and it is a concept album on the topic of abortion.  First off, the music itself is fantastic, an ambient melodic hardcore blend that reminds me of The Receiving End of Sirens mixed with Of Machines, but a bit heavier.  It’s right up my musical alley, with heavy breakdown sections, but an underlying commitment to melody and the vocals are top notch.  Every now and then, an album is released that catches me in such a way that listening to it goes much further than passive absorption of music and lyrics.  Certain albums speak to more than that and have a message that opens eyes and exposes things that you might not want to think about.  In the last days of 2009, I went to the Onething conference hosted by the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, MO.  At the conference, I heard Lou Engle speak on the topic of abortion and the inherent and powerful evil that saturates it through and through and it hit me hard.  I have always been pro-life, but I could understand a woman getting an abortion in the case of rape or something similar.  That changed after Onething.  I came to the realization that shedding the innocent blood of our own children is never acceptable.  Not in any circumstance.  People will argue that a fetus is not human.  Planned Parenthood, one of the most evil organizations in the world, in their counseling sessions reassure pregnant women considering abortions that what they carry within them is “not a baby.”  People will argue that life doesn’t begin at conception, but that it begins and some late trimester of the pregnancy or at the moment of birth.  I want those people to explain how the blood of a baby in the womb, the blood flowing within a fetus, is any different than the blood of a baby who has just been born.  What is it that makes a fetus inhuman?  There is nothing.  A human fetus is human life.  These lives are taken in the name of choice.  They claim a woman should have the choice to make health decisions in her own body.  I think a woman has that right, up to the point that it infringes on life.  Just because the child is growing within the woman does not give her the authority to decide if it lives or dies.  At the point of conception, it becomes alive, it becomes life, and law forbids us to shed innocent blood.  Law forbids murder.  How people can claim that killing a fetus is different that killing a late-term baby or a newborn is beyond me.  I think this can be argued outside of religion, but Christianity does oppose it fiercely.  BirthEater confronts the wordly stance on abortion and gives insight on abortion from a spiritual warfare perspective and from the perspective of the unborn child.  ”The Family Disease” is a track from the perspective of an unborn son, and the title is examining how we seem to wish to exterminate the “family disease.”  The fact that people can view their offspring in the womb as diseased or cancerous tissue that needs to be removed is something so intrinsically morbid and terrifying when you sit and comprehend it.  People decide to exterminate their own sons and daughters because they view them as an illness; an inconvenience.  ”Dead Speaker” is a song sung from the voice of an aborted child, wondering why his mother never wanted him and had him extracted.  The mother pipes in saying “something didn’t want you to live in me, my body rejected you and you don’t belong to me.”  This is a mother to her child, refusing the truth that her child deserved to live.  ”Mother Love” can be a hard song to listen to because it addresses the regrets of abortion.  A father cries out “oh my son, why did you leave me?  Where did you run, my son? Why did you leave me?” in pain that the mother decided to have the child aborted.  ”The Abortion Plan” is one of the most heart-wrenching songs on the album, again from the voice of the aborted child, singing about how he grows right next to his mother’s heart, yet she counts down the days until she gets to remove him from inside her.  The child laments about how his mother didn’t want him, though he had a fresh life, fresh “like the mind of an infant” full of possibilities.  A life that was ended.  The spiritual side is brought in, as the child cries of how it never felt uglier than when its dead body was held up by legs and shaken by the devil himself, the one who celebrates at every abortion carried out.  Ending the album is a track called “Devil Walk, God Walk (Heaven Walk, Hell Walk)” which is truly haunting.  It really strikes at the spiritual weight of the decision to have an abortion.  People are turning to the devil to come within them and deliver them from their failures.  A profound line is that “there’s no life worth living our children will leave” meaning that on their own accord, the children would choose life.  But instead “we’ll separate the family disease we’ll create.  If we’re dead we’ll believe.”  The song really strikes on how people view an unwanted child as a disease that needs to be removed for the safety of the mother.  The lyrics are hard to read, and terrifying, when they speak of how people hand their children over to demons to behead them, kill them, burn them.  ”We’ll be left seedless men.”  The aborted children are born into death.  The song ends with the almost triumphant line “All of our sons and our daughters are dead, and the birth that we stole!  Eater grows old!”  The album uses the term “eater” to signify the adults who consume and end up living long and comfortable convenient lives after having exterminated their disease.  All in all, the album simply haunts me.  It makes me aware of the horror of what people are capable of doing without flinching.  The absolute moral void that is present that enables an individual to kill their own child to make their own life easier or more convenient.  It’s an incredibly selfish and immature move.  It’s a way to escape the consequences of a bad decision.  No one wants to live with consequences, but people don’t realize that consequences are there for a reason.  If there were no consequences, there would be no learning and people would be as depraved as ever.  And to those who became pregnant through rape, that is one of the most horrible things that can happen to a woman and it breaks my heart to think of the kind of mental, emotional, and physical damage that must cause.  I will never understand it firsthand.  However, a life is a life.  An innocent life.  And life trumps everything else.  The sanctity of life overrules all.  The Bible says that those who shed the blood of the innocent, by men their blood shall be shed.  God hates the shedding of innocent blood, which is what abortion is, and the devil exalts over it.  There is a glaring difference between pro-life and pro-choice that most people don’t look at: one of them turns a profit.  Former director of Planned Parenthood Abby Johnson stated that one of the goals is to make money, and they do this by raising the number of abortions.  You can be sure that, like any other medical procedure, an abortion isn’t cheap.  Another thing about abortion that people don’t realize is that it has its foundations in a racist agenda.  Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, referred to black Americans as “human weeds” and “reckless breeders,” and to this day 76% of all Planned Parenthood centers are positioned in black or Hispanic American neighborhoods.  Does anyone else find this extremely wrong?  Pro-life wants to protect what is sacred: innocent life.  Pro-life people do not support it for personal gain.  The opposition is in support of abortion for less noble reasons: escape of consequences, to make money, or the hidden racist agenda.  If you’re reading this and support abortion, I urge you to look inside your heart and reassess the decision.  I do not speak for God, and you may not believe in Him at all, but I can confidently say that to support abortion is to deliberately and explicitly oppose Him, and that is a very dangerous thing to do.  If you’d like to give feedback, feel free.

Anyway to wrap this all up, BirthEater is an exceptional album with great music and a profound message that will make you think and will possibly leave you a bit unsettled.  I definitely think that if you can handle some screaming and some heavy music, it’s a CD that is absolutely worth a listen.