Artistic freedom and affirming the sacred

I think artists tend to have “more music than honesty,” (a line by George Abbott, recently quoted by Derek Turner), and this is where I think Plato was right to be skeptical of artists. Once honesty leaves the room, truth and reality often follow, and reality and the existing culture begin to fade away. Music and humor are great salesmen, but hedonism and nihilism in art often follow the loss of honesty, which is what happened in modern Western art, which was not really art.

I think artists need to be free to create, to improvise, but with improvisations on subjects more sacred to the people than profane. The greatest art in human history was an affirmation of the sacred. I think this needs to be revived in art. I would like to see artists---call them evolutionary realists---make art, music, humor and improvisations which affirm the religious philosophy of theological materialism.

To attain Godhood we need to evolve in harmony with the laws of real nature, activated by the material and then supermaterial Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within life. This can bring art and science legitimately back to religion. What has come before in religion and philosophy can be retained but considered as incomplete glimpses or experiences of real Godhood, which all life strives to evolve toward in the cosmos. This is the affirmation of the sacred which I think is needed in art. Perhaps then we can have great again.