As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.

If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path towards it is the path of language.

Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.

People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification.

You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.