Because I'm not really religious anymore, but my religious upbringing is too important a part of how I came to be the person I am to reject it entirely. I'm a professional empiricist and skeptic, but I'm also a professional storyteller. So I can't buy any mythology or theology, but neither can I reject it out of hand.
Which is how I wound up in a position where I guess I believe in God, but I get around theodicy--if God is benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, how does evil exist?--by rejecting the idea that God is benevolent. The orthodox answer to that question is that God allows bad things to happen in service of a greater good later on, but I never found that satisfying for two reasons: 1) It doesn't actually answer the question, because an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God could just wave all the world's pain away and 2) Is there really a compelling reason that if God exists, He's actively good?
But the idea of a God who's detached or ambivalent just makes more sense. Maybe just because I can get my mind around that idea more readily than I can understand a being that's purely good.
Anyway, "God's Gonna Cut You Down" doesn't quite mesh with that idea theologically. Or at least it doesn't intend to, because the idea is that if you sin, no matter what, God's going to smite you, which...I'm not sure how that makes sense, because an all-loving God would hate evil, but would He hate it so much that He kills evil people? (Which also leaves unanswered how He allowed evil or sin to exist in the first place, but that's a question for the talking snake over there.) I know that this particular brand of ecclesiastical justice is popular among modern Christians, but it still concedes that God is either not all-loving or all-powerful.
"God's Gonna Cut You Down," if nothing else, delivers what it promises. Which is to say that it sounds like what I imagine living under the threat of divine justice feels like. The persistent guitar/clapping background is, for lack of a better word, scary as shit. No wonder it's found such a strong purchase in baseball, both as the background for highlight videos and as entrance music. Because this definitely foreboding. It's not loud, berserker metal. It's the music of someone who's coming to cause you pain methodically. It's Anton Chigurh's entrance music, which is by orders of magnitude more impressive. Random violence is for nitwits, but vengeance is the Lord's.
