His Eye Is On the Sparrow… Really?
The psychology of emotional manipulation through music
Many of you will recall hearing the beautiful song His Eye is on the Sparrow often sang by Ethel Walters and George Beverly Shea during a Billy Graham televised crusade. As music of that type is intended to be, it was very moving and emotional.
The title of the song was taken from the New Testament, Matthew 6:26 and Luke 12:6, which I will quote word for word from the New American Standard Bible, reputed to be the best English translation from the original Greek.
Luke 12:6–7: Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.
Matthew 6:26: Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
Obviously, those verses are declaring that since God watches, feeds and protect mere birds, He will surely do much more for us, who are “more valuable than many sparrows.”
The following reveals just how safe birds are from danger in the United States. The figures are from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and is the average between their low and high estimate.
Killed by colliding with window glass… 600,000,000 (six hundred million just in the United States each and every year.) A simple glare free lens, like opticians make for us humans would have prevented this problem.
Killed by colliding with motor vehicles… 214,000,000
Killed by colliding into electrical wires… 25,000,000
Killed by cats…2,400,000,000 (that is 2.4 billion, again, each and every year!)
Tens of millions starve to death, freeze to death, and are eaten alive by snakes and larger animals. Young chicks are often found dead in their nest without their mother anywhere to be found. Diseases give millions more a slow, painful death. Millions more are killed by hunters, poison and oil pits. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds are caught each year in nets and on hooks intended for fish.
No one can deny that an all-powerful deity is certainly not protecting the birds, at least not in the United States. The authors of Mathew and Luke were either just repeating something nice that they had heard or did not know that there would come a day when fact-checking on the internet would be fast and easy.
We see the promises made in Matthew and Luke are simply not true. As evidenced by the beautiful song His eye is on the sparrow, too often, wittingly or unwittingly, religious music and teachings are designed to strike at one’s emotions, while bypassing the brain and critical thinking. They include the emotions of fear (as in eternal hellfire), hope (who would not like to live forever in total happiness and bliss?), guilt (while guilt can be a good thing, such as when you’ve hurt someone else, it is far too often used to manipulate someone). Even when it is unintentional, the result is exactly the same.
Regarding religious music, many church music directors readily attest to how easy it is to spark, to change and to stop a crowds’ emotions. If the Spirit is real, why does it need music to start moving and why does it stop once the music stops?
Many believers actually think that naturally triggered “goosebumps” are evidence of God’s presence. Some refer to it as “a warm flow.” Erica Cirino in an article published by Healthline explains how “goosebumps” are triggered: “When you’re experiencing extreme emotions, the human body responds in a variety of ways. Common responses included increased electrical activity in the muscles just under the skin and increased depth of heavy breathing.” They are associated with the state of feeling emotionally touched in a joyful or sad way, and sometimes both. Coldness and fear are also common triggers.
The medical terms for “goosebumps” are piloerection, cutis anserina, and horripilation. “Goosebumps” are actually hair follicles that our hairy ancestors used to provide warmth and to appear larger when confronted by a predator. They were triggered then, as now, by emotions. While there is nothing wrong with music that creates an emotional mood, it borders on fraud when it is intended to manipulate or lead someone to misinterpret what is happening. It is no different in a church than the BBC study that shows how music in stores causes people to buy more or how it affects behavior in restaurants.
But wait a minute, maybe, Matthew and Luke were only half wrong. Let us examine and see if the “more valuable” ones are protected better than the birds.
According to WorldHunger.org, there are 5,600,000 young children under five years old who die each year, with most being under one year old. That is over ten every minute, one every six seconds. Imagine the pain not only of the child but also the pain and grief suffered by their parents and loved ones.
Approximately 3,100,000 die of malnutrition. Children who suffer from poor, undernourished diets suffer up to 160 days a year with various illnesses. Almost 1,000 children under five die of malaria every day; all because of a mosquito that most good gods would never have created. 500,000 children become blind every year; most are easily preventable with health care. We can go on and on about the thousands that are killed by guns, drowning, abuse and other calamities; but obviously not one of these “more valuable” ones were protected by a god.
Need more evidence? Nearly 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage during the first month, most even without the mothers' knowledge. All an all-powerful, all-knowing god has to do to prevent the thousands of young girls from being raped every day, with many held captive for years as sex slaves, is call 911.
As an atheist, we avoid the horror of having to acknowledge that a god just sits back and watches. After all, Luke tells us above that God watches us so carefully that He even numbers the hair on our head.
Unless God is a “respecter of persons,” Matthew and Luke are wrong again. It seems that those who claim to be protected just so happen to have more money and live in an environment that has clean water, sanitation, available health care, plenty of good food and other modern resources. Many of those most “protected individuals” also carry guns and have a 24-hour security alarm system installed in their house.
Even in the United States the poorer a person is, the less they are protected from crime, from sickness and disease, from injustice and inequality, from bad and dangerous schools and from just about every other ill that society can offer. The evidence is clear; either God does not protect anyone or else he sure hates poor people, especially those of color.
It is quite frustrating to see Christianity ignore or just outright deny the many wrongful things in the Bible. For evidence of some of them, see here for immoralities, here for contradictions, and here for whether or not He exists. Instead, so many religious people only cherry-pick a few verses that we all agree would be good.
Amazingly, many of those good things that are part of most sermons and many songs, turn out to be absolutely false, just like the birds know full well. Here are just a few examples to show that even the “good and happy” cherry-picked ones are grossly misleading.
(As a former evangelical, I wish there was an easier way to say it, but if the following are not true for everyone, then they cannot be said to be true for anyone. All one has to do is to meditate a few minutes about the slaves, the child warriors, the staving; many from birth, the millions of refugees torn from their homes and possessions with little but the clothes on their back, millions more diseased and starving, and a hundred other examples of unnecessary suffering.)
John 14:13–14 Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.
Proverbs 10:3–4 The Lord will not allow the righteous to hunger, but He will reject the craving of the wicked. Poor is he who works with a negligent hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
Proverbs 13:21 Adversity pursues sinners, but the righteous will be rewarded with prosperity.
Mark 11:24 Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.
Psalms 37:4 Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalms 84:11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.
Psalms 34:10 The young lions do lack and suffer hunger; but they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.
Psalms 34:17 The righteous cry, and the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.
Matthew 17:20 And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.
Matthew 16:28 “Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.”
Matthew 7:9–11 Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him.
Isaiah 40:31 Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.
Psalms 37:25 I have been young and now I am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his descendants begging bread.
Again, these are nice and wonderful statements, but they are not true. So many of us atheists would give anything to make them true. What a wonderful thing it would be, if there was a God who loved and protected children from hunger, disease, abuse and who would prevent the rapes of the thousands of young girls who are in fact raped every day; many who are held captive for years, as sex prisoners.
If there is an all-powerful, all-knowing god, who does not even call 911, surely, he, she or it must enjoy just sitting back and watching not only the innocent precious girls being brutalized, but the innocent children in pain dying at the rate of one every six seconds of every day.
Let the apologists explain these away like they do the numerous contradictions and immoralities their Bible is full of, but if good religious people have compassion and work hard to try to alleviate some of the suffering in the world; why doesn’t their god do even more?
