The track’s few lyrics feature my favorite fictional biblical educator, Good Guy Lucifer. But that alone doesn’t necessarily qualify the track as worthy of a Music Monday post so I have to somehow justify this questionable move to include Skrillex as the artist of the week. Well, I just so happened to be listening to the new album, Bangarang, right after I had been reading one of Robert G. Ingersoll’s essays. Particularly, I was reading his well-known lecture on “The Gods“–you know the one that start with the smart-ass line “An honest god is the noblest work of man,” which is a play on a quote attributed to Alexander Pope–when I came across the following passage:

“If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.”

So in a way perhaps, partaking in the process of liberty, reason, enlightenment, and all of those things that Ingersoll outlined we are in a way living in a den of the devil, the worldly manifestation of that serpent’s liberating gestures from so long ago in a fictional garden of Eden. This goes without saying that I do not think that the devil is real, however I think that Ingersoll makes a great rhetorical point that happened to color the way I enjoyed this song. I should also note that I have no idea what Sonny Moore’s religious inclinations are but I think that is beside the point.

So sit back, turn it up, and enjoy today’s track “The Devil’s Den” for Music Monday–the only place on the internet where you can get commentary on Skrillex and Robert G. Ingersoll in the same post.

As always, if you get a chance, send your suggestions for future Music Mondays to me at chashman@centerforinquiry.net, leave a comment below, or @tweet us at @CFIOnCampus. Your suggestions, along with future and past songs, may end up in the official Course of Reason Music Monday Grooveshark playlist or Spofity playlist that anyone can listen to.