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Yep. We sung one of the most famous of these bar tune hymns, A Mighty Fortress, at my wedding.

Now, permit me an illustration.

Is it unreasonable to assume you would feel less at ease if one of these creatures crawled into bed with you rather than the other? The two images evoke different thoughts and emotions. Yet they are nothing more than differing permutations of pixels on your monitor. Is it too much of a stretch to assert the same applies to music, differing arrangements of notes, tempo, cadence, and instruments producing the soundwaves?

God's Word call Abigail "beautiful" (1 Sam 25:3). If God's Word says it, it must be objectively true since God cannot lie. Beauty is not subjective, merely something in the eye of the beholder. Why would not the same be true of music?

I'm not sure what all that means, frankly.

"Beauty is not subjective, merely something in the eye of the beholder"

Appears to be almost a contridiction with itself.

In any case, IF it is true that music is objectivly beautiful or not, then one has to ask "Who defines beauty in music?"
IF, on the other hand, it is in the eye of the beholder, then who are you to rail against someone else's taste in music?

Now, I believe there is an objective stadard for church or religious music - that it glorify God, or that it honor what he honors. But that is not a standard fo beauty, it's a standard of content.

All that said, I'd happily point to so called "music" which I find to be utterly useless no matter what the lyrics are, but I freely admit that is a matter of my own tastes. All the "mall churches" being blasted on this thread are doing is ministering to people with a worship style conducive to them actually, you know, worshiping.

What a shame that so many Christians insist that all Christians be cookie-cutter duplicates shaped - how conveniently! - just like them.

It seems to me that there is a pattern here:

Group A: All Christians ought to be just like me if they want to glorify God;

Group B: God has created a wonderful diversity of people and he can be glorified in an infinate number of ways from Black Spirituals, to litergeys, to Worship songs, to classic hymns, to Gregorian chants and a thousand more besides. Let us all find a place where our hearts can be attuned to God and worship him there.

Now, which of the two seems more likely to have an egotistical (i.e. MAN-centered) view of the situation?