Excellent example! Let's examine.
Verse 1: "Preacherman, dont tell me, Heaven is under the earth.
I know you dont know What life is really worth.
Its not all that glitters is gold;
Half the story has never been told:"
What he's saying here is that traditional Christianity of the type Marley grew up in (Church Of God) has uninformed preachers. They preach about a heaven that doesn't exist - in Rastafarian thinking the sky in under the earth as well as above. It's not special. This is because the preachers have never revealed the whole story.
Verse 2: " Most people think, Great God will come from the skies,
Take away everything And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:"
Here he puts forth the Rastafarian teaching that the Christians are wrong about a Second Coming in which Jesus will descend from Heaven, as well as the notion that the earth will come to an end. Here he argues Rastafarian teaching that God is physical, not spiritual. That he exists in the person of Haile Selassie, not as an invisible being external to the world. The life we are living is exactly the kind of life we will always have: salvation is not going to heaven - it is living on earth in a paradise that will be realized when Haile Selassie's righteous rule over the whole world comes to pass.
Verse 3: " We sick an tired of-a your ism-schism game -
Dyin and goin to heaven in-a jesus name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty God is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you cant fool all the people all the time.
Here he argues that the various branches of Christianity are all a scam "an ism-schism game" - and that the notion of dying and going to heaven is false. Paradise is an earthly phenomenon given to the righteous in Zion (the Rastafarians call the ancient city of Axum in Ethiopia "Zion") by a physical God - Haile Selassie, who is "Almighty God" and also "a living man." Christians are deceived by this false obsession with invisible spirits, but Rastafarians cannot be fooled.
So Marley is not properly an atheist - he believes that Haile Selassie is God, the same God spoken of in the Bible and that "heaven" is really just everyday life on earth in the perfect kingdom that will one day be established by Selassie.
It's similar in some ways to the Jewish notion of life in the age of Moshiach, similar in some ways to the Christian belief in a Messiah who is God, and similar in other ways to the Five Percent Nation group among blacks in the US Northeast in its reject of the reality of the spirit.
>> We sick an tired of-a your ism-schism game -
Dyin and goin to heaven in-a jesus name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty God is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you cant fool all the people all the time. <<
I think this is clever forked-tongue speech: it sounds like Lennon enough for the college-campus Leninist/Lennonist fans, but to his Jamacian base it sounds like an assertion that He has returned. But the point is unmistakably Marxist/materialist: “don’t live to prepare yourself for heaven, but rather focus on earthly things; Jesus ain’t up there.” Of course, this isn’t necessarily any more leftist/atheist than many Catholic missionaries I’ve heard, but I’ve told them that they were Marxist tools to their faces too, and directed them to read genuine Catholic literature like “The Soul of the Apostolate.”