The Artsy Lunatic wrote:
I heard this song years ago, when I was really young. I just now realized it's sung from the perspective of God.
Suddenly this song is a lot more sad.
Out of all the perspectives I've heard that song could mean I have never heard this and possibly for good reason, as it's clearly about a king being taken down in a revolution, who knows he won't go to heaven, and everyone hates him.
This doesn't apply to the judaist, christian, or islamic views of a God at all. Or even God from an outside perspective. Religion isn't a dead thing and most people aren't calling for it to be completely abolished unless they're teenage atheists and even then it's a minority of them. There's no revolution taking place for the song to make any sense from the view point of God.
It's about a king, and it's about a revolution taking place around him. The band has said this, the song's name plays to it, the music video is over a famous painting of a revolution overthrowing a king, everything points to it.
I mean really imagining it from the perspective of an omnipotent, omnipresent, immortal being just sort of ruins the song because the whole thing is about the guy being taken down to the lowest levels from the top and it's fairly hard to see that happening from the viewpoint of the personification of endless power.