@Draug:
Hm. Well, I'm not a musicologist, so I couldn't speak to it's technical composition...I felt it struck a right balance between being memorable enough (lots of memorable tunes and lyrics I feel in this musical) and also knowing when it needed to be minimalist or quiet enough to give the characters their moment on stage as well, as this obviously features one of the best and most vaunted stories in the West, arguably France's great national epic/ The Great French Novel...
There's still the likes of Camus, Dumas, and then Proust's monstrous seven-volume epic I hope to read sometime to contend with there, but I digress.
On the other points:
1. To be clear, I don't study philosophy, I'm not a philosophy major, nor will I ever be...I need to get a job and afford drinks and tons and tons more books, after all. ;) So just to be clear, so I'm not deceiving anyone, I'm not studying philosophy...I read it, quite a bit, and I have quite a few of the major figures between Plato and Sartre sitting on my bookshelf, but, to be sure no one ascribes me any undue authority, I'm not a Philosophy major--I'm an English major. Totally different. Instead of being a snob when someone can't follow Wittgenstein, I instead can be a snob when someone doesn't understand Chaucer's English. ;)
2. Well, Draug, there are some who say every last word is completely and utterly the literal word of God--what do you say (and on what authority?) to those who hold such a view?
3. I'm not taking the parables as literal occurrences, but I WILL say that I don't have to take Jesus' message as "the truth," ie, a valid viewpoint or ideal, any more than I would take Plato's idea of Forms as factual even as he gives a parabolic Analogy of the Cave to convey the idea. (I'd mention the fact that Plato gives this idea while neither he nor his followers ever once said that you would go to a torture chamber for all eternity if you didn't believe his theory of Forms, after all, his best student, Aristotle, didn't, and Christianity has a long, long, LONG history of doing just that, but now I AM trespassing on my "Great Debate" material, so I'll leave it there.)
4. What's more, there's still no actual "proof" these were Jesus' words...Plato wrote down his works, and obviously Jesus didn't, he's actually quite the same position as Socrates, ie, being attributed many ideas and sayings but not having something of his own writing or record be passed down...actually, if anything, Socrates has a better case for his views being his than Jesus, as his trial records' report and ideals via Plato and others were written down in what would have been just a few years after his death, whereas with Jesus, the Gospels don't come in and give an account until many decades after the fact, so there's actually more evidence and proof for Socrates having existed and said what he said than Jesus.
5. Finally, even if Jesus did exist and did give his great Sermon on the Mount, that would still not prove the existence of the God or Kingdom of Heaven he was speaking of...we could not logically infer from his existing that he actually was the Son of God, for all we know--and for what it's worth, it's my own personal belief, and probably the belief that's gathering the most steam and has the closest root in truth to it presently--he could have just been a very, very spirited rabbi, a great Jewish public speaker with some ideas that appealed to his audience and a way of conveying it (ie, choosing the right metaphors and analogies) that made him very, very believable to those in 1st Century AD Judea and, as a result, this highly-charismatic Jews caught the eye of the Romans for saying something deemed dangerous, and was killed...and thus began a personality cult (plenty of those before and after this time period) and that eventually became a new religion with decades turning his life into a legend (we see that happen with leaders today, acquiring a near-legendary status, Washington and Churchill two good examples) and with the Gospels, this religion caught on...and you know the rest. We have ABSOLUTELY NO OBJECTIVELY LOGICAL PROOF to assume that, even if he existed, Jesus' message was true, or that the things he spoke of were true. Again, you must first presume them to BE true before reading for them to come off as such; if you go in, like me, first a loosely-religious Reformed Jew (and thus not believing he was the Messiah) and then as an agnostic/atheist (and thus not believing in a supernatural force at all) you have no prior reason to accept these claims. The Bible assumes its audience to already believe in God, the first line being "In the Beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth." There isn't a second to stop and establish the logical existence of god first and THEN say he created the Earth; the writers of the Bible take God as a given, and if you do not already think a God exists, the Bible does nothing to persuade you one does...you must first find a reason to believe for a reason OUTSIDE THE TEXT, be it for personal reasons or for wanting it to be true or for hearing it for the first time as a child, having adults tell you it's true and, as we seem to have a genetic disposition as a species to defer to our elder's ideals at a very young age as children and take them as fact (before, you know, we grow facial hair and listen to rock music and ride Harleys and go Dean Martin or Marlon Brando) taking what our parents say is true as truth, and so on. At any rate, there is NO argument given for God in the Bible, so ...all the things I just said, I'm repeating myself now. :)
A word on String Seconds versus Draws... From the creator himself.
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