In a new interview with The Weeklings, bassist Geezer Butler talks to Jamie Blaine about Black Sabbath and God. An excerpt follows:

Q: When I was a boy I heard a preacher claim that Black Sabbath’s music was evil. I got my uncle’s copy of Master Of Reality and saw the lyrics were actually — quite Christian. Did you get any backlash over Sabbath singing a message of repentance and God being the only way to love?

A: “No, people always like to find the “evil” in the music, so they’d quote the “pope on a rope” part, out of context as usual. People like to find negative in everything. We weren’t interested in writing songs about the “nice” things in the world, everyone else was writing about that. We wanted to inject some reality into music. I think if we’d been called White Sunday we’d have had a totally different reaction!”

Q: Some historians have called “After Forever” the first real Christian rock song. What were you thinking when you wrote those lyrics?

A: “A lot of it was because of the situation in Northern Ireland at the time. There were a lot of religious troubles between the Protestants against the Catholics. I was brought up strictly Catholic and I guess I was naive in thinking that religion shouldn’t be fought over. I always felt that God and Jesus wanted us to love each other. It was just a bad time in Northern Ireland, setting bombs off in England and such. We all believed in Jesus — and yet people were killing each other over it. To me it was just ridiculous. I thought that if God could see us killing each other in his name, he’d be disgusted.”

Read more at The Weeklings.