I like beautiful music but if I think of the religious aspect, it kills it for me.

I do and did more in the past too bad it was written in English. Still,it was a brilliant piece and I like some parts even better than the famous Hallelujah Chorus.

Many of the composers were paid for the dialogue while composing beautiful music, they did have to eat

I enjoy the musical quality can ignore the dialogue

The religious aspect was never an issue I simple can't listen to classic music for very long.

I am no more enraged about Handel's Messiah being a musical piece about a fictitious character, than I am enraged at Spring Time for Hitler being about a real one.

I’ve been singing this oratorio now for more than 60 years and have never paid more than lip-service to the words…same goes for all the other hymns, psalms, requiems and other Christian devotional pieces of music. The love of music is the point of singing…the libretto only the means to that end.

Music is just an abstract sound scape, there is no need at all to pay any mind to the words, to get enjoyment from it. That does not apply however to the visual arts, although the church in the past was one of the richest institutions in the world, and it commissioned some of the worlds greatest artists, the results are still almost always banal and silly.