Chris De Burgh: I've always had a deep distrust of organized religion. Although religion has been a massive comfort to billions of people down the years, I have been distrustful, certainly as a historical student at university, of looking at how power has been manipulated by religious institutions over the masses for centuries. So I always felt very uncomfortable about that. I admit that I am a Protestant by religion, not a Catholic -- I'm living in a Catholic country, but we have Church of Ireland faith, which is basically Church of England. I'm certainly a believer in Christ, but I kind of just about stop there. I think even the Bible you have to look at a little carefully, because let us not forget the people who wrote the Bible were in fact, human beings as well, fallible as anybody else. So my beliefs tend to go into that sixth area where I am absolutely certain in my own way, and I certainly won't impose this on anybody else, but I do believe there is a vast power around us all the time. It's like an Internet of information - this is your Google search.

Prayer, I think does work, and it particularly works in despair, when you really have tried everything and I think something happens in the human brain that transmits signals, perhaps to this greater power, and if you listen carefully - and I am certainly not the best at it, but sometimes I can listen - it's like turning on your radio. Just turn on the radio and start listening, hunt down that place where you can actually pick up a strong signal. And this all may sound very totally bizarre to people who are either non-believers or cynics or agnostics, but you asked me about my personal beliefs, and that's what they are. I think the energy that we get from natural forces, and even the ones that we can see and feel and touch, like looking out my window here in Ireland at the most beautiful spring trees and how these things can die for so long, as they do in Canada, and suddenly "boom" they emerge again. We are almost like transgressors, we are trespassers on this planet and I think the more we learn about it - I am quite certain they are trying to speak to us but we're not really good at listening.

Photo courtesy Sony Music Canada.

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