During an appearance on “The New Man” podcast with Tripp Lanier, LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe opened up about his feelings on religion. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I had some negative experiences with religion, organized religion, growing up. There were some negative experiences within the church when I was a child.”When I was a child, I was raised in the church; I was raised in the Southern Baptist church. And I was always taught that God loves everyone and we shouldn’t judge everyone and we shouldn’t judge anyone and that we’re all equal under the eyes of God. And then, around seven or eight years old, I began to notice rank hypocrisy within church-going people on how they treated other people, how they viewed other people, what they would say on the side. And I was, like, ‘Okay, this is all bullshit.’ So I was kind of done with the whole God thing. I was not an atheist. I’ve never been an atheist, but I was — I don’t know. I just kind of loosely, I guess, gave lip service to the idea of a God, some sort of spirit, some sort of higher power. And it wasn’t until I was really brutalized by alcohol to the point where I had to ask something outside of myself for help, ’cause nothing else was there — just me. ‘Please help me. Something.’ And so I definitely believe in a higher power. I don’t know if it is a cognizant, rational, thinking deity. I don’t know if it is simply a reality itself. I don’t know if it is an underlying energy that runs through everything, but I think there is at least a sense of order to the universe.”I’ve heard that the God uses an acronym for ‘good orderly direction’,” Randy continued. “If there wasn’t any sort of direction, even within chaos, even within the chaos of our universe, I think everything would just cease to exist.”So, do I believe in a God, for lack of a better term? Yes. Do I attempt to have a conscious contact with that quote-unquote God? Yes, on a daily basis. Really, the main point of it is, do I know what that God is? Absolutely not. No clue. It doesn’t fucking matter.”It seems illogical to me,” Blythe added. “I don’t think we can comprehend, specifically, with our limited senses… Like, if you think about a dog, a dog can hear things that we can’t hear. I think we are not attuned to the frequencies of the divine. Not yet. So, it doesn’t make sense for me for there to be a specific sort of monolithic, one particular god that ‘this is it.’ Because if there was, despite what cult leaders and televangelists and charlatans throughout the ages have tried to tell you, if someone had the fucking answer, then it would be self-evident when they presented it to you. But it’s not. So I think with a lot of religions, at least the historically based ones, I think they have some, perhaps, divine aspect to this stuff. And maybe it’s the divine expressing itself through a particular person so that that culture in that moment, in that time can understand it.”That is one of my problems with dogmatic, fundamentalist religious people of any stripe,” Randy said. “They’re, like, ‘My God is the only God. And if you don’t follow this, you’re gonna go to hell’ or whatever. Let’s just say Buddha, who wasn’t even a God. He is a human being who supposedly attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree. Buddha, who appeared however many thousand years ago in India — he made sense when he he appeared there. Would he make sense to the Celtic tribes in Ireland at the same time, who were running around and committing warfare with the blue paint on their face or whatever, the Highlands of Scotland and Ireland, the Celts? No. He would not be culturally appropriate. So I think there may be culturally appropriate expressions of the divine throughout history in each corner of the world. So who am I to tell you my conception of the divine is the correct one when it wouldn’t even make sense to you?”Blythe’s second book, “Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head”, is due on February 18, 2025 via Grand Central Publishing (GCP).”Just Beyond The Light” was previously described by Blythe as a “tight, concise roadmap of how I have attempted to maintain what I believe to be a proper perspective in life, even during difficult times.”Last month, Blythe announced more spoken-word and question-and-answer events to promote “Just Beyond The Light”. The special “evening with” event includes a spoken-word performance, an audience question-and-answer session, a copy of “Just Beyond The Light” and an opportunity to have the book signed.In a recent interview with Radioactive MikeZ, host of the 96.7 KCAL-FM program “Wired In The Empire”, Blythe was asked if “Just Beyond The Light” picks up where his debut book, “Dark Days”, which focused on his ordeal in a Czech Republic prison and his subsequent acquittal, left off or if it’s a completely different book. Randy said: “It’s a completely different book. It’s a collection of — I wouldn’t call ’em essays, but different chapters about, basically different people and experiences who have [changed] my perspective for the better.”As I get older, I try not to make the same stupid mistakes again and again and again and again,” he explained. “And surprise, surprise, if you look at people who — you look at them and you think, ‘Man, this person has their life together,’ or, ‘They’ve acted in a manner that I find admirable,’ if you pay attention to them and follow their example, you don’t do stupid things yourself. I’m not saying that I don’t still do stupid things, but I’m trying fully in my old age to learn from others more.”In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan’s death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.Blythe’s prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD’s 2015 album “VII: Sturm Und Drang”: “512”, one of his three prison cell numbers, and “Still Echoes”, written while he was in Pankrac Prison, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write the aforementioned “Dark Days”, in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.[embedded content]