AN ATHEISTIC PORTRAIT
~ 1 ~
From darkness into light we came,
Back to darkness we will go,
For death treats everyone the same,
As reasoning doth show.
From the dead no one returns,
they never have nor will,
A fire its own fodder burns,
Until its flames are still.
We did not leave myth behind,
The death defying dream,
The moral codes by men defined,
That are not as they seem.
For all we have is the law,
In which religion is extreme.
~ 2 ~
To expect from life what life is not,
To hide from what is real,
Loses face when you are shot,
And when cruel pain you feel.
No God will come to save you this,
Only by will power you revive,
Never did belief in myth,
Help people to survive.
Belief, means that one does not know,
The answer to a thought,
So it is false seeds that they sow,
For they believe in naught.
The prejudice that from them grow
Leaves the world divided and distraught.
~ 3 ~
We see pyramids of ancient times,
When only Kings were Gods,
Still today we see the lines,
Of sacrificial graves in bloodied sods.
We see the rich and we see the poor,
The starving, and the stout,
One strains his back to build the door
That the other shuts to keep him out.
Fundamentalists go to heaven,
Most wish they would go to Hell,
if the ten commandments number eleven,
they are not prepared to tell.
For to them one represents the law,
The law being one book as well.
~ 4 ~
But in this religious society of dreams,
We make new laws every day,
The do not's that embrace extremes,
Infringing on all you might say.
It is a society of many factions,
Many cults and racist trends,
Based on monetary transactions,
And he who pretends.
It uses violence against others,
And violence against its own,
Denies the rights of women; Mothers,
As its long history has shown.
All opposition it smothers,
Lest the truth be known.
~ 5 ~
It brainwashes its children,
That they are all of like mind,
All mixed in the same cauldron,
The more intelligent ones refined.
It opposes all free thought,
Particularly of the thinking man,
Who is not in the whirlwind caught,
Thus his words they cannot ban.
They invent demons and witches,
To depose opposite views,
Covering up obvious glitches
Behind the rhetoric it imbues
Making people dependant,
On the one God it pursues.
~ 6 ~
But no God ever materializes,
No promises are ever kept,
But such is the effect of such devices,
That such truth they reject.
They replace death with a nirvana,
Make it a sacred paradise,
Sounding good so they try harder,
To believe heaven is very nice.
Who were they who died at birth,
Were they Gods people too,
Those who never knew the Earth,
Did they also pass on through
Does not some simple free thinking,
Reveal these things as untrue.
~ 7 ~
The brain rots with the body,
How can thoughts then survive,
Without thought we are nothing,
We are not really alive.
Our characters have gone,
What we were has decayed,
For when living is done,
It is all lost beneath the spade.
Yet there is the frustration:
How can the living mind die
That compels the persuasion
To believe in a lie?
That we all go off to heaven,
With the Angels to fly.
~ 8 ~
Whose thoughts do you think with,
Are they really your own,
Or are they fashioned in sync
With cloned thoughts of a clone.
Why do you believe ?
Is the question that I ask,
Do you really perceive,
What I do honestly ask.
For I ask not if you do believe,
Nor if you do not,
I simply ask, why;
There is no underhand plot.
The question sounds simple,
But I know that it's not.
~ 9 ~
Some will react quite quickly,
Those who do not think.
Some will just snub me
As a blasphemous old fink.
But those with intelligence
Who can think for themselves,
Those with the diligence
To wipe the dust from the shelves -
They will spend time thinking,
Through the logic and the facts,
Sorting through a sprinkling,
Of the multitude of tracts,
To which people respond,
Recording historical acts.
~ 10 ~
For we who would debate,
The validity of the cults,
Without presuming the fate,
Of the final results
Know we cannot discuss things,
With a fundamentalist few,
For to the debate it just brings,
An inflexible point of view,
For if there are no doubts,
Then faith is simply blind,
Leaving the possibility out,
That some truth can be defined.
From talking on a level,
Where respect and understanding is refined
~ 11 ~
Faith shifts the burden from the self
To a non-responsible place,
Thus it is wiped from the shelf,
Lest it bring to one disgrace.
Thus it drives reality away,
Sheltering us from the rain
That we do not learn to cope
With the consequences of pain.
For unless we burn a finger,
How do we know the stove is hot,
Tis meant to teach us caution,
To duck lest we are shot.
But to turn the other cheek,
Is to lose your life and rot.
~ 12 ~
Take a look around you
At the world in which you reside,
Not just one country in isolation,
Take a good look then decide.
What has religion done for the planet,
What has it done to unite us all,
Has it allowed us to group together,
Where is the love it claims to install.
How many lives have been lost,
In the name of one God or another,
When will we realize the cost,
When will we, the truth, discover
That when a man's life is lost, it's lost,
That dead men do not recover.
~ 13 ~
Religious societies have failed,
Reality cannot dwell in dreams,
Violence has not been curtailed
Our balloon is bursting at the seams.
When will we turn towards a culture,
That does not condemn and judge,
Does not divide and puncture,
form factions that will not budge.
Do we believe that what we're doing
Are the proper things to do,
Are the goals that we're pursuing,
For the benefit of me and you.
For the benefit of those we ruin,
Because we don't agree with their religious view.