Consecrated Religious Nonsense

I do not spring from biblical ashes and I will not fly up to be with some 34 virgins

No god of man has created me and all your books are but outdated fairy tales

The necessary faith you replace with dogma serves only to assuage your fears

I do not worry that my death is permanent and that not a trace of me remains

Your pabulum cannot nourish me with its artificial and phantasmal ingredients

You talk with your personal savior but I cannot hear the voices in your head

You take power by perverting whatever wisdom your dusty prophets left behind

Your vengeful, jealous, wrathful witchcraft cannot harm me if I will not believe

I must simply and politely say all your organized religions morph into forms of control

I do not descend from the incestuous bonds of the offspring of Adam and Eve

Jesus and Mohammed gained fame from martyrdom and early death like rock stars

Wily con men have since drained money and power from their fame for centuries

Employees of the catholic church are forced to wisdom via unnatural practices

What churlish god decrees that men grow beards and women cover up their faces

Explain to children why a god’s name is inscribed upon your nuclear weapons

Such gods would smile and send me straight to hell from their so-called heavens

What twisted father would send his faithful son off strapped up with explosives

What sick and vain faith holds human life as sacred but decrees that animals have no souls

What is the message when the competing one true faiths battle for control

You ought to be taxed heavily and have your toxic franchise emissions regulated

Your founders told wondrous stories now twisted by the clergy for its selfish needs

You prey upon the ignorant, poor and fearful, greedily co-opting their honest need to faith

Your calls to Jihad in god’s holy name would earn you hell, if only it existed

The dusty books and embellished translations are tried and true sales tools

Why does your god demand subjects live like pigs but build him wondrous temples

Acceptance of any literalist religious dogma is a sad and pathetic copping out

It must be fine to explain one’s thoughts and fears with extensible make believe

How convenient it is to invoke god’s mysterious will to quiet and to rationalize

What a brilliant stroke to let god’s self-appointed representatives also govern

How hypocritical to teach that god is love while spreading hatred of the infidels

Faith based on revealed truth is moral, ethical and intellectual cowardice

May the scowling mullahs dark broodings be lost forever to the background noise

Billions of personal saviors prattle endlessly trying to hide the onrushing void

You hold up as the very devil other faiths with objectives identical to your own

You ought to be tried for fraud, negligence and crimes against humanity

All of your grand temples should be turned into useful schools and hospitals

You perversely co-opt our need of faith into a means to gain power and control

No god speaks through you and the authority you grant yourself through ‘Him’ is bogus

Your interpretations of the actions of your fantasy characters are comical at best

Omnipotent gods balancing our sins and virtues are really quite amusing concepts

There is nothing behind your pomp and smoke or your ceremony and circumstance

That different true gods set us upon each other means we have all gotten it very wrong

You immerse yourselves in the minutiae of your make-believe to hide from real issues

The multi-generational delusion is quite seamless, but only when viewed from the inside

You speak in musty dialects that we might more easily accept divine ventriloquism

You have built competing empires off human fears and insecurity of the unknown

All your writings and monuments will disappear in less than one geologic epoch

By what right do you dangle so-called truth, revealed to others as bait for your prey

Let us strip them, shave their heads and toss them all together to see they are all the same

Make them read legal disclaimers as any normal pitchman must

Have them print the dangerous side-effects and unwanted symptoms they produce

Teach the children their flaws and fallacies as well as of their value propositions

Let them have their gods strike me dead and prove that ‘He’ has done it

Teach the dangers of blind faith in politics and religion in equal measure

Force the self-appointed spokesmen into endless debates among themselves

Grant them that god exists but make them prove that he has a ‘Word’

Rate them like mutual funds, rank them by their assets and absurdity of beliefs

Combat them with comedy and satire, reason, logic and broad education

Question their authority, make plain their assumptions and criticize their dogma

I ask them merely to explain events in a way that makes any real sense today

Who is this god, anyway?

Whose god is this

that let us explore the beauty of mathematics

while whispering only to us that we are His chosen people

Who is this god

that lets men abuse children and rob the elderly

and still shows us the grace of the earth in the springtime

Whose god is this

Whose hand we see in every detail of creation

and whose teachings we have reduced to the stalest of dogma

Who is this god

that permits us to kill for him as they would kill us in his name

and yet is love, being filled with infinite mercy

Whose god is this

that placed us in a universe 15 billion years old

where we live but our three score and twelve

Who is this god

that allows seven billion humans to overwhelm the earth

which still produces rainbows after a cleansing summer rain

Whose god is this

that we hear in Bach and see in Leonardo

yet lived in Hitler and thrived in Stalin

Who is this god

that lets children have more ignorant children without hope

and helps the fawn to its feet with mother licking so tenderly

Whose god is this

that created the beautiful clockwork chaos of cosmology

and rains down repeated acts of random violence upon us

Who is this god

Who permits us to extinguish the tiger

yet still gave us the ability to admire its grace

Whose god is this

that shines in the eyes of every smiling infant

and in whose name we kill with such impunity

Who is this god

that stands in the twilight, arms outspread over old freeways and junkyards

and simply blesses each day, our hopeless factory white bread

Whose god is this

whose work is revealed with telescopes and microscopes

and who counts each fish as it disappears from the oceans

Who is this god

Stooping so low as to tempt us with paradise and threaten us with hell

yet is omniscient, omnipresent, eternal and merciful

Whose god is this

that teaches us forgiveness to one and towards all

but allows no mercy towards those who put false gods before him

Who is this god

that pushes up dandelions amid smoking ashes

and gives us the faith with which we move mountains

Whose god is this

that brings shade from the sun and a breeze to sweaty brows

yet commands the drought, the famine, the pestilence and the starvation

Who is this god

that merely watches from above as the old lose their dignity

and invests the clouds with the patterns from our dreams

Whose god is this

Teaching us to forgive and to forget

and insisting upon an eye for an eye, again and again

Who is this god

that oversees the destruction, pollution, extinction and over-population

yet guards so carefully the seeds of hope that ever sprout in our hearts

Whose god is this

that cradles the ever-increasing poor and the hungry

and why is his word used as a tool by so many shrewd opportunists

Who is this god

that smiles down upon our torture, executions and imprisonment

and in whose love and mercy our land puts its trust

Whose god is this

that stands up for those who cannot stand up themselves

and then stands by so silently as they are led away forever

Who is this god

that we have all invented, so alike are our needs

who brings us all moral comfort as we slaughter each other, for him

Whose god is this

that the old, the halt and the sickly find so very comforting

and the dead child's mother wails to without any consolation

Who is this god

that blesses us as we poison the rivers, foul the air and butcher the trees

yet grants us the sacred sound of snow falling on the silence of the mountains

Whose god is this

that brings our family together during holiday seasons

and sends our lonely sons to faraway places to perform unspeakable acts

Who is this god

that baptizes children with paint full of lead and air full of toxic fumes

and remains at our sides throughout all the days of our lives

Whose god is this

that gave us our senses to appreciate the grandness of his creation

and taught us of drugs, alcohol, violence, repression, rape and abuse

Who is this god

in whose image are the looters, the whores, the rapists and the insane

and whose mercy gently rains down upon them all in an equal measure

Whose god is this

that blossomed in poverty and required no finery to walk in full grace

and whose faithful followers grow rich and fat in his reflected righteousness

Who is this god

that though certainly all-knowing must still test our faith

but shares all his secrets with any who simply listen