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God,
God,
God,
God,
God,
God,
God,
God,
I don’t believe
you’re there.
Earthlings plagiarize your calligraphy,
appropriate your power,
adorn themselves in robes of verdant paper
collected from well-oiled robotic flocks.
be with me this night.
Breathe your words upon my ears,
my imperfections.
Teach me to know you
within this sculpture that you have carved.
deliver to me a blessed word.
Why Abraham?
Why Moses?
Why Joshua?
I agonize to hear your thunder,
share radiance that illuminated their knowledge.
why have you forsaken me?
Point out the evil thread
woven into my prayers.
I will rip it out!
I will tear it,
burn it,
annihilate it!
Glorify my mind,
bare my soul.
Gorge me with miracles,
awaken blind faith.
within your omniscience
lies the freedom of my will.
Does fire
await my arrival,
eager to cast
flames of eternity upon
this heathen guise?
Within your omniscience
lies the freedom of my will –
a murky paradox at best.
you are now,
now is you.
No framework binds you.
You are infallibility,
intrinsically present.
I am inherently helpless.
My view is shrouded by
your own handiwork.
love me.
Part for me the seas
of mystery.
Visit your festival
upon this incomplete creation.
You removed Job’s blanket
of doubt and anguish.
I am tortured by failure,
I am the Job you choose
to evade, elude,
from whom you keep
your manifestation,
if there, indeed, exists one.
I don’t believe you’re there.
Not even
an imperfect creature
as I would allow
the earth
to become
the evil home
of mankind’s horrific sins.
You’ll find a poem entitled “He Cried” in my online book, MICHAEL’S BOOK OF POETRY (and some other assorted foolish verses). I write a postscript following that poem trying to explain how an atheist can write a seemingly religious poem. In that postscript, I remind the reader that, on the About Michael page, I make it perfectly clear that I am not only no longer religious, but I’m not even the least bit “spiritual”. I explain myself as well as I can on that page.
One point I didn’t include is the fact that, given the chance, science may someday have solid answers for almost everything that exists in the world. After all, who could possibly have envisioned that we would someday be able to read a person’s DNA? For the vast length of time during which human kind has inhabited the earth, people didn’t even know that DNA existed.
Science continues, it moves on. It continues to discover what there is, not only here on earth, but elsewhere in the universe. Books such as The Bible or The Koran stop, period!
The Bible, with which I’m more familiar, is a narrative of a few thousand years and, once Jesus of Nazareth is crucified, The Bible merely talks about the end times in Revelations.
So for thousands of years, God supposedly went from talking to people directly, as he spoke directly to Abraham and Moses, to giving people signs, mostly catastrophic signs of his anger such as the flood or the tower of Babel, to speaking to people through an assumed human identify to, finally, not speaking to people directly at all and not even giving people signs (although some fundamentalists might debate that – and that debate would be a hoot for me). In Revelations, he does say he’ll come back once again, donning that human identity, to slaughter most of the very life he created while taking his favorites to be with him. I find it sad that anyone would believe in such an horrific being.
I’ve also said elsewhere on this site that I would never attempt to deny anyone the expression of their religious and/or spiritual faith and, although you now know more of why I don’t believe, I still believe that we all have the right in what used to be a united United States of America to worship how we wish, when we wish, where we wish as long as our methods of worship don’t interfere with the lives of those who choose not to worship as we do. I obviously most certainly believe that we all have the right not to worship a supreme being at all.
I don’t like to narrow the area to what used to be a united United States of America. I’m of the opinion that anyone, anywhere should be able to worship any supreme being in which one believes or, again, should be free not to worship a supreme being.
Unfortunately, just as the early Christians who inhabited North America slaughtered the indigenous people who were already inhabiting North America for refusing to change their spiritual beliefs, many Islamic fundamentalists will do anything, no matter how inhumane, to ensure that people who inhabit the Middle East believe in Islam.
This is not to say that at one time Christianity was intolerant and today Islam is intolerant. To quote what I’ve written elsewhere on this site, “As much as we speak of our fears of Islamic extremists today, I see a segment of the Christian population in America which seems to want to turn the U. S. into a Christian theocracy. I prefer that my country remain a secular democratic republic, thank you.”
To further quote what I’ve written elsewhere on this site, “There will be more writing having to do with my perspective on religion and/or spirituality that will appear on this site.”
This is part of that writing. There will even be more.
In “God”, I express some of the agony I went through before deciding to stop believing in a supreme being. I posted this poem at The Arcanum Café, a message board which I once visited regularly and which I’ve referenced elsewhere on this site. Most people who responded to the poem tried to help me through what they perceived was my time of doubt. When I posted the poem, my time of doubt had long passed. “God” is not a time of doubt through which I am presently going; it expresses much of what brought me to my present a-theistic point of view.
COPYRIGHT 2001 by Michael Bonanno
Reproduction of “God” or
LOC Reg. #TXu 988-155
any part therein without
the express written
permission of Michael
Bonanno is prohibited
unless the reproduction
meets The Copyright Act
“fair use” doctrine, (title 17, U. S. Code)..