God
God is energy
God is light
God is sound
God holds the atoms
That swirl in the ground
God is flowing
Through you and me
God is the galaxy
And electricity
Religion is dogma
Religion is a lie
That separates us from energy
And puts God in the sky
I don’t believe in
Jesus, Buddha, Krishna or Mohammed
They’re all just people
That lived on this planet
I don’t believe in prayer
Or a God that cares
A force for good or evil
With a face that stares
Religion is an evil
Full of pomp and hypocrisy
Useful by the powerful
There for all to see
If God were alive
In such simplicity
Guiding our lives
On a planet in this galaxy
One tiny speck of dust
In a raging sea
He’d appear the same to you
As he does to me
Not as Jesus to some
Just the chosen few
Jehovah to some others
Creating pagans and true
Giving out commands
Ordering us around
With strange beliefs
And dictats profound
No – God is the atom and the energy
The fuse that makes them dance
And the time to let them be
God is around within and without
With no Heaven or Hell
On this magic roundabout
When I think about religion
Perhaps there’s something I missed
Maybe God’s just punishing me
For being an atheist.
Opher 8.2.99
I’m an atheist. I do not believe in god or religion. I believe in science, carbon dating, Darwin, evolution and the Big Bang.
I believe the Bible and Koran were written by men. They are not ‘the word of god’.
I see no evidence of creation in the ‘design’ of the human body or the universe. I see a lot of things we do not understand with out limited intelligence and perhaps we never will.
I acknowledge the good things that religion has produced: the cathedrals, works of great beauty, poems and writings that move people, morality that helps people live their lives happily, comfort and purpose in times of desolation.
I believe morality came before religion.
I believe in tolerance, peace, love, free speech and the right of people to believe what ever they want. I think we should argue our case with passion.
We don’t all have to agree – just respect each other.
I also see the terrible things that have been carried out in the name of religion (and still are), the slaughter of unbelievers, pogroms, crusades, jihads, persecution, holocausts, genocides, crucifixions, beheadings, burnings and discrimination. I see the crazed fanaticism of the fundamentalists and the intolerance, bigotry and hatred it induces. I see the indoctrination of small children and cultural brainwashing.
I find the beliefs of creationists and fundamentalists (along with the dogged quoting of religious texts) absurd. I have studied how those texts were put together and find their formation, translation and content all extremely suspect. They were written by various men, long after the events, passed down generations by oral tradition and accrued into books. These books were then further culled to remove ‘heretic’ works and mistranslated. What we have is a mish-mash of contradictory offerings, purporting to be the word of god but really a collection of writings from many suspect sources. No more the word of god than my poems.
We seem to have a need to believe in some deity and magic. It is a psychological need. We’ve worshipped suns, moons, rocks, idols, ancestors, cats, trees, and supernatural superbeings who we have placed in the sky in heavens, valhallas, cloud palaces above Olympus, paradises and the rest. We have had gods and goddesses cavorting in human form, creating catastrophes, drinking, fornicating and causing mayhem. We have idolised, worshipped, sacrificed and beseeched them all. Most of the ones that were previously idolised to the point of martyrdom and believed in to the point of death have fallen by the wayside. Once they ‘ruled’ over millions but now we no longer know their names.
It just so happens that we have a few that are presently flavour of the month. Wars will be fought over them, sacrifices made, and much prayer and offerings will be presented up to the gods. The only trouble is that those gods do not exist. They were invented by men (few by women) and are now being used to gain power.
Our present religions will fade and die. No doubt they will be replaced by others equally incredible.
Meanwhile science continues to push back the frontiers of knowledge so that we understand more and more.
I believe all religion is a product of human imagination but I can be persuaded that there are mystical forces at work in the universe. They are probably scientifically verifiable – given time. The energy in the atom; the transformation of a supernova.
My idea of a ‘god’ is more akin to atomic energy. It’s an incredible force that pervades the entire universe. I do not think it is conscious, has purpose or thinks we humans are anything special. It is. It is something in the midst of nothing. It came into being and that in itself is miraculous. Forget the rest.
I am an antitheist because I believe all religion is false, it creates more harm than it does good and it is used by the powerful to gain more power and wealth. It is one more cause of misery, hatred, violence, bigotry, intolerance and arrogance. We’re better off without it.
The end verse is meant to be humorous.
