Nothing to do with poetry this. I try hard not to be fanciful, or self-deluded, or indulge in wishful thinking, but sometimes things just get the better of you don't they?
For some reason, ever since staying awake all last night to listen to the results of the referendum come in (I fell asleep in the bath this afternoon), I have been having a recurring thought that there is some lost and lonely individual out there who has woken to the light of day today, and found it relentless and unforgiving, and they have ever since been thinking over and over to themselves “Why did I believe that Boris and Michael could have a good idea between them? Why did I do it? I must have been mad, what came over me? What have I done?"
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Most of my blog has had some connection with writing, and particularly poetry. What follows is from the sceptic side of my nature.
I cannot think of anything, other than religion, for which such astonishing claims are made without evidence of their veracity. The religious are often easily offended, what offends me about religion is its lack of sense. In this piece I want to concentrate on two aspects of god that seem to me to get insufficient critical attention. Firstly the nature of a supposed god, in particular an aspect of god that, if he existed, he would share with us lower life-forms. It seems to me that the thing we ordinary mortals, and a god, have in common, is that neither of us are able to help being who we are. Just as we cannot help not having the kind of powers that a god would take for granted, a god must be unable to help being a god, replete with those powers. At first sight this probably wouldn't seem all that important to believers, but in a real sense it does cut the idea of god down to size. There is something he has no more power over than we do, and, I would suggest, deserves no credit for. God deserves no credit for being god, unless that is he worked his way up from being the powerless humble equivalent of a shelf-stacker in the great supermarket of heaven, to being the CEO of Heaven Corp. I find that a notion it's difficult to entertain, and I have never heard of anybody who has suggested such a thing. And yet, this god supposedly rules over us, ready to punish us for human frailties that are something he has never had to bother himself with. Doesn't seem quite right does it? Humans often admire people who have achieved something by sheer effort, but to have greater power merely by virtue of who you are by chance, seems less admirable. The other thing that has been bothering me more and more, and never seems to be questioned sufficiently, is the idea that this all-powerful, all-loving, super-being, chose to sacrifice his own son to in order to save the human race. Why on earth would a divine entity use such a crude, and cruel means to communicate with people? Why would it be necessary, given supreme powers? Admittedly he had old-testament form in this matter, in the shape of Abraham and Isaac, but in that case he relented, and didn't see things through to their grisly conclusion, but aren't we supposed to see the new testament god as a kinder, gentler being? Why isn't this universally recognised for the unpleasant nonsense that it is? |
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