Defiance

you scream at me to obey or face the fires of Hell
    from your megaphone in the park
    from the speakers of your mosque
    with your scriptured signs outside the sinner's funeral

    your heaven of biblical obedience
    your paradise of 72 virgins
    your nirvana of blissful enlightenment
mean nothing to me

perhaps I will face judgement when I die
perhaps I will face oblivion
perhaps my loved ones will be lost to me
    as I drown in the emptiness of an atheist's death
    or I burn in the fires of your Hell

but,
    you cannot take away the present
    you cannot take away my compassion
    you cannot take away the peace that grows from the injustice i correct
    you cannot take away the mark I will leave on this world

    I will do what is right
    If my soul will pay the price

    I will defy you for an eternity
    and my paradise will be now
because good is in the way we touch the world

Author's Note

I'm actually not an atheist, but I'm pretending to be for the purposes of this poem.

Reviews

[New Dawn]

Religion should never be forced but sought by those who feel they have room for it in their lives. I do not believe in a condemning God who would punish us indiscriminately. Living to a set of morals is important, being a good person is important and being able to forgive ourselves when we fail to live up to that is also important. I know atheists who live to a high moral code and christians who attend church and feel themselves to be highly moral on that basis alone. Great poem !

[Master K-tops]

Well,I have something for you too New whatever,did you create yourself? You say He is a condemning God when He made you,you sin and He asks for you to repent and come back to Him. He is loving and He is your creator. He has all the rights to condemn any wrong acts of yours. He is God!

[New Dawn]

Ah but I don't say he is a condemning God - I actually said I do not believe in a condemning God - I did not say that I do not believe in God - you are confusing religion and faith - they are too different things. Religion is created by man, run by man , and twisted by man to fit his own idelolgy. Faith is faith - individual to each of us and in my mind completely private.

[Rita L. Sev]

This is excellent. I don't think your poem suggests atheism, necessarily, but rather a person fed up with the contradictions and injustices in organized religion. Faith can be a wonderful, healing gift, but religion often suffocates that (I am Catholic, love the traditions, the ceremonies, etc, but my FAITH is between me and the Divine.) I think you said so much with the final line: "Good is the way we touch the world." Well done!

[Muse]

And you convinced me. I had a religious piece of work of mine get rewritten with the help of an athiest. It actually gave my words more clarity and substance because I knew what was in that head of theirs. You will find...that just like believers...a lot of them are passionate about the way we treat one another....the believers say "this love" it is the fruits of our faith and beliefs being shared...the non-believers say it's just being accountable for his or hers own actions. All karma to the side.

There lies the conundrum.

[TLK]

Just because you believe does not mean you are not expected to be judged, and fail in the eyes of judgement. Atheists, on average, only disbelieved in one more God/Goddess/of the Pantheons of Gods than any believer.

Therefore, I read this as working equally well whatever the beliefs of the narrator. It was a searing piece which touches on a real aspect of felt spiritual emotion.

[Brandon S. Whitten]

Excellent point you've made. Kudos for this splendid read and write.

[.]

~ i'm not an atheist either... (on most days of the week :P)... more importantly, i love this poem... ~ most of my teen years were spent in a locality where every few days someone would organize a "jagrata"... ~ which means "staying awake all night long to sing bhajans loudly"... ~ i love certain bhajans (hindu devotional songs)... but those jagratas used to torture us... sometimes we had exams the next day... sometimes we were ill... (viral fever)... sometimes we had relatives visiting us from another part of the country and we couldn't talk to them... sometimes we were watching a football match or movies on television... ~ those bhajans were so damn loud... but no one ever protested... because it was done in the name of religion... ~ we were thrilled when we moved from that locality and the first thing my brother and i said was "yay, no more jagratas"... :P

[JR Darewood]

I won't lie, I actually find the bhajans charming. I love that people walk for days and stab themselves during Thaipusam. I love that Catholics think they are drinking blood, and that at certain churches on a specified day of the year someone can rub oil on your neck and say something in Latin and the patron saint of sore throats will cure you. I love that there are muslim "magic mechanics" who will purify your salvaged car of the spirits of the dead who inhabit them.

I guess what I don't like is that so much injustice is done in the name of religion: violence, war, xenophobia, beatings, ridicule, hatred. Religion can bring people together to do beautiful things, but that is dwarfed by the incomparable horrors it has produced. This was just a reaction i had to an evangelical that i extended to all evangelism throughout time, but when I re-read it, it actually sounds like a poem about gay marriage. So I guess it can be about a lot of things.

[.]

~ well... i love bhajans too... especially the bhajans of hari om sharan... but i have a colossal problem with the violation of personal space... i remember the times when those loudspeakers used to torture us all night... especially before exams and when we were ill... ~ and... i know that it starts with the violation of space in small ways... and then it grows and grows and grows... into the things that you listed... my own home was butchered so i know what you mean... ~ but i do have a problem with all kinds of dysfunctional ideas that are spread... things like cell phones can be charged by placing them in front of a photograph... ~ i don't think religion is anti-science... and when it is projected thus, i get creeped out... ~ people are taken for a royal ride here by those who spread anti-science ideas...

~ to me this sounds like a poem... that emphasizes the need for humanitarianism... i think that the need of the hour is to respect everyone's human rights... it shouldn't matter if someone is a believer or not as long as the person is humane...

[JR Darewood]

good point