The Skeptic's Prayer

A prayer written by a skeptic.

The bible-beater condemns us to a
lake of fire so hot.

Then I ask myself, do we deserve this
condemnation or not?

Take a scan over the large, vast,
wide-open landscape.

And I guess the thumper can say it
with a face so angry, so straight?

I guess the eagle will make a
c**k-eyed landing onto melted concrete.

And then God's judgment will be so poetic,
more brimstone than bittersweet.

Prayer was yanked from the plants that
manufactured minds of dead weight, utter lead.

And our blind eye turned toward tube steak dining
seeks out punishments that equate us to Sodom's dead.

Everywhere you scan, the heathens of varying stripes are
practicing things that are not of God.

But I reply, if you exhibit contradictions yet be so
damn perfect, isn't that rather odd?

You fixed it up so we could choose to be willing or not,
but if the leeway is wanting, why should we follow that path?

I've stared at the stories and internalized the words, and
I've concluded that we received unnecessary wrath!

Punishment upon his most beloved even to the point of death,
it makes no sense at all.

It's like a temperamental adult who hasn't become a
mature soul, no wonder belief is before the fall.

All this bizarre insanity just empties my hope from the
hollows of my chest.

The existence of a piss-poor parental being like that
must be the world's longest-running jest.

I now understand the punchline to this pithy joke, so grows
the usefulness of some myelin-sheathed cells.

I prefer a death that dispenses me into eternal blackness,
not one of infinitely many noxious hells.

So that means God likely exists, and we were likely
created from pure evolutionary chance.

He dropped some primordial fire-starter into some furnace,
and left to pursue some other song and dance.

The great architect it was, who left us mathematical purity
in this orbital realm.

Is like the father that called his son Sue, us fending
madly against nature and standing at destiny's helm.

And now I stand before the thumper, the beater
smiling widely.

I am an entity independent of any spirit dwelling high
above, I remark snidely.

Don't come before me bitching about my soul suffering
a maddeningly prolonged heat death.

I have seen the horrors of gulags, and the faces of
those addicted to meth.

I will live rightly according to universal ethics and the
laws that govern this land.

I shall decide my destiny by consulting others I trust
and by what nature commands.

I don't care for your religious edicts or your spirit-driven
mandates.

Your God fucked things up far and wide, so the result is
not open for debate.

From now on, I will bow down on my hands and knees to
nothing, no religion at all.

I fall for nothing but the fact that I love mankind for
better, or against the wall.

I don't pray to you or anybody else, so I'll see you at
that meeting table.

And send me down to the brimstone pit if you are more
than an earthly fable.

Those words I have toiled over, bled my heart out to
deny hard, these sharpened barbs I penned for you.

To all earthly religion, to greedy huckster prophets,
I bid you all bitter adieu!

Reviews

[Ruth]

Great poem....religion, to me, is fear mogering, nothing else! This portrays that really well love.....all the same, when you look into it! xx