.
Asinine
to atheist evolutionists
When your science cannot put to rights
The special wrongs of our divinity,
Your exasperation reaches heights
That challenge all the laws of gravity.
When you talk at us and see our hearts
Are strong on blind belief and Godliness,
Though we are more than sums of our seen parts,
You tar us with unknowing ugliness.
You want to stick us tightly to one spot
Where no amount of feathers help us fly,
Demand we acquiesce to what we’re not
According to your science that we defy.
No heaps of calling us an ass or donkey
Makes you or I descendants of a monkey.
.
.
Damian Robin is a writer and editor living in the United Kingdom.
This is a well-written sonnet, although as one of your addressees, I assure you that
(a) I thoroughly respect religious faith despite lacking it personally, and
(b) as a conservative I think that religious observance plays a valuable social role.
Thank you, Richard, for your positive comment on the poem.
Thank you also for your compassion in respecting religious faith and observance. I agree that religious observance has a valuable social role. Myself, I do not practice specific observances as I am not religious but have a spiritual faith. I practice Falun Gong.
I do many activities with practitioners locally and globally. In the future these will doubtless become more formalized and the practice will be viewed as a religion.
Great ending that perfectly fits and concludes our Christian thoughts.
Thank you so much, Roy. I do value comments on my things that have ‘great’ and ‘perfect’ in them !
I don’t know if you are using ‘our’ to include me as a Christian. Practicing Falun Gong, there are many overlaps with Christianity.
Like Richard, I agree that this is a well-written sonnet. I’m with Roy on the concluding couplet… so often Christians are mocked because pseudo-science (that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with political ideology) is meant to be worshipped at the altar of political correctness. But… and this is a tough one… I have atheist friends who display far more Christian traits than many “Christians” and they don’t agree with today’s “science”. So where does that leave atheists who have turned their backs on the political aspects of today’s bogus scientific finds? Perhaps this is a turning point. When one can see that Darwin’s theory of evolution doesn’t work mathematically (I thank DNA and computer technology for that) then they may question the validity of the modern religion of “Science” and look to finding a “Creator”. Damian, thank you for bringing a subject, that needs to be discussed, into the poetical and political arena. And this is the only arena this offers that type of discussion. Thank you, Evan!
Thank you, Susan, for the positive view of the poem.
My biggest difficulty with atheism is Richard Dawkins. His writing had received many literary prizes. His rhetoric is brilliant at bringing people into accepting the models of science. He believes in science but will avoid the comparison with a theist belief. For him, science holds the truth without a doubt. When people debate with him and put the debunking arguments to him about science (or Science) that he puts to theists about God, he will have none of it.
It used to be that when people in the West talked about ‘believers’ it was predominantly about ‘believers in God or deities, the supernatural, the wider-than-the-sensorially-perceivable’. Now we should make a clear category for ‘believers in the all-mighty, irrefutable powers of Science’.
Damian, thank you for your interesting reply. I thoroughly appreciate it.
Where Richard Dawkins in concerned, I believe his rhetoric is only “brilliant at bringing people into accepting the models of science” because his voice is allowed and loud and his literary prizes are of these subversive times, just like the Golden Globes and Oscars… I think Ricky Gervais put paid to the value of these type of faux awards the in-crowd puts so much store in. I read ‘The God Delusion’ in 2006. Dawkins lost me at the celestial teapot analogy drawn from the philosophies of Bertrand Russell. He completely lost me when he mentioned his alternative to God as our Creator being aliens.
Science is indeed the new religion. I say (without a trace of irony) – God help us.
Good poem sparking good discussion, Damian. I have seen a cartoon of a person kneeling before an idol in the shape of Darwin, but should it not be a lower beast? Evolutionists are neither atheists nor science devotees, but animal idolators.
I believe the current name for the scientific theory of creation is Intelligent Design. It is based on the sound truth that there is irreducible complexity in nature, even in the simplest and smallest things. This cannot be the result of random chance, but requires a designer. The only way for evolutionists to get out of this is to posit a vast number (10 to the 500th power) of universes, because with this number, there could by chance be a universe like ours. But sadly for them, Walter Alan Ray proved logically that they must posit an infinite number of universes or accept intelligent design. Real scientists balk at an infinite number, because infinity is not a number but a concept, with which calculations cannot be done.
Regarding Falun Gong, I accept what seems to be the view of most practitioners, that it is not a religion, but a practice with which some overarching moral ideals are associated. Thus, a person could practice both Falun Gong and a religion. I am reminded of the work of the English Benedictine monk Aelred Graham, who wrote a book called Zen Catholicism. He argued that the practice of Zen (seated meditation) need not be linked to Buddhism, but could be useful to Christians as a discipline to sharpen meditation and to focus attention on better following Christ and Saint Benedict (by avoiding waste of time and resources, for example).
Practice (one’s way of life, including the moral aspect) is attractive to many moderns because some practices (such as Falun Gong or Zen) seem to allow one to keep belief (the equally important aspect of truth) separate from conduct. This, I think, leaves aside the highest part of the human spirit, in which there is a God to be adored and worshipped. It promises to make human social life easier, but can there really be spiritual life in which spiritual truth is decided or ignored by each individual, has only minor or partial influence on conduct of life (practice), and may not be shared by those who think they can align practice nevertheless?
That’s too much to argue here, but there are two minor things you might want to fix in the poem. With “no amount of feathers helps us fly,” you need the singular verb “helps” because the subject is “amount” (singular) not “feathers” (plural). “According to your science we defy” might seem better than including the extrametrical “that.” I can see that “that” is an effort to clarify, but is it really needed? Another way to clarify could be to change “your” to “the” or “false.”