That Smug Religious Peace

[mnaz]

Religion's smug "peace"
needs to be knocked back.
Whatever religion it may be.
Religion is not peaceful lately.

By now we realize, the world
cannot be conquered physically
like Old Testament texts suggest.
Yet we go there, over and over.

[wylde]

mnaz - agreed. when has any man made article, especially religion, offered meaningful peaceful solutions.

should "we" bomb Libya again? Yemen? Iraq? Afghanistan? et al. it never works.

[saw]

can't argue with the direction here, for some time I have felt a profound disingenuous hypocrisy coming from folks that wear their religion on their sleeve, that ignore any of the love from their religious texts, and focus on a perverse kind of redemption....this place does not seem to be peaceful , as you suggest....most all of the hawks in congress are "religious"
and I dig that the poem isn't about religion per se....it's a poem about the "missing peace"

please excuse my pun...ha ha...have a good day !

[mnaz]

Sorry, not really a "poem" here ..

I didn't say this as well as I could/should have (I mean, what's wrong with finding the answer in religion, right?). Maybe it's just those people I met in St. George in Oct. 2001 who were eerily unmoved by the events of a month before; or maybe it was years of being dragged into my old militaristic, End-Timers "church." I don't know for sure, but that smugness needs to get smacked around a bit. It all seems pretty good until the terms and conditions start raising their ugly heads ...

[mnaz]

Wylde, and Ton, I agree. I guess one could argue, using Biblical precedents, that genocide can be effective in obtaining political goals (at times). But seven billion living souls later, this organized, staged physical conquest via random mass-killing thing never works, especially if the driving motivations are too obviously self-interested by those doing the organizing, wrapped up in whatever religious wrapping paper that one might choose. (Even if it is half of the economy.) Okay, maybe it "works," but it never fucking settles anything.

Please excuse my anger. It is one of my human weaknesses.

And self-fulfilling prophecy . . . Did I mention that one yet? Yeah, that's the other insidious thing about the Big Three Programs-- this whole thing about prophecy, and what it really "means" ...

[mnaz]

I can't really argue too much with any of that, though chakra bottom-dwellers aren't limited only to the West. Well, at least not exclusively. And really, I think we're pretty much already slaves to overlords in more ways than folks realize . . . but man, we have one hell of a lot of great consumer products to consume! Yeah, let's keep 'em coming! ...

[revolutionR]

we need more not poems.

[WIREMAN]

lets drop the big one, see what happens?....randy newman

[justwalt]

religion created the division

peace is not possible for another millennia

unless some catastrophic event breaks what we have now

just saying...

[mnaz]

Ironic how religion, which is based on something so universal as a human quest to connect with a higher power, can be so needlessly divisive (and rule-crazy) in practice.

This poem actually started as a simple comment about that classic smug look and tone of some "believers" as they proselytize, but morphed into something else as I went along, like a lot of my stuff lately. Kinda odd ...

[wylde]

I think the divide and conquer extends beyond all religions, western and other, and has even morphed out of the hands of a concomitantly waning of global political power; which is now firmly in the hands of the corptocracy and their foot soldiers the lobbyists and media et al.
*looks over my shoulder for michael's support*

sorry. I digress.

[the mingo]

Romus is doing wheelies on his keyboard - *again* -

[mnaz]

I think life is like a boomerang.
In time it gets back to the throw,
and I'm so stuck on now that how
could I ever worship heaven?