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Voice of the World (Free verse) by Dovina

They call us Third World below the Second below the First because we have less produce less suffer more But three are really one these days we can help you understand come and let us show you hear the One World voice Osama gives us food teaches kids to read Musharraf gives promises and sewage in the street Work all day to buy a chicken or dine on scraps of rich don’t say we have democracy and allies in the West Fill not the mouth of famine if you fear to make us strong but feed the brains of young ones not yet won to jihad’s cause Come and give them options show them one big world maybe we will kill you maybe they will not

-=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. 28-Jan-08/2:25 PM
Your arrogance has swollen so far beyond thunderdome that it has retracted into its own balls and is now fuelling a second -=Even_Bigger_Arrogance=- that will blot out the sun and be gay.

To your first point, I agree religion can force a moral consensus (usually by threat of divine punishment), but obviously that's only an intra-denominational consensus. When it comes to forging consensus between people of a different faiths, its record is APPALLING. It has done more to divide the human race than just about anything else, with some unbelievably violent consequences. I'm ashamed of you.

Secondly, are you seriously arguing for religion on the grounds that it speeds up moral decision making? (a) I don't think that's worth considering in the first place, and (b) even if it was, religion is probably one of the more long winded routes to making moral decisions, because it relies on Revealed Truth rather than any innate sense of conscience (you've got to trawl through some pretty obscure Bible verses before you discover that eating bats is wrong... or have you committed Deuteronomy to memory?)

Finally, there are many value systems that have nothing to do with God. Chiefly because healthy people do not require a divine spark to realise that murder is naughty. Probably the most popular among atheists is secular humanism, but an individual's value system is really inspired by a myriad of factors, from their formative years at a Respected Public School, to whether or not they get a 2:1 in Combined Media Studies from Loughborough University. And nearly all literature (to name but one of the Arts) informs morality in some way: Dickens, Orwell, Burgess, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Stephen King's It, and so on. There isn't just One Book, One Chosen People, One Jesu (but if there had to be One Book, that book would be Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab.)




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