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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. 8-May-08/7:06 AM
Where you go astray is in implying the necessity of Religion from the inevitability of Mystery. I can't explain why we're here, or how it all started. There are infinitely many things I don't understand-- science will explain some of them, but I know there are some things it will never explain.

Does that mean I should make up an explanation, or put my faith in someone else's (necessarily made-up) explanation? Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must hang our heads in shame. I don't know if the Universe was made by a God or a He-Man or a Gelatinous Cube or a Whatever. How could I know? How could anyone know?

My point is that even if there is some grand scheme, some meaningful wider context to our actions, then any such scheme is unknowable. What's left is the freedom to choose how we live our lives according to our own conscience. The christian religion offers a terrible explanation for why world is as we observe it (science is better), and constitutes an even worse basis for morality (your own conscience would be better). Even my stripped down characterisation - Christ dying for our sins so we can be saved and live in Paradise with Him - is a guffed-up abdication of responsibility. I'm going to dismiss it as such.

"... reality, human existence, is infinitely baffling. One gets one explanation - the Christian, the psychological, the scientific ... but always it gets burnt off like summer mist and a new landscape-explanation appears. He suggests that the one valid reality or principal for us lies in elutheria - freedom. Accept that man has the possibility of a limited freedom and that if this is so, he must be responsible for his actions. To be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans." John Fowles




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