Our Fetishes

The Pigmy in the forest
So I've heard
Found a glass bottle.
The bottle he found, he worshipped.

The tribe turned the glass bottle into their God
Bowed to it, worshipped it,
Set it in its wreath of fine leaves.
It turned their whole village mad.

I look at the fetishes of our culture
How the bottle is almost like our ideas.
They unite us, they divide us,
They disrupt the continuity of the sound mind.

Good ideas---
Well formed ones---
Are free of fetishes.
It is not Post Hoc Ergo Proptre Hoc
But the distilled singularity of the notion
That it will save, redeem,
Bring some awful power into existence
And manifest the miraculous comfort we adore.

Religion is not the same as fetishism.
Rather, fetishism is some abnormal mental defect
Brought on by an object being placed
As the sole foundation of our reason.
If placed there, whether science, race or holy book,
It produces in individuals the divisiveness
Of all of its defects.
For, even the Bible becomes a fetish
To some Christians---
To not understand its sense
But rather get bogged down in the literal interpretations.

For, the chapters of war in the Bible
To my humble intelligence
Are there to ease the conscience of a soldier
Who has done abominable things.
Not a how to guide on war.
And stoning the homosexual or adulterer
Is much the same, that we've all been degenerates at some point in our lives
And must live humbly with the fact that we deserve a lot worse
Than what we get.
Or, the most ridiculous one
That Genesis must be taken literally.
It must be that the earth was created in six literal days
As you ask anyone educated
It's just not something we can literally believe.
Even myself. 
But, if you cannot still believe in Jesus
Despite that, then you hadn't really known Him.
As, it's just the fetish you've created
One which will be destroyed in the end.