It’d be impossible for me to say I don’t understand the atheist.

It’d be impossible for me to say I don’t understand their unbelief.

Sometimes I listen to them,

And see they have found the inebriation of an idea

And they romanticize it.

They protect that feeling, for fear that it was not good.

 

At the end of the day, unbelief is just that.

It is finding, and creating, for yourself a religious experience

Out of some emotion one has found.

Maybe I do it, too.

Until, at some point, we recognize what is good.

Then the inebriation of that idea is found empty.

It is just our romanticizing it…

For the sin we had committed,

It must give our life the meaning we want.

There is something that feels good…

Be it friendship,

Be it acceptance,

But it is a pretension

On our part to turn it into our reason to stop believing.

 

Truly, I can understand it.

I listen to all the logical formulae,

All of the arguments, the temper tantrums.

I understand them, from having been one of them.

If only for a few months of my life.

I understand it— And truthfully,

Given my situation—near as bad as it can get to some people—

I would rather be here, than in the abyss that is atheism.

When I stared out into the void,

I could never see empty space.

There was always God staring back at me.

I could never say He didn’t exist,

And even in my deepest atheism,

I was praying to God about it.

 

It’s hard to say why I believe,

Other than that I can sense that there is a God…

And, after clinging to my Bible in Sunday School class,

And reading it, I had found it to be Jesus.

Because if it’s not,

Then God is a liar, who never showed himself,

Never taught us how to live.

Christ, He died for the right path.

What God is a martyr?

 

I’ll be frank…

I don’t understand why Jesus had to die.

At the best of my understanding,

It is inspiring to me that God Himself would die.

Why I must offer His soul for a substitution,

Why I must believe in Him—

It won’t ever make sense to me.

Yet, as right as rain,

I know only One God ever did truly show Himself.

And Godlike in his ability to heal, and cast out demons,

And forgive sins…

I truly want to live with Him as my example.

As imperfect as I am,

As many times as I’ve been discouraged,

I know that God showed Himself.

The fact is there was a tomb, and it’s undisputed.

And with that, it’s good enough for me to believe.

For, Christ set a perfect moral law

And told us to love one another.

Whatever Christian argument and formulae they tell me

Telling me it’s not about being a good person,

That God is not great because He empowered us to be good people…

I’ve seen the other religions.

I’ve seen God’s Spirit in them, as well as me.

But, at the end of the day, their God might be Jesus

And it might be Christians who are wrong.

Maybe men had found God,

A people who had not searched for Him,

And I’m open to that suggestion.

I say that without blaspheming.

For, I know that Jesus is the only path to salvation.

Just Who is He?

He is the Son of God,

And we must worship Him:

I’m just in doubt about who truly knows Him.

 

But, the final revelation is that God is Christ.

Who He saves is up to Him.

I only know that there is Sin—

And if they elevate her to the top of the pantheon,

I hope that the Jew’s Religion overcasts it,

And that the Fame Yahweh had in Greece and Persia

Carries on to our current time.

Lest, we sleep the sleep of perdition…

Not I, but multitudes.

Only those with understanding

Can ever be convinced.

Padraic Pearse, oh poet,

The songs of a fool you did not sing.

Hung on your gallows,

The tyrants let you die.

But what for your song?

Were you hungry for violence?

 

For the love of Republican Government

You sung your heroes-songs

Of mother Erin.

And the Banshee keened,

Oh did the shade keen.

 

We, the land where your ye fellowmen fled

We stand berated by kings and princes

Who do now claim to have royal blood.

Are they Bourbon or Hapsburg

Perhaps they are, but America,

Mother Maria,

She to whom Erin’s Exodus fled,

We have no King.

O sweet child

I came to tell you a truth.

Many will listen to the song

That sounds much like the winds and reveries of us all.

For men want to hear their hearts pipe to them from the other hearts.

 

But, to draw into the deep darkness,

To pour out truth is far more fruitful.

For, when acceptable in the eyes of the LORD

The strong winds of the crowd

To whom we chaunt,

Err like Echo, and it chaunts back;

Understand it is not our reflection to choose

In the poesy we pluck…

Rather, it is the heart of another

And their wisdom.

 

Whom, though, yours grew dark,

I ask you, “Was it I?”

And if that answer is yes,

I am sorry.

The carnal mind is full of sweetness,

But we try our furnace,

And let the embers flow over our souls

To melt its dross.

 

Skim it with the instrument.

Set it free.

For your prior truths were far more precious to me.

The professor pompously speaks his formulae;

Yet, he does not understand it.

He, rather, performs by rote his routine

A show, an ethos,—cries out foul on the students

Who do not trust him to give them the answers.

He fools millions, yet we understand it because a computer told us.

The mystery of this invention,

That what it says must be divine rite,

The professor uses it as an example

To teach, but he does not know what he teaches.

The Academy men sought out wisdom.

Our modern Academy, men remember what was wise

But becomes as vacuous as an empty vessel.

For, to have knowledge without understanding

Is a kind of sin we have passed down through our generations.