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EUDEMONIA (Human Flourishing – for the religious)

“Why is there something, but not nothing?” is a question
that confounds philosophy, science, and religion.
Whence came matter-energy, and the laws of nature?
Were they magically ordained by a Divine Creator?
No, gods are no answer, they just beget another question;
“What begot gods, is there an infinite regression?”
Religion’s sciolistic answers entail rhetorical sophistry,
boasting specious teleology and casuistic etiology.

Stone Age people, for want of any science education,
invoked gods and spirits in their explication
of forces of nature, wondrous and frightening,
like fire and flood and thunder and lightning.
Their superstitious beliefs they thought made sense
of a world incomprehensible, mired in their ignorance.
From shamans in trances to praying priests on a mission,
mankind’s ‘Original Sin’ was the fall for superstition.

So, from the brutal Bronze Age up to modern times,
and from the frigid Arctic down to tropical climes,
the gods begot theology that’s unsubstantiated twaddle,
on what an invisible and silent god’ll
devise as its inscrutable, eschatological plan,
but the gods all were made in the image of man.
So, what confounds the concept of objective morality?
Why, all the gods who condoned their own immorality.

Jehovah, Christianity’s Almighty Lord God,
lords it over Heaven, though he’s a sordid old sod.
He’s malicious, capricious, jealous, and genocidal,
homophobic, misogynistic, and megalomaniacal.
He tasks his sidekick, Satan, with cruel sadism in Hell,
torturing ‘sinners’ for all eternity, and atheists as well!
So, as the problems with theodicies remain unresolved,
Jehovah, from his turpitude, cannot be absolved.

Yahweh, god of Zion, is a meshuggener and a jerk.
Oy vey, so many rules on life, like when to work,
and how to dress, and what to nosh and sip,
and mohals giving baby boys the snip.
Yahweh’s a nudnik! So, what else is new?
Is a shiksa blonde not kosher? Is the Pope not a Jew?
Religious rules, begot by Bronze Age nomads,
have got observant Jews by the gonads.

Allah, the god of Islam, is a fierce judgemental djinn,
who’ll reward you with houris, if you submit to him.
Apostasy, from Islam, is treated just like a crime;
Muslims’ll threaten to kill you, if you don’t toe the line.
And if you dare to draw Muhammad in a comic cartoon,
there’ll be chaos and killings from here to Khartoum.
So, face Mecca at prayer, five times a day at least,
and stick your ass up in the air for the Religion of Peace.

See the Muslim, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
Spiritualist, Wiccan, Christian, and Jew,
Confucianist, Shintoist, Taoist, and Hindu.
Yea verily, the faithful at prayer all look dopey;
prayer doesn’t work, it’s superstitious baloney.
If praying to your god really worked, just imagine,
our world’d be a better place, sans plague, sans war, sans famine.

Well, why would yours be the ‘One True Faith’
in a magical, phantasmagorical, astral wraith?
The varieties of religious experience reveal
a feeling of a god’s immanence might seem quite real,
but feelings of the numinous are clearly psychological,
so belief in any god is really quite illogical.
Monistic materialism makes for rational understanding;
objective evidence of a spirit realm’s obviously lacking.

It’s evident we have just this one life,
with all its pleasures, challenges, toil, and strife.
As social beings we evolved our moral sensibility,
combating selfishness, lust, and venality.
Human evolution’s due to Natural Selection,
so life derives no purpose, at any god’s direction.
Religion’s harm outweighs its good, the rationalist laments
our value judgments being based on reason and evidence.

Religion should have no say in the politics of a nation;
its revelations and dogmata lack a rational foundation.
Human flourishing, (Aristotle’s eudemonia), conflicts
with the social engineering that religion inflicts
on societies that could democratically endorse
rationality-based ethics, mores and laws.
The most religious nations often are the most barbarian,
whereas the least religious are the most egalitarian.

Religion validates discrimination and oppression;
religious faith stifles policy on research and education.
Moderate religion’s like fertile soil, full of pious ordure,
wherein extremism takes root, to terrorize and torture.
Holy texts, from ancient times, in ignorance divine,
were blind; LGBTQ and straight folk are all equally fine.
See, a new era beckons, where humanity could be,
as reason infers, one great family.

You might blame wishful thinking and indoctrination;
if they subverted your mind, they’re an abomination.
But there’s no need for you to blame your genes;
your faith’s fomented by socio-religious memes.
They corrupted your mind with a contagious infection
of superstitious ideas that can’t stand close inspection.
So, cast them out, get rid of that insanity,
then you can revel in your unfettered Humanity!