Poetry: The Making of Terror

A  poem by Chengde Chen

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Terrible as terrorism is, should we be so terrified, just as terrorists want?

It’s much less frequent than road accidents that kill hundreds every day; nor scarier than psychopaths’ random attacks that are as unpredictable.
There’re greater chances of being killed by a common cold or diarrhoea.

It is the media that 'turns' a homemade bomb into a nuclear explosion.
It is the government that 'legalises' the fear of it by changing the laws.
It is the trembling public psyche that completes the process of terror –
a religion of fear, jointly founded by enemies in the name of war!

The Americans should invite their 32nd President (Roosevelt) back,
as he understood that 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'.
Or they might consult successful or unsuccessful actors on Broadway,
who know only too well that a play can’t run long without audience

Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Poetry to Refute Dawkinsism

A special poem by Chengde Chen to launch the new blog

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How to Refute Dawkins’ Atheism

 

Dear Professor Dawkins, 

Yes, your bestseller, The God Delusion, is bought by millions;
more so your TV debates taking on archbishops, hotly YouTubed.
“No belief without evidence”, your atheist crusade is convincing,
like sounding the new death-knell of religion, with web power.

When the believers defend faith with Scripture,
you dare them to “walk on water” or “turn water into wine”.
When they count the moral good religion brings,
you attribute enough wars and scandals to the Church.
When they’re lost for words, or deeds, and God is laughed at,
you harvest applause, like the invincible spokesman of reason.

However, let me ask you a hypothetical question: 
 
“If you knew it was the case that, without the fear of God,
human society would collapse, would you still reject religion?”
 
If you say “yes”, surely you would see how irrational you were –
worse than cutting off a man’s head to treat his headache.
A rational person, as you firmly claim to be, has to say “no” –
doesn’t this mean faith could be justified without evidence?

Reason has two functions: seeking truth and weighing expediency;
if we can’t tell if it’ll rain, we’ll carry an umbrella as a precaution.
Since “God’s existence” can neither be proved, nor disproved,
it’s reasonable for man to discipline himself with the imagination,
which wasn’t a “delusion” that happened to occur in all cultures,
but a spiritual organ driven by the evolutionary need to coexist.

Without the simple idea of the-Almighty-for-good-and-against-evil, 
what could have turned a race of jungle animal into a moral being?
True or not, the great invention of man’s “second heart”
deserves Nobel returning to history to award his best prize! 

 Yours sincerely, 

     An agnostic-who-explains-religion-with-evolution
 

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Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here