Freethought Poetry: Mothers

This is a first of its kind in the site, and it’s still experimental. Red mentioned that perhaps more of us could share prose or poetry about freethought, so here goes my first dive into this mess 🙂

Mothers

Mother, you bid to bathe me with boon, and still you do

Try, for you feel it’s your responsibility to.

You’ve sacrificed, and supplied me with sustenance

There was a time, I remember, when our parlance

Were very much attuned to each other’s ideas and thoughts

But then I studied and grew, and I think you see it was not for nought.
*
Mother, you never really showered us such spirituality as

Father did; he would try to preach the Bible from start till last.

Yet still you required religious reverence, relished it if you will

You believed in heaven and hell, Adam and Eve, and of course good and evil

As a child, I believed those, and I still remember believing them too

I was a victim of it all, indoctrination, and I think so were you

*

Mother of my mother, I’ve no doubt you’ve assiduously applied all

Your talent and time to transform this future mother’s mind into a thrall

Do I then blame you for bequeathing this bane? This irrational virus of the mind?

Perhaps so, but you are just a victim as well, in a long chain left behind

By forebears who were perhaps too quick to believe and be converted

From a father and a mother to their sons and daughters, the passing of the virus repeated.

*

Mother of my mother, father of my mother, and many of our ancestors

They took pleasure, and so do you I believe, from knowing your errors

Your actions, your thoughts, somebody is watching; Pretty silly if you think about it for a moment

That you take as a rule, Bronze age ideology, instead of actual discernment

Of how things really work, science showing the systematic silk-road to awareness, to evidence

Which luckily, some of our ancestors started, instead of balking in gods and their supposed omniscience

*

Motherland, you’ve spuriously spawned spirit satiated sapiens since stone ages

People who cling to quick reaffirmations, even if evidence says the erroneous explanation engages

Not man’s faculty of reason, but his irrationality and will to believe

And if it be so, would it not be possible then, that any lesser man contrive and conceive

Any ludicrous and fanciful mythology, unto his own machinations and whims?

“Of course!” That’s the answer. As Dawkins puts it, those inventions pass on as memes.

*

Motherland, how long will ‘heathens’ like me, unto which science and skepticism prevail,

Be beset by bothersome brigands banding together, to remove me from freethinking land from where I hail?

The time of rationality, of science, of constructive skepticism, of evidence seeking, should fill the 21st century

Yet the century is still plagued by, unfortunately, blind and unyielding irrationality

If what religion means is to be awed by our fleeting lives in the vast cosmos, then I’m a religious man

But I would not immediately jump blindly by mere faith, and always reason out if I can.