Man’s Soul

Does one have a soul

That can be looked into?

It is rather droll

If one sees there sin too.

After age ten for some years

God becomes a person

His son ended in tears

When their relationship worsened.

Entering manhood at twenty

Finding Church sermons a mumble

And hypocrisies plenty

Our faiths in myth crumble.

Pagan beliefs make pleasurable reading

Poets and thinkers bring them alive

Evil strikes when control demands bleeding

Priests, armies and hatred arrive.

Life’s miseries made the soul’s dependance

On Government and Holy Word essential.

It seeks reassurance in credence,

Enjoys the mindset of the residential.

Catholic Christianity murdered the Gnostics

Who worshipped Christ as the son of man.

It destroyed its love along with the rustics

Whose message of peace sought to expand.

Wars of religion have wiped out species

Righteousness is the whip that enslaves,

When thought is shattered in pieces,

Succumbing to propaganda like the home of the brave.

Spinoza’s reason opens the prison.

Creator and created are one and the same.

No longer fear, no longer derision.

Religious tyranny sputters out like a flame.

Mystics heard divinity speak in the fields.

Hegel saw divinity in the winds of the universe,

But Feuerbach saw it in man’s yields,

Living on earth to quench man’s thirst.

Love of Humanity was the good man’s hope.

Afterworlds, as Hume showed, were a myth.

Inhumanity leads the sensitive to dope

And criminals to take the fifth.

Before language was mental communication.

Man’s thought carried simple emotions.

Speech brought division by stratification.

“Rulers” commanded “slaves” to devotions.

By anthropomorphizing God

Priests sanctified man’s convictions,

Conflicting and enforced by the rod

Leading to political contradictions.

Might the soul yearning for freedom

Be filled with dictated obsessions

As criminal as Satan’s Kingdom,

Desirous of another’s possessions?

Souls of nations like the US and Israel

Where wealth and violence apprise

Show disillusionment and despair so integral

To governments of criminal enterprise.

Their histories of conquest and rape

And presently of obscene torture

Sins from which they cannot escape

Stink with the corruption of nature.

Can we see the soul’s survival

In today’s ignominious calumny?

Could man’s integrity banish its rival,

Push it into oblivion dumbly?

Reason and tolerance brought it light

Rescued it from pernicious dark

And ignorance that blinds as a blight.

Its survival needs courage stark

In the heat of an American election.

Religious politics can decide its fate

As we rely on good sense for deflection

From maniacal destruction of state.

David Richard Beasley, author of That Other God —In Vienna, Austria, after WW II, an American poet and mystic sets out with single minded determination to unite the peoples of the earth through meditation, telepathy, and the collective subconscious to bring them to the knowledge of the one true “God” of humanity. (davuspublishing.com).