The Problem of Evil Philosophers say

Sagely nodding their head

On page after page we’ll forever make hay

And it’s not to be grasped by the lay

The Problem of Evil Theologists say

Promising life to the dead

We’ll never know it but continue to pray

You’ll see it on judgement day

The Problem of Evil some People will say

Following as they are led

It’s probably right to kill them this way

Let God sort them out in the fray

But in the underbrush somebody growled

Nature in tooth can be red

The problem is solved

When you see we’re evolved

We’ll take it from there if we may

~Skink

Take med down, its time to do it.

Did I think I could go through with

the pains that millions have known?

Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen,

where was I and where salvation?

Take med down.

Humankind betrayed me,

god and devil have both left me,

so take me now away.

The last scrawny jews have said

much more about the dead

than I could ever say

Take med down it matters little,

the lance-wound and the spittle

a crown of thorns is all I’ve known.

But a child cried out in vain

helpless heart in fear and pain

in poison gas. So take me down.

Take me down. I wasn’t there.

The childrens eyes so full of fear.

The mother crying out for me.

Crush my cross that never could

save them even if I would.

So take med down and set them free.

  ~Inger Hagerup

(Translated with apologies by Skink)

Today I again met the mind-numbing drone about religion as a, or more precisely The, source of wonder, comfort and spirituality. How do I live without?

Well, I do fine. Precisely because I am not invoking some ethereal soulstuff I can say with greater confidence that any New Ager that we are truly part of Nature. Surer than any sun-worshiper that every ounce of us are of stuff made by forgotten stars. More certain than any Budhist seeking Nirvana that we will forget the past but still live on in the multitude of life around us. I do not have to fear any Hell beyond what I face here, and no tedium of eternal continuance. And yet, I know that we live forever as any “now” is as eterneal as the universe.

I can be forgiven by asking the person I wronged, and seek penance by making it well again. I do not have to wring my hands over the “problem of evil”; No God is tempting us to do wrong. Any evolutionary biologist know why we are not nice to each other all the time (and why we mostly are). No omnipotent malevolence is behind earthquakes and pestilence. Plate tectonics and bacteria are. Instead I can do something about it and have a real hope for a better tomorrow.  

I do not denigrate our “souls” by saying that we are all material. It is the religious mind that is denigrating matter. I know that I have a soul, because souls are what we have. Also I know that this soul is made by the same matter that makes rocks, oaks and sunligth. Ergo, matter is capable of making something that can feel love, ponder oaks and commit genocide. It just takes Evolution.

Though not by any means planning to make an ape that could tell stories, it nevertheless did. It just took time and chance. (Or just plain bad luck if you happen to be from one of the species H. sapiens is pushing over the brink to extinction this week.) We may not be around forewer. As a matter of fact we may be planning several versions of Armageddon as we speak, but then again we may decide to cancel due to rain. We may even get off this rock before the next asteroid hits. And while we are at it, we can be fairly certain that no God wants some of us to survive more than others. And no less. And that compassion is not dependent on belonging to the rigth creed. No God is love. Loving is hammered into our genes by the failures of those who didn’t.

Is it our physics eduaction that is to blame? That when we think “matter” we think billiard balls rolling on frictionless surfaces with Newtonian inevitability. Surely our minds are made of finer stuff? No, but the biliard balls are. Nothing is inevitable even though the future may already excist. As does the past. (By the way even sober cosmologists tend to outperform the most wildly hallucinating preacher for imaginative metaphysics. And afterwards they test them. And then they get drunk.)

As tempting as ranting against education (or the lack of) is, the reason for us wanting religion so badly is deeper than that, but that will have to wait for another nigth.

A skink is a rather small, lizard-like animal. Like us, they a vertebrates, but where modern Homo sapiens have been around a few hundred thousand years at the very most, the skinks have several millon years under their belts. However, quite a few of them are having (or should have) serious doubts about tomorrow.

It is also the assumed name of my favourite literery character.