You dream your Adam an amoeba
To break his eukaryotic whole
And split in two his God-made lonely soul,
To clone his greed, great cowardice,
And make another apart to blame
(For, Michelangelo notwithstanding,
Pointing the finger at God across the chaotic sky
Is less than satisfying):
Your darling Eve, a wanted wanton
At once silly and deceitful,
The easier to ridicule and despise:
The mistress of distress, the mother of all lies;

Unjustly shoved from the garden of supernatural love
(An insipid primordial paradise, where nothing changes
And choice is an uncherished illusion)
By the remote Father figure with His imperious concerns despotic,
The impossible demands, fatal reprimands,
Who trips so that they will fall—
The broken couple shatters in shame,
The apple falls close to the tree,
Their children murder and nest
Incestuously to people the deserts with sparks so demonic
They must be drowned in dark and deluge and death;
Later women and afterward men
Are damned forever for every disagreement
(Whether of diet or deportment):
Every natural thought is made impure,
Every reasonable word a blasphemy,
Every act but strict obedience
(To a silent god who doesn't speak,
Whose every command must be invented,
Interpreted again by fickle men),
Conveniently, a sin;

Never has such a fuss been made over a dead man,
Whose words, once trivially grand, were with the breath
Immediately stolen from the mouth of his corpse
By those who then inverted (and thus perverted) them—
Messianic miracle! the dead is risen! (but reduced
Via reverse transubstantiation in cruciform embrace)—
Swapping purity for power, salvation for control,
To build a Christian fecalith of fidelity
Before which all are commanded to kneel
And likewise worship death, subvert the real;
To build arrogant cathedrals with priapistic poses
Struck to impress the naive, the poor of purse, and worse,
Those who can't much think and only feel, and seduce them
To sacrifice, to orgies of piety and prayer,
With the quick spells and misdirection of self-sainted stage magicians
Working to obscure their sacrilegious trick,
The mean motive of their mission,
Their message of nightmarish hell and eternal damnation
From which the worldly lords who lead them,
The chattering claque of clerics,
Enjoy the heaven of exemption:
Let the hungry lions eat meat while the saved sheep weep;

And preach of fear and limitation,
Lamenting man and his weak and crooked core
While embodying all the sins of their own designation
In self-fulfilling prophecy and in sermon citing litanies of
Human weakness to justify those transgressions
Rather than their secret certainty that there is
No force behind their farce
But that which they themselves provide
In servile bonds of shame, in pillories of salt,
Freeing them to feed in contrived rituals of tears:
Pagans purged,
Parishioners punished,
Peccant priests provided for,
Popes pimped like primordial pop stars
Of sick and sacred appetites,
And a hapless world of fools at fault the feast;

Embracing a pieced-together tribal bible
Boasting intolerant values of violence and vengeance
Renamed "love,"
While denying any possibility of earthly justice
For those who bleed, the blessed;
Excusing themselves from the responsibility of bequeathing it
And trading even the forlorn hope of achieving it
For impassioned promises of a postponed reckoning
And high exalt, a posthumous reward
Rendered above by another hand;
Espousing revelation by a band of men dead
Before ninety generations of our grandfathers were born,
Ninety generations over which nothing has happened,
God has not appeared except in the delusions of the mad
And the starved dreams of the needy—
Confusion: you cannot witness what you've never seen—
And most advances by man and in his society have come
Not guided by the rote rule of totalitarian religion
But despite it:

The ideal scam is one in which there is no threat
Of discovery (and therefore no accountability)
For those who perpetrate the fraud;
Fantasy ends at the body's grave,
So enshrine innocence (a pretty term for ignorance),
Encourage childish superstition, preach against what seems,
For if only the lost can be misdirected,
Only the shaken shaved and enslaved,
Then all meaningful maps must be discredited
To sell the scheme:
Faith is a feeling for the false;

All true prophets are heretics;
Exploration is inherently deviant;
The dangerous must always be damned:
Galileo & Darwin—Discovery & Dissent—
More precious than Jesus
And no less crucified
By those who knew—and cared—not what they did.
There are two types of men in the world:
Those who want to be gods
And those who don't want to be
At all.