Words of a Dying God, Part I
Ever since I was a kid in college
something troubling has been on my mind,
put evolution near morality
and many contradictions you will find.
Our instincts versus our sentience,
blood programming pit against free choice,
and now matter how I looked at it all,
there were hard truths that I could not avoid.
That so many things we think are moral
give us no evolutionary edge,
that the only place some virtues work
is in the world that’s inside our head.
The nice guy always does seem to finish last,
functional bullies get all of the girls;
men are not loved unconditionally,
only for what we bring to the world.
We like to think we can talk it all out,
but sometimes people do need a smack;
we study hard to make things better,
then just get farther and farther off-track.
We give to help those people in need,
then it just ends in dependency,
so many thinks that we think must be right
just seem to deepen the tragedy.
The things that we think, the things that we feel,
seem to drag us all until we’re insane,
what we want to build, and what the world allows,
are not exactly one and the same.
When I realized this, and other such things,
I spent many years just trying to think
of why evolution would produce a beast
whose brain would contradict its own instincts?
Why can we think of things that can never be?
what good are goals we can never achieve?
It seems like we’ve been set up for failure,
there had to be some reason, I believed.
For those reasons I chose biology,
got a professorship and did research,
probed deeply into the depths of the mind,
won countless accolades for my work.
Ran across endless theories of why
we contradict ourselves at such cost,
but every bit solved brought ten new questions,
all that toil, and I was still at a loss.
But the need to know remained every strong,
and though it nearly cost me my career,
I started probing the faiths of the world
to see what older wisdom might appear.
Though they have their flaws that one must wade through,
and their practitioner so very human,
they also retain time-tested ideas,
that have proved their use again and again.
I focused on the archaeologists,
combing over lost texts and old sites,
and at first it seemed I was stymied again,
until I got a phone call late one night…
CONTINUES IS PART II.
Copyright © David Welch | Year Posted 2019
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