Thought for Today (Aug 10, 2004) Share this with Fundamentalists
Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:41 pm
Thought for Today
A bit of poetry for your meditation from Jesse Kornbluth (a..k.a. Swami) on Beliefnet
August 10, 2004 | 3:00 p.m.
The Earth is just two redwoods old,
we are by certain preachers told.
So fossils and mutation rates
are simply Satan's sucker-bait.
Others say that Earth's been here
for something like four billion years;
and some are given doctorates
to study man's descent from ape.
But the world is round or it is flat--
one view's foolish and one is fact.
Truth lies not in some golden mean,
a temperate zone between extremes.
Truth, like gold, is where it's found,
despite what cowardice propounds.
In truth, truth is no moderate,
it is instead cause and effect
linked in autotelic law--
its point is made with fang and claw.
Fools come to grief upon the facts
much like the priests who killed the cats
because they're minions of the devil,
unlike us and therefore evil.
How did they divine this truth,
how arrive at holy proof?
By throwing felines from church steeples;
the cats survived, unlike good people.
So priests then slaughtered all the cats
and reaped a rising tide of rats.
Soon the rats begat a plague,
which ushered in a long Dark Age.
The President is brave and wise,
or else a windbag stuffed with lies.
Nice people will propound the view
that Truth lies right between the two.
But truth is hard and cold, not nice;
it lies in wait, Titanic's ice.
--David Essex, on the message boards of Eschaton, on a weekend evening when visitors were invited to discuss...poetry
A bit of poetry for your meditation from Jesse Kornbluth (a..k.a. Swami) on Beliefnet
August 10, 2004 | 3:00 p.m.
The Earth is just two redwoods old,
we are by certain preachers told.
So fossils and mutation rates
are simply Satan's sucker-bait.
Others say that Earth's been here
for something like four billion years;
and some are given doctorates
to study man's descent from ape.
But the world is round or it is flat--
one view's foolish and one is fact.
Truth lies not in some golden mean,
a temperate zone between extremes.
Truth, like gold, is where it's found,
despite what cowardice propounds.
In truth, truth is no moderate,
it is instead cause and effect
linked in autotelic law--
its point is made with fang and claw.
Fools come to grief upon the facts
much like the priests who killed the cats
because they're minions of the devil,
unlike us and therefore evil.
How did they divine this truth,
how arrive at holy proof?
By throwing felines from church steeples;
the cats survived, unlike good people.
So priests then slaughtered all the cats
and reaped a rising tide of rats.
Soon the rats begat a plague,
which ushered in a long Dark Age.
The President is brave and wise,
or else a windbag stuffed with lies.
Nice people will propound the view
that Truth lies right between the two.
But truth is hard and cold, not nice;
it lies in wait, Titanic's ice.
--David Essex, on the message boards of Eschaton, on a weekend evening when visitors were invited to discuss...poetry