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Today's Spinozas

He knew morality
came before religion,
today there is an awakening
of the human spirit.

Religion must take a back seat
to the caring of our world,
we finally understand
our affect on the grid.

Our children's children
may survive.

Acceptance is their course,
good we won't be around
to fuck it up anymore.

Review Request (Intensity): 
I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing stage: 

Comments

such a tighly framed and expressed idea...concise, and very fluid...no heming/hawing...beautiful precision

Al

An idea not embraced by any sense of majority,
yet ... so the last stanza still needed. Today it is
easy to see how religion separates instead of
uniting human beings. Much like democrat and
republican keeps the confusion and in-fighting
going so the country won't unite, and it's working,
but not unseen by more and more every day.

author comment

A good depiction of Spinozas, I guess you are talking from a read of his philosophies, something like Ethics before breakfast as it were..
A very good write, Yours Ian.T

.
There are a million reasons to believe in yourself,
So find more reasons to believe in others..

Spinoza was persecuted for speaking out in
his day, today we have the luxury of speaking
without the persecution, at least in most countries.

author comment

and let's hang on to that, speaking up, being passionate, having courage.

Jenifer Jaspa James

In Australia, the church didn't want 'ethics' taught in class! I give up.

Jenifer Jaspa James

I agree, if a person needs any religion to guide
their moral compass there is already something
inherently wrong with their thinking.

thank you for your fresh eyes !!!

author comment

I went away from man made religion which is just a bunch of hypocrites, crooks and Paedophiles pretending that they are good by going to church and using religion to hide their evil

We have been screwing things up since the days of Adam and Eve. placilng self before morality, and nevermind religion. We never want to make the same mistakes our parents did. The next generation will create their own messes. Just like we did.
Thoughtful write. Linda

He who conquers self , has won a great battle

Adam and Eve, an unbelievable story for me. Man has made many
of the same mistakes over and over, and we are bound to them,
but there is an awakening, I sense it and see it coming.

author comment

Hadn't known about Spinozabefore now

In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from his
community, it isn't known exactly what he did but
he later denied the immortality of soul, strongly rejects
the providential god - the god of Abraham, Issac and
Jacob and claimed the law was neither literally given
by god nor any longer binding on existing Jews.

Very radical for his time ehh !!!

author comment

good we won't be around
to fuck .......it up anymore.

excellent
at least one thing we have common
that's why I always believe
TIME ALONE IS GOD
If God you must indulge..

loved

We share humanity regardless of our views
so there will always be a common ground.

thank you,

Richard

author comment

broad minded a man...

I have come across many silly ones ...
all my life
since decades
but i respect all ...of human kindness... the milk is common..
religion is man made

perhaps the second profession...
after that one..
which is universal..
and
without which no man woman can savour existence
hope you will agree won't you??

loved

I think these myths carry a huge function, unfortunately most who seem most attracted to organized religion do not have the ability to believe in anything but literalism. If they could see symbolism and draw from it, we wouldn't have this sick dilemma. Oh and by the way...DON'T MESS WITH AN AMERICAN'S GUNS, jeez what a backward ass, embarrassing state of affairs for 2013.

Ron

Blue Demon77

"What I want is to be what I was before the knife,
before the brooch pin, before the salve, fixed me in this parenthesis:
Horses fluent in the wind. A place, a time gone out of mind."

The Eye Mote-Sylvia Plath

That is really the problem with organized religion, they
are an exclusive club, meant to keep us separated, when
we all know, or should anyway, that we are all the same.
Religions promote hatred, a contradiction unseen by those
who wield it. Today the separatism is much easier to see,
more and more reject that idea every day.

The guns; quite another subject but how would disarming
the public do anything but disarm the people already obeying
the laws, or most of them? I believe it is our right to bear arms
and for the reasons stated in the Constitution for the day may
come when we as a people need to defend ourselves against
our own tyrannous government, hopefully that won't happen.

thank you for your comment

author comment

thank you much !!!

author comment

I think this poem is a good example of how meaning can be more important than form when it is strong enough. The subject of our ecological morality and future on this planet as a species is so vital that rhyme or rhythm are secondary considerations. Many of my own poems have a similar characteristic (I hope) and bring up the question of whether they are really poetry. My opinion on this point is that as soon as you break a text up into relatively short lines (compared to prose) and leave a lot of space around what you are saying, you are demanding an especially intense kind of attention from your reader, and so are under a tacit obligation to provide an equally intense, concentrated way of saying things. That is enough to be poetic.
Best wishes,
Robert.

This one is prose, expressing an idea or a view from
the writer. Changing line lengths (to shorter) does little
to add poetic flavor unless it adds to the tempo or flow
of the outspoken word. If the outspoken word is flat, as
in much prose because in general we tend to use less
flavorful expressions or more common every day descriptions,
then line length will do nothing but make it appear on paper to
be written out like a poem.

Richard

author comment

except in that when expressions are too flavourful they can make the poem hard to understand. That is not the case in this work however.
Best wishes,
Robert.

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