Greetings - Franz, Carl, Iris, Scott; friends and guests, and all
you strangers
About religion will I speak today and of its dangers!
Firstly then let me tell you, that this sword is double sided
As humanity with hope and despair it has provided.
Heart of a heartless world, the sigh of the oppressed creatures
Is hardly but one of its infinitesimal features.
Another face that religion has shown across the ages
Is oppression - written on thousands of history’s pages.
We ask: why hope?, yet find the human condition so dire
That it needs divine projections to keep burning its fire.
Love, hope and belief have been banned to the transcendental realm
Allowing misery, discrimination to overwhelm
True cosmic action in the Here and Now of the moment’s flow
Impeding warm solidarity amongst humans to grow.
The realization of the human kingdom remains postponed
With dignity and happiness ad infinitum dethroned.
How many a “chosen people” have not declared themselves lords
Pronouncing inferior and fighting with all kinds of swords
The “barbarians” - wretched of this cruel, divine battlefield
Facing the hated “masters” with honesty - their only shield.
Yet once having swallowed, with baits, sinkers and also with hooks
The oppressor’s religion, they all have become sorry crooks
Pigs look to men and men to pigs and all indiff’rently join
Either one of the sides that constitute the very same coin.
This coin, my dear friends, most certainly has a determined shape:
It’s the master-slave relation from which there is no escape
In so far the slaves themselves willingly to their lot agree
Refraining from living actively, thus remaining unfree.
God, providence and authority are in charge of their fate
Comfortably reigning their lives until true freedom they hate.
They never doubt, they never think on their very own account
They gladly succumb to the monstrosity they have helped mount.
Religion, fatal instrument based on ignorance and hope
Is used by its masters in many an unsuspected scope,
Domesticating their sheep, they lead them to war and despair
Apart from “divine blessing” leaving only death in the air.
Sadists and masochists altogether joyfully combine
In the name of their supreme Master-God to behave like swine.
So, they all depend on each other, the masters and the slaves:
Unless they cut their ill relation they are bound to their grave.