Religion says the one comforting thing:
We don’t understand and it’s okay.
It’s always okay to sing.
We don’t understand—and it’s not okay:
This is the secular speculation
In which we lose our way.
We understand there is no God,
And once we establish this,
We think we’ll begin to understand more and more—
But instead our thoughts get more and more odd.
And when we don’t understand, hell! this is not okay.
You need to understand, and this need
Takes you down a darker way.
“I thought I understood he hated me,
And I knew she loved me, and I knew
The easy, the simple, the secular and the true.
I don’t believe in God, and this complexity
Is coming nearer and nearer to a mystery
Yesterday I rejected, when I saw it burning in you.”
The smart atheist becomes depressed.
He is God. And gets no rest.
The worst idea is “everyone knows,”
The social idea of the political middle,
Expressed in the Wall Street Journal
By Peggy Noonan, a Bush supporter; old, now;
Still feted in Washington D.C.
By the rich, with fine ideas of poetry.
She doesn’t belong here. But here she is, anyhow.
“Everybody knows” is the truth for these
Sunday morning politicians, the hidden disease
Which corrupts everything. Peggy Noonan? I would rather die
Next to an atheist, whose knowledge was in short supply.