4 Themes: Section 2: Religion

4 Themes: Section 2: Religion

I believe in God,

Because I was told to.

A religion I did not understand;

A faith I did not profess.

But I had to fit in,

I had to please the crowd.

And so, I continued to ‘believe’,

While questioning the existence of a God;

While facing a world full of hypocrites.

Out loud I asked,

‘Who is God?

Is he the Judge?

Or, is he the Executioner?’

Everyday I wondered,

Who determines the sinners and the blessed?

How do we measure a person’s worth?

Why are the sinners kinder than the preachers?

Is hypocrisy the religion?

Nay, I am who I am.

Neither a sinner nor an angel,

Just a mere human.

And if there is a God,

Then He shall judge me for who I truly am,

Not who I profess to be.

We believe in _ _ _
Because we were told to.
But two millenniums of stony silence
Have forced us to get up and seek out
The steep path to the mountain top.
Like the children of Israel before us
We endure the cutting elements to arrive
At the origin of our kind.
He is under the yellowing yew tree.
(We know it is He despite
The troubling gauntness of His face.)
'We have come for some answers,' we say.
'So many questions we know not where to start...'
He blinks quizzical. Oh incomprehension.
'Who are you and why do you want answers from me?'
'We are all your children, Father!
How could you have forgotten us?'
His eyes withdraw into his shrunken skull.
'Forgetting is the nature of all things.
If I made you in my image long ago,
It is because I feared I would lose myself.
Time is the sole possessor of memories,
Of extinct civilisations and dead stars,
While I, waiting for complete amnesia,
Am only a servant of the soundless universe.'

Tasha Lim & Edward Ong
13.3.16 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Comments

Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Murakami Salutes Orwell: How "1Q84" Pays Homage to "1984" (Part 2)

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

The Thinking Man’s Bible and Messiah: A Personal Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Part 1)

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch ” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None ( Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen ). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant mora...

Stranger on Earth

Search This Blog