WordPress has a problem with formatting poetry. I recently changed templates hoping it would be easier, but to no avail. So back to posting about politics and atheism. If anybody reading this has any suggestions on how to format poetry on a WordPress blog, I’m all ears.
What parent hasn’t asked themselves just what they will say when asked that most proverbial of all questions? Clearly many recycle answers even they don’t believe. “God has mysterious ways.” That kind of thing. Others of us wonder if perhaps there isn’t a better solution, one approaching intellectual honesty. Thus, the following limerick.
“My Daughter’s Question”
A few years ago the Guardian posted a story on Rev. Christopher Goodwins, who rewrote the Bible in limerick verse. Readers of this blog know that I’ve been working up my own repertoire of atheist limericks, some of which deal with biblical themes. First, the Rev. Goodwins:
Today’s limerick is on (un)intelligent design. Proponents of so-called “intelligent design” are always rambling on about watchmakers and 747s being whipped up by the Maker from the junkyard of spare biological parts lying around. They make it sound like everything is so intentionally, wonderfully designed that there can only be One Answer as to how things are as they are. But they never seem to distinguish the miserable from the horrible, as Woody Allen once said. We are all miserable. But why would an “intelligent” designer design my deviated septum? Or my wife’s intestines? Or my mother’s knees? Why such horror?
“Unintelligent Design”
Limericks are flooding my notebooks, yielding all sorts of interesting results. I write them in the train on the way to work, over breakfast, in my sleep. I’ve even committed a few pornographic limericks – the truest to the form – which you won’t read here, to memory.
Again, feel free to cut and paste in the comments section of your favorite atheist blog, or tweet them, or put them up on your own blog. Or read them and forget about them, or whatever. Here’s today’s limerick.
“The Pope”
I’ve been penning limericks lately. I wouldn’t publish more serious poetry on my own blog, but I figure limericks are topical, humorous and eminently memable. So feel free to cut and paste in the comments section of your favorite atheist blog, or tweet them, or put them up on your own blog. Or read them and forget about them. Whatever. This one is called
Stay tuned for further atheist limericks!
– for Ayaan Hirsi Ali
1.
There once was a actress named Weisz
whose bashful, compassionate eyes
inspired us to rate
her Hypatia as great
and to weep when the heroine dies.
2.
What little we know of her life
is bound up in trouble and strife
of an era in which
they thought her a witch
because she was nobody’s wife.
3.
Neither Christian nor pagan nor Jew
she was one of the relative few
who today we would call
a freethinker, et al.
then degrade in the New York Review.*
* of Books
Meme this: if you like these limericks, you can help create a meme. Pass them around on the internet. Hopefully they will reach Rachel Weisz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali! Remeber, this is an experiment.
How? Be imaginative. Post a comment on Pharyngula, or RichardDawkins.net. Dawkins coined the word “meme.” Send it to your atheist cousin, or uncle.
What’s a meme? Anything that can be passed from one brain to another. If you wish to know more about the obscure reference to the NYRB, just google “Enlightenment fundamentalist.”
If you haven’t seen Agora, check Wikipedia for the basic outline of Hypatia of Alexandria’s life. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has lived with bodyguards and armed escorts for years because of her freethinking views. She was born in Somalia.
