Violence There
Janet Kuypers
5/13/16
Ancient Mythology
may have had
fantastic stories
of how Gods
would battle each other,
but Gods have been
developed by man
to explain mysteries
to us mere mortals:
Pray to the Sun God.
Chant for the Rain God
to create the crops
and satiate
our simple survival.
But as I see it,
as time wore on,
the Gods we all
claim to revere
seemed to stop
quarreling amongst
themselves,
because...
(and wait a minute
if they are Gods,
shouldn’t they have
figured this out
before?)
But the Gods
figured out
that instead of
battling each other,
mere humans
are much easier targets.
And when that gets dull,
why not let the
idiotic masses
do the killing
themselves?
Because sure,
in the Old Testament
a God punished Adam and Eve,
not because Eve
ate from the Tree of Knowledge,
but because she convinced
a man that knowledge
might be a good idea.
And sure,
there’s a flood
(a pretty big one at that),
there’s a mass killing
of first-born sons
unless you put
lamb’s blood
in a cross
on your door.
Sure, I get it,
there’s violence there —
but in the
New and improved
Testament,
they say to be kind,
to turn the other cheek.
But now we’re reduced
to humans who fight
in the name of God,
and if we humans
got any of our
Coliseum-themed
blood lust
from our Gods,
they must be
having a field day
watching us
destroy ourselves.
It may have
taken those Gods
too many millennia
to figure it out,
but now that they’ve
let their violent side
fester in us
for long enough,
those Gods now
can just sit back
and watch
us mere mortals
as a really
entertaining show.
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