RATZINGER'S DILEMMA

“God overflows with generosity,”
Writes Ratzinger while searching out
The face of god. But man’s ferocity
Is caused by what? He's prone to gout?
The pope claims that God's engineering
Has put the lie to domineering.
But if that's what God really did,
Then why supply us with an id
Which vastly increased our black humors?
God’s either generous or not.
So popish logic goes for naught.
He gave us rage, mass grave entombers.
So "white" of Him. So sing te deum
But to a God of human mayhem.

Ratzinger claims that our dissection
Of Jesus’ miracles casts doubt
Upon the truth of Resurrection.
Take, for example, bailing out
The bride and groom who were complaining
Their wine was gone. The jugs remaining
Held only water. On a whim
Lord Jesus filled them to the brim
With wine. The pope says look to meaning-
(Though miracles might prove too much
Mohammed had the “magic touch”)-
For Jesus by his intervening
Was showing how much God loves you,
But that assumes the story’s true.

Ratzinger claims that historicity
Is not important to the sense
Of what God did. With this felicity-
Which says you don’t need evidence
For little facts like was a Jesus
The god himself come down to ease us
Of our immortal pain in hell-
We bid the real good-by and dwell
In fantasy which knows no fiction.
Now Ratzinger is not a dope,
Although he bears the title “Pope,”
So if we honor his conviction
We’ll need some proof or a la mode
Why not live Brown’s “Da Vinci Code.?”

Without some proof this brilliant scholar
Is nothing but a critic who
Is strangling on his Roman collar-
Which cuts off air to his IQ-
In his attempt to make god Jesus
But purely from an exegesis
Of an unlikely tribal text.
What leaves this reader more perplexed
Is how old books writ by committee
(Except perhaps the books by Paul
Whose brain was injured in a fall)
Are trusted outside Salt Lake City
Where anything can be believed
So long as it can’t be perceived.

We’re certain that the Book of Mormon
Was written twice by Joseph Smith;
That when he finished his brainstormin’
The tablets vanished into myth-
Flew up to heaven where slave traders
No doubt became the books curators-
Which left Joe Smith in full command
Of other farmers’ wives and land.
What’s this to do with Joe Ratzinger?
It helps to have a modern perch
To see how founders of a church
Might make for laughs on Jerry Springer,
If it weren’t sad their brouhahas
Keep humans from a common cause.

As Lenin said, it takes ten pages
Of opposition argument
To show what’s false in what a “sage” says
In just one page. But’s evident
He didn’t mean the categories
Of heavens, hells, and purgatories
Or anything like virgin birth;
Or anything not of this earth.
So let me make a last proposal
By asking how the mind of man
Could ever know a god’s game plan
Unless the gods at our disposal
Were really just a state of mind
From darker ages of mankind?