[Adrian Fry]

Above us there is merely sky,
Below there is but sod.
Inside us guts and mesentery
But nowhere is there God.

No deity to praise or chide
Or garner grovelling prayer
From adherents who yet abide
With what was never there.

No Heaven ever there to crave,
Nor flames of Hell to dread.
Nature dictates how we behave
And all end coldly dead.

Yet theists still bestride the Earth
And we must let them know
The nothing all their Hope is worth,
Thereby making it so.

[Douglas G. Brown]

No Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost
Will sway me from believing most
Religion is a pack of lies;
I’ve joined the atheistic guys.

I have no fear of Allah’s wrath,
Nor walk the Buddhist middle path;
I’ll never bow nor bend my knee
To any Hindu deity.

Not even vague Confucian Heav’n
Gives my existence any leav’n.
This world I see is all I’ll get-
I feel no need to hedge my bet.

No Paradise to lose or find,
No One to bless the ties that bind;
My destiny, in simple terms,
Is nothing more than food for worms.

(tune ... The Navy Hymn)

[Martin Parker]

Eternal optimists who rave
About a life beyond the grave,
You're simply cosmic bric-a-brac;
There is no God who wants you back.
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For reason and for sanity.

For soon enough you'll find your Church
Will leave its members in the lurch.
You've been led up the garden path.
There's no eternal aftermath.
A word of warning 'ere you go;
Don't say we never told you so.

[Roger Slater]

Amazing Space, how void thou art,
No soul, no god, no plan,
No lord who gave the world its start
Or Earth to sinful man.

I once was blind but then I saw,
When into Space I peered,
No angel handing down the law,
No wise man with a beard.

'Twas only Space and nothing more
That saved a wretch like me
From myths that I believed before
I learned to think and see.

[Jerome Betts]

Nice one, Roger. Deserves to win. I'd been wondering if the Olney Hymns would emerge.

[William A. Baurle]

deleted. Wasn't quite the thing.

[Terese Coe]

What a surprise to see Jim is back again! A big welcome to you, Seamus!

Believing in the highest good,
we cling to love and beauty.
If something in the natural world
is god, it shirks its duty.

Though you say god has never died
and we can always cope,
environmental suicide
squelches every hope.

It’s one thing to destroy mankind,
but why is god so sour?
Why would it, in its right mind,
repudiate a flower?

[John Whitworth]

I thin that's nice, Terese, but I don't think it's a hymn.

[Terese Coe]

Could it be a hum?

[George Simmers]

If you'd agnostic be,
Come to our chapel.
With hard-nosed certainty
We'll never grapple.
Our preachings never touch
On deepest truths or such.
Our creed is nothing much.
We are not pilgrims.

Name any God you wish –
We'll gladly doubt him.
We're almost certain (-ish):
Life's best without Him.
We doubt the Bible's true,
Yet we doubt doubting too.
You can't be sure, can you?
We are not pilgrims.

I wrote this and then checked the rubric - it's for atheists only. I'd got it into my head that we could do a hymn for agnostics. Oh well, maybe it'll come in handy another day.