Mark Sebring

A military-style ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building arrested 37 undocumented immigrants. Innocent citizens living in the same building were brutally treated and detained for hours, for the crime of being non-white. When a woman, concerned about the children, naked and zip tied together in the street, asked, “Where is the morality? Where is the humanity?”, an ICE agent replied, “Fuck them children.”

Our country is ruled by brutes
who don’t care about the rights of anyone
who is different from them.
It appears that most of the people
who call themselves Christian
are on their side.
They make excuses
to justify the brutality
against those who are not them.
Or simply deny that it exists.

It is easy to recognize
that they are hypocrites
and difficult to understand
why they can’t recognize it themselves.
They don’t seem to realize
that they are Star Witnesses
to the idea
that their God doesn’t really exist.

Show me one True Christian.
Someone who is actually Christ-like.
(They seem pretty rare these days.)
I will disagree with them.
But I’ll probably get along with them
just fine.

Mark Sebring is a retired systems programmer from Omaha, Nebraska. He is also an amateur philosopher and poet. His AuthorsDen website contains an odd assortment of songs, poems, essays, and short stories he’s written over the past 50 years. “An Atheist Perspective” was originally published on his website.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.