Tomorrow, my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson are coming to visit for a couple of nights. My mom, who rallied a little today, is looking forward to seeing them. I’m hoping she hangs onto her awareness long enough to go out to dinner with us on Saturday and to brunch on Sunday at the Mohonk Mountain House — a treat for all of us who have never been there (mostly because it’s outrageously expensive). I heard that Alan Alda and friends helicoptered up to there for his last birthday party.
I’m treating us all because we deserve it. Especially me.

The BBC podcast on atheism brought home several points for me that I suppose I should have already realized.
Atheists can be as obnoxiously fundamentalist and militant as any religious zealots. I think that in my 20s, 30s and 40s, I was borderline obnoxious and confrontational about my lack of “faith.” While I’ve become even more convinced that my atheist position is appropriately valid, I have become more tolerant of those who don’t agree with me. See, maybe wisdom does come with age.
My contributions to the BBC discussion ended about a third of the way through the program, but I was rather pleased to hear other, later, participants refer to things that I said.
Some of the more militant atheists insist that the world would be a better place without religions, since so much of the historical intolerance, genocide, hate, war, and persecution were (and are) done in the name of one religion or another.
In general, I don’t disagree with that position, but I also recognize that there is a need in many people for the solace and purpose that religion can offer, a way to feel more secure in what otherwise can seem a random and chaotic universe. So, I doubt if there’s any chance of ridding this world of its various religions.
What would help considerably, however, is if religion became something personal instead of institutional; if each individual understood about the range of belief and (non-belief) systems on this planet that provide a “moral compass;” if each individual could choose the ethical/moral system of beliefs that work for her or him and not have one imposed by culture or family.
One discussion participant taught in a Jewish elementary school, and when asked if it would be possible to enable children to learn about other religions as part of the school curriculum, the teacher responded in the negative.
The purpose of Catholic schools and Jewish schools etc., is to indoctrinate children with the dogma of the religious sect while they are also being taught the academic subjects. I should know. I went to Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school. We had a required course in “Apologetics” so that we could defend our religious positions to non-believers.
I think we can assume that each family has the right to teach its children the values, beliefs, and culture that the family holds dear. No government should interfere with that right of every parent.
And it is in the schools that children should learn about other religions, other mythologies, other cultures. They should be encouraged to question and think critically and come to conclusions that take into account their own personal hunger for spiritual nourishment, their appetites for awe, and their need to feel connected to something greater than themselves.
Personally, as an atheist, all of those yearnings, for me, are satisfied by the awesomeness of the natural world, the complexities of human creativity, and the drama and mysteries that science continuous to reveal. This world, this life, is enough. I long ago discovered that notions of god get in the way of living and loving authentically and honestly.
One of the atheists in the discussion offered a challenge something like this (and I’m paraphrasing):
Can you name an ethical statement or moral action done by a believer that any non-believer couldn’t make as well. He maintains that you can’t.
Can you name a wicked action or wicked statement undertaken by a believer that any unbeliever could make. He maintains that you can’t.
Think about it.
I remain, godless on this awesome mountain.

She has stopped eating unless I feed her (except for coffee and homemade sweet bread) and she sleeps almost all of the time. And she doesn’t talk. And she cries.
Yesterday, I got her to tell me why she was crying. “I’m afraid,” she muttered, devoid of energy, of purpose. She was sitting at the kitchen table, slumped over and still.
“Are you afraid of dying?” I ask. She nods. “Are you afraid of being alone? I ask again because she used to articulate this fear often. She continues to nod, her eyes half closed and unfocused.
“Mom?” I say, trying to get her attention, getting on my knees to try to look into her eyes.
“Mom,” I continue, you don’t have to be afraid of being alone. If you think you’re dying, remember that everyone in your family is up in heaven waiting for you. Your mother and father [she’s begun calling for her momma], your husband, all of your brothers and sisters. They are all there waiting for you. You won’t be alone.”
Of course, I don’t believe any of that, but she does, and that’s what’s important. In younger years, I would argue vehemently with my parents about my unbelief. That was then.
I see her take a breath.
“And if you keep living, you are not alone here either,” I add. ” I am here. Your son is here. You granddaughter and her family are coming to visit you this weekend. We all love you and you are not alone.”
She slumps in her chair.
“Do you want to go back to sleep,” I ask.
She nods.
She sleeps.
My brother refuses to believe that it’s possible for a body that is more than 91 years old to just wear down, wear out. He wants her to get her blood tested, get a CAT scan of her head, which she is often rubbing on the right side. He wants something else to be wrong. Something than can be fixed.
I am ready to let her go. I think she is ready to let go. He does not want to let her go.
She cries.

A poignant hope of a poem, one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry sends:
Fat is Not a Fairytail
Jane Yolen
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted,
flinging herself down the stairs.
I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.
I am thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.

As a result of my previous post about atheism, BBC radio contacted me and asked me to be part of the broadcast debate on “should children be brought up without religion?”
They asked me to make the first statement, which, of course, I was glad, but not prepared, to do. I didn’t know who the other debaters would be, and it turned out that most were clerics, scholars, writers, heads of organizations, both religious and atheist, from all over the world. They kept bringing on new debaters and siphoning off some of us earlier ones.
The program might be repeated and/or it might be on podcast. You can check it out here, where the best comment left, as far as I’m concerned, is #14.
ADDENDUM:
You can listen to the broadcast or download it here.

“Do you still have ‘faith’?” she asked the two of us who were sitting on either side of her at our table.
“No,” I answered. Just that. No.
Under other circumstances, I might have carried on about my perspective on the value of godlessness, my decades-long exploration of what some call the world of the spirit, my opinionated take on the evils of organized religion. But for the two other women, who had suffered the tragedy of losing young adult children to the fickleness of fate, the loss of their faith was something much more personal and much more painful.
Tonight on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams ended his program with a piece that indicated atheism is on the rise.
The Washington Post also had a article a few days ago that begins with this:

BURGESS HILL, England — Every morning on his walk to work, high school teacher Graham Wright recited a favorite Anglican prayer and asked God for strength in the day ahead. Then two years ago, he just stopped.

Wright, 59, said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a negative influence in his life and the world. Although he once considered becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in God’s name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem cell research.

Wright is now an avowed atheist and part of a growing number of vocal nonbelievers in Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, membership in once-quiet groups of nonbelievers is rising, and books attempting to debunk religion have been surprise bestsellers, including “The God Delusion,” by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins.

New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet, and in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.

Another Washington Post article includes these statements:

Focusing fresh attention on atheism in the United States was the publication last week of a book about Mother Teresa that lays out her secret struggle with her doubts about God. “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” has led some high-profile atheists to say that her spiritual wavering was actually atheism.

“She couldn’t bring herself to believe in God, but she wished she could,” said Christopher Hitchens, a Washington-based columnist and author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” the latest atheist bestseller.

[snip]

Nontheist is another term for atheist, or someone who does not believe in a supreme being.

A study released in June by the Barna Group, a religious polling firm, found that about 5 million adults in the United States call themselves atheists. The number rises to about 20 million — about one in every 11 Americans — if people who say they have no religious faith or are agnostic (they doubt the existence of a God or a supreme deity) are included.

I deprogrammed myself from my Catholic brainwashing soon after I set foot in my first college philosophy course. At the same time I was losing religion, my roommate was converting to Catholicism because she was marrying a Catholic. I remember going with her to a Newman Club meeting, where I asked the chaplain: “If I live life as a good, compassionate, caring person but I don’t believe in god, will I go to hell?”
Of course, his answer was “No, but….”
I never heard the rest of his answer because I left the room, recognizing the conundrum of my question and not expecting an answer that made any more sense than “faith.”
My children were brought up godless and good, and they remain so. As do I. Well, the godless part, anyway.
Go here for an overview of the godless in America.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
ANTI-SEMITISM
One day this week (day may vary depending on locale) on PBS, the “World Without War” episode of the Ken Burns documentary, “The War,” includes coverage of liberating the concentration camps at the end of WWII. Perhaps it will show some of the original news films, those used in movie theatres (which had 2 films, a cartoon, and a newsreel) back in the olden days before television.
If so, whether you have or haven’t seen that film footage — which is gruesome, be warned — of what the Allies found in those camps, you owe yourself (and those who suffered and died there) to watch so you’ll never forget or doubt the reality of the Holocaust. Millions of Jews were tortured and starved and killed along with millions of others by the most repugnant political regime and its despicable loyalists ever to set foot on earth. “Never again,” it was vowed repeatedly after the horrors of the camps and the scope of anti-Semitism rampant in Europe that helped create the camps were all fully revealed. “Never again.”
And yet. Yet…it seems something there is that loves anti-Semitism. Its clawed ugliness still hangs on. Real anti-Semitism, that is, as distinguished from the purported kind foolishly attributed by zealots to anyone who levies any criticism whatsoever of Israel or Jews. As if they are somehow beyond criticism of any kind. They aren’t, and to say they are is to detract from the actuality of true anti-Semitism, the vile and assaultive and murderous kind. Which brings us to an unbelievable, yet real, matter of astonishingly painful irony.
Recently, Israeli police uncovered a cell of neo-Nazis. Inside Israel. Honest. Young Israeli citizens, 16-21 years old, had joined together to spraypaint hate symbols on synagogues and to attack religious Jews, drug addicts, and homosexuals. They even videotaped their attacks and themselves holding Nazi-like meetings. And all of them are Jews, out of families migrated from the former USSR under the Israeli Law of Return.
Jews as Nazis. The world turned upside-down. Photos show tattooed arms with Gothic lettering proclaiming “White Power” and “Skrewdriver” and “88” (eighth letter of the alphabet) for “HH” — Heil Hitler. And therein lies another puzzle. Why tattoos in English? Why “White Power?” Let no one say the world hasn’t gone mad: Jews from the former and repressive USSR with apparently American White Power ties embracing Naziism in Israel. No wonder that country sometimes acts in ways that seem paranoid to the rest of the world.
These neo-Nazis should have to sit and watch the original film footage that Ken Burns may show about the death camps — over and over again. We should all watch it over again so we remember that horror forever and keep our priorities straight, no matter how wrongly Israel sometimes acts (which is not to set it above criticism and even condemnation when warranted). Because: Never again. That must be assured.
Oh, by the way. Here in our country during these particular times we’re trying to live through, remember that anti-Semitism also has a broader meaning than we usually attribute to it. People of Arab heritage are also Semitic.
Yes, they are

Summer has abandoned the mountain, and the colors of autumn are fast spreading from valley to valley.
Just before the bright orange full moon, my mother seemed to have lost another bit of her brainpower. Several times a day, now, she says that she doesn’t know where she is and she wants to go home. She is terrified of being abandoned, left alone to fend for herself, despite the fact that we never leave her alone, not even at night, now that I’m sleeping on a bed in the next room. Any kind of altercation — even on the television — sends her mind imploding. She cries. She cries a lot, but not from pain anymore. We took her to an orthopedist, who looked at her recent x-ray and gave her a cortisone shot in the shoulder that has been so excruciatingly painful. She has not been complaining about pain in that shoulder.
Her pain is her awareness that she is being abandoned by her “self.” When she asks “where am I?” it’s not the confusion over “where” that terrifies her; it is the loss of the “I.”
“Am I going crazy?’ she asks in lucid moments.
We can’t bear to tell her that, yes, she is.
91 years and counting.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
BANKRUPT
The number keeps growing. It’s already in the hundreds of thousands, and it keeps growing. What number? Iraqis killed since the U.S. invaded. Hundreds of thousands, most of them innocent people trying live in a virtually impossible situation. Hundreds of thousands killed by U.S. military or in sectarian violence or by perhaps-foreign insurgents or by private U.S. contract mercenaries. All since the U.S. turned Iraq upside-down with an unwarranted invasion.
Nobody here seems much to care. Media occasionally footnotes a news report with passing mention. Military shrugs with a fatalistic, “War, people die,” or an incredibly callous “collateral damage.” Administration, with its led-by-god’s-hand president, insists that we fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.
That last is particularly galling. “Them” — who exactly does that refer to? After all, Iraqis were not responsible for 9/11, but when that point is made, the god-chosen president says nothing or simply repeats his “them” non-sequitur which actually means: “them,” you know, the ragheads, them “less-human-than us creatures over there in the Middle East.” Oh yeah…them. There better than here. In other words, let innocent Iraqis die so Americans don’t. (Sounds similar to the prez’s serving — or not — during ‘Nam.)
Okay, then here’s a question: if fighting there means no fighting here, then we must all be secure (here in sieg-heil “homeland”), right? Then why all the intrusive, scare-tactic “security” measures here in America? Why the stripping of Constitutional rights? After all, if we’re safe cuz innocent Iraqis are dying in our place, then we don’t need all those intimidating measures here, do we? (By the way, what color is the security alert level lately?)
It may all seem like a real puzzle, but actually it’s no puzzle at all. Behind every point and question raised above, there is a single, basic explanation for why hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died because of our presence in their land. And here’s the reason: we don’t care. Why not? Because America, in virtually its entirety, is morally bankrupt. We have tossed our moral compass in the trash cuz it was convenient to do so cuz it was getting in the way of our being pissed over 9/11, and keeping us from smashing anyone and anyplace we wanted. So our alleged “leaders” — all of them we elected, and their buddies — led us down the rose garden path with lies and scares and twisted logic.
But it’s not their fault. Nope. The fault lies with the rest of us. We let them have our moral compass. We readily made ourselves morally bankrupt so we could kick some butt. Anybody’s. Guilty or not.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead.
Shame on us.

The title of this post became the mantra at my high school reunion last night. Despite multiple by-pass surgeries for themselves or their spouses, despite various joint replacements, complex medication menus, and debilitating illnesses of all kinds, despite the tragic loss of children and spouses, we were there and we all were STILL ABOVE GROUND.
We were as varied in terms of personality as we were in high school, but this time we all felt a general comradeship that wasn’t always there more than 50 years ago. The indefatigable classmate who organized the whole shindig vowed to organize another one in five years, if not sooner. After all, next time there might well be “a lot more roses.” (That was an event in-joke that I will footnote.)
Meanwhile, I made the mistake of dancing the Lindy with strappy shoes that had non-skid soles. Landed on my butt once, tried to get up, landed again, and then finally managed to hold onto my partner’s hand tight enough to right myself. Since there were only two other couples on the dance floor, of course everyone was watching. But we finished the dance (trooper that I am who isn’t easily embarrassed); the distressing part was how totally out of breath I was at the end of the song. Out of shape! Definitely out of shape! The only other dance I did was part of the Electric Slide, which I managed, with flair, despite the sticky-soled shoes, and which I ended with a “high-five” from a attractive woman who pretty much ignored me in high school.
As it turned out, I was not the only one who had been divorced. I was not the only one who was a heretic, although I was probably the most heretical of the bunch. I chatted and hugged and kissed on the cheek both men and women I didn’t even know that well back then. It was as though our five decades of life’s experiences had given us a lot more in common. And, heh, we were all still above ground.
As I checked my email when I got home today, I found that one of my classmates had already emailed us photos that he had taken with a camera a lot better than mine. I realized that, without name tags, I couldn’t readily remember the names of most of the faces because they had changed so much over all those years. There were a few I recognized right away last night, however, because, underneath the wear of years, their teenage faces, their eyes and their smiles, were still there.
Some were more successful and/or wealthy than others. Many have had to survive any number of personal tragedies for which money couldn’t compensate,. several having lost children to illness or accident. I can’t even imagine the horror of losing a child. I learned that the friend I thought had died in a tragic house fire died by much more tragic circumstances.
I discovered that I was not the only one caring for a parent, and not the only one living with a care-needing parent. I seem to be, however, the only one who doesn’t have outside help.
When I walked into the house today, my mother was sitting in her chair crying. My brother was ensconced in a side chair, immersed in some ebay transaction. She hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and before I unpacked my car, I made her something to eat, which she hungrily devoured. Later, we watched a travel video of Poland, and before she went to sleep, we danced to her muddled rendition of the Polish National Anthem.
While there were some divorced and some heretics among my former classmates, there were no bloggers. This URL is now listed in the bio information about each graduate that was circulated. It will be interesting to see if any of them will visit and comment.
I drove home from the reunion grateful for my reasonably healthy body, for my two children and one grandchild, for the past 50 years of being able to live much of it “my way.”
Footnote: During the Mass, which I didn’t attend, the priest noted those classmates who had passed away since we graduated and placed a rose for each in a vase. And so, all evening long, there were poignant comments about the number of roses there might be the next time we get together.