Status Update: Blah

Confession: Although I know very well that I am a very fortunate person in so many ways, I still have relatively regular bouts of The Blah. I wonder quite often, how many others are afflicted with this horrible malady. Maybe it's just me. Miss Ungrateful. Miss Dissatisfied.

There seems to be a lot on my mind lately but it's a jumbled up mess I haven't taken the effort to unjumble. Therefore, I don't seem to have the clarity to sit down and write anything I feel would be worth my while.

So, I'm just going to pull some things out of my brain and put them down in writing in an attempt at straightening up the untidy web between my ears.

*I've been verging on angry lately. I don't know why. Maybe not angry. That's too harsh. Irritated. That's better. I've had my head soaking in news and political books for months now and I think it may be getting to me. I need to live in ignorance for awhile maybe. They say it's bliss, you know.

*I read a comment on someones blog tonight that said that they'd never "actually met anyone who watched or got their news from MSNBC." My first thought was, "Wow, Dude. You really need to step outside that protective bubble you're living in." My second thought was, "Yes, you have. You've met me!" I know the person who left the comment and he knows me. (He is a Far Right Winger) I guess he hasn't discovered my not so secret identity yet. I guess he would be shocked to find out that he has actually had in his home, a Liberal, an Atheist, a watcher of MSNBC, a subscriber to the Huffington Post and a peace sign wearing new age hippie...and they are all me.

*The topic of Family has been popping into my head on a somewhat frequent basis and I haven't devoted any time to determining why. It's a touchy issue for me and I suppose I need to go through the mental frustration of facing it down and figuring it out. This is contributing to my Blah because I have gone through this exercise many times and am frustrated that I'm still having to do it. It means I'm not doing it right!

*Valentine's Day came and went and I could give a rat's patooty less. In my "former life," I was married for 14 years to an absolute nightmare of a human. Valentine's Day brought with it the hopefulness only the hopeless have of actually being put at the top of the list for that one day. Of course, my hopes were dashed each and every year. The last few years of the union were the years that completely ruined any chance for Valentine's Day ever being able to redeem itself in my eyes. I think it was year 12 when The Idiot actually asked another woman out on a date on Valentine's Day. He took her to dinner and then they went dancing. I spent the evening on my couch watching a Twilight Zone (how very appropriate, no?) marathon contemplating how in the hell my life went this wrong. Year 13, I saved and planned and took The Idiot out to a fancy restaurant and spent my hard earned money on some fabulous food. I had dressed up in my very best Look At Me- Aren't I Pretty- Please Love Me dress. Over dinner, I sensed something just wasn't quite right. As we pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex after dinner, The Idiot hit the automatic door locks and proceeded to tell me that he was having an affair.

Those days are far behind me now and I am married to The Man of My Dreams. He treats every day like Valentine's Day. He tells me he loves me several times a day, never leaves the house without saying it, kisses me every morning and every night and calls me several times a day if for no other reason than to say, "I'm busy as heck, but I wanted you to know that I love you." So now my every day romance is better than most people's Valentine's Day. I know I'm very very lucky. And, I still don't like Valentine's Day.

*I'm going back under the knife on Friday. Dr. L has told me that when he takes all of the metal out of my shoulder, his hope is that I will experience relief from a lot of the pain that I've had for the past year since it was put in. This should have me jumping for joy in hope and anticipation. Instead, I am nervous and anxious. It's difficult for me to imagine not experiencing pain every day. I've seen the x-rays and my bones are in pieces. The metal was supposed to help the bones heal and instead the metal began failing. I don't know how it all works. That's why I go to doctors. They have almost always done right by me so I feel as though I should be feeling more hopeful. Instead, I keep thinking, "What if it doesn't work?" Dr. L has told me what will happen and it's not pleasant. And in Classic Me form, I prepare myself for the worst. I always tell my husband that if I'm prepared for the worst and then it happens, well...I'm prepared. And in the event the worst doesn't happen, well then...I get a pleasant little surprise.

*My daughter is here from Texas visiting. We flew her in for her 20th birthday because she wanted to spend her birthday with us. This made me feel good. I've spent the past couple of days talking with her and I am experiencing an inner whirlpool of emotion. She is not where she wants to be in life and not where I'd hoped she'd be. I have such a desire to rush in and rescue her and to make things better, but she and I have been through a lot together and I know that rescuing her is not the answer. All of my attempts at rescue thus far in her life have resulted in failure. She is not in any bodily jeopardy, mind you. If she were, I would most certainly rescue her. It's her heart and mind I'm worried about most. We all have to learn our own lessons and I have fulfilled my motherly obligation and shared my wisdom and my lessons with her so that she might use them for her benefit if she sees fit. I worry and I fret and I hope. I hope that she will learn her lessons earlier and without as much heartache as I did mine.

*Today the kids were home from school because it was President's Day. I cooked and cleaned and cleaned and cooked...and cleaned...all day long. I am tired. Eric had a mountain of homework to do after work today and four hours into it, he's still not done. I'm so proud of him for taking on school and doing so well. He'll finish his bachelor's degree this year and with all A's. It's been a mountain to climb, I assure you. Mixed in with my pride is the ever present selfishness of wishing we had more time to spend together. The last couple of years have been spent in between the work of our daily lives and his schoolwork. Our time together seems never to be enough. I don't know how much would be enough. He is my best friend, my sounding board, my partner in silliness, my Dancing Queen and my Knower of All Things. He also always smells delicious, no matter what he's been doing. Now you see....all the time in the world is not enough time with this man.

*sigh*

Sleep needs to happen soon, so this is it. Nothing brilliant, witty or of real importance.

I hope Friday is a sunny day.

Reba, Dolly...Are You Out There?

There is a notebook I've been keeping for years and it contains all of the previously discussed crappy poetry I've written over the years as well as other random pieces of paper that I've thought interesting enough to hang on to.

Since our move from Texas to Arizona last year, I haven't looked at The Notebook. I dug it out to start finding some of the crappy poetry and I found a piece of paper that made me laugh out loud.

Now remember...I am absolutely not a lover of country music in any way. I pretty much get nauseated when I hear it. So, imagine my shock to run across country music lyrics written by none other than, moi'. No...really.

It's hysterical to me. Every time I hear a country music song I carry on about how whiny and pathetic it is and tell my husband, "Oh, my gosh! Someone needs to put her out of her misery!"

So, there you have it. When I checked the date at the bottom of the page of lyrics, it revealed that I'd put my misery down on paper one month prior to getting divorced.

Reba, Dolly, Dixie Chicks...if you're out there, pull up a chair and grab a beer so you'll have something to cry into and get a load of this piece of work:

Losin’ You
(Divorce done country style)

I’ve been told I’m crazy but I don’t believe it’s true.
I’ve been cheated on and lied to and it’s all been done by you.
I’ve been pushed around and put down, I’ve got boot prints on my soul,
But you’re not gonna keep me down, it’s time for me to go.

(Chorus)

I’m gonna lose you and find me and never turn around
I’m gonna break free and you’ll see that I can’t be kept down.
So step aside and let me by I’m goin’ out that door.
The woman in me has finally seen you’re not the man I was lookin’ for.

You’d almost convinced me I wasn’t worth a dime.
That I wasn’t pretty anymore and that I was past my prime.
I came close to givin’ up on ever turnin’ heads my way,
But all that changed in the check out line and it’ll never be the same,
‘Cause a cute young thing was checkin’ me out and askin’ me my name.

(Chorus)

I’m gonna lose you and find me and never turn around
I’m gonna break free and you’ll see that I can’t be kept down.
So step aside and let me by I’m goin’ out that door.
The woman in me has finally seen you’re not the man I was lookin’ for.

Now I don’t want a guy half my age, I don’t want a man at all,
But it sure was nice to catch the eye of a stranger dark and tall.
I realized that I’m not the girl I thought I used to know.
That girl wouldn’t have stood a minute for the bull you like to throw.
So I’m gonna get to know her again. I’m packed, it’s time to go.

(Chorus)

I’m gonna lose you and find me and never turn around
I’m gonna break free and you’ll see that I can’t be kept down.
So step aside and let me by I’m goin’ out that door.
The woman in me has finally seen you’re not the man I was lookin’ for.

I'm going to start work on my Grammy acceptance speech. What ever shall I wear?!

Petits Morceaux de Moi, Part II

I don't know exactly when my relationship with my mother jumped the rail and went completely off course, but it's been a bumpy ride for many years.

For several years this was a difficult relationship to cope with, but I've learned to take it for what it is....and for what it isn't. As I've grown and matured and realized that not only do I not have to blame my mother for things anymore, I also don't need her approval.

What I can't change, and neither can you, my friends, is that the DNA of
our parents is all neatly and nicely woven into ours. This is a fact that has often times made me cringe.

One day as I sat pondering the relationship between my mother and me, it suddenly occurred to me to ask myself how I thought my daughters felt about me. That is a really humbling question. What kind of mother have I been to my daughters? Will they be like me and run as far away from their mother as they can when they have the chance?

I don't know the answers to those questions completely yet. My oldest daughter turns twenty this month and has asked to come home for her birthday so I'm flying her here from Texas. Our relationship has been like a roller coaster since she was about three. I take heart in the fact that it is here that she wants to be on her birthday.

What I do know is the answer to the question of what kind of mother I will be to my grown children. I will be the type of mother that is happy when her children call and share their news with her. I will be the type of mother that shows up for special events in their lives. I will be the type of mother that not only accepts them for who they are, but loves them too.

So, this poem was difficult for me to write. There are a lot of things that my mother wasn't that I wish she would have been. But I also have to acknowledge that she managed, with incredibly few tools, to raise me to be a pretty decent human being. And, there's no denying that as I mature, I recognize those bits and pieces of DNA that I irrefutably inherited from her.

Inheritance

I hear the familiar laughter and turn to find her,
but she is not there.

I look in the mirror and see her eyes and ponder
if my maturing face will someday look like hers.

I cry tears of anguish thinking that I am a failure as a parent
and wonder if she cried those tears, too.

In selfish moments, I think myself the selfless martyr
and remember times when she truly was.

I used to scorn the thought that I might be like her in any way-
but I am beginning to understand that there is beauty in the likeness.

I can take her successes and failures and learn from both.
But I cannot change the laugh, the eyes, and the sense of humor that
occasionally embarrasses my children.

They are her legacy and her gift to me.

So, I will embrace them and find comfort in them,
and inevitably pass them on to my daughters-

hoping that they will accept their inheritance
with more gratitude and grace than I .

August 2000

(The month of my 32nd birthday. I must have been doing some reflecting!)

Shocking Revelation!!

I just found my 5th grade report card from Pawnee Grade School. My teacher was Mrs. Gilliland and I really liked her. She stands out in my memory as one of my top five favorite teachers ever.

Now please, if you will, let your eyes wander to the lower right corner of my report card and look under the heading, “CONDUCT.”

“Annoys Others (Talks)!”

Okay, Mrs. Gilliland! What the hell?! I thought you liked me!

This made me giggle hysterically when I saw it. I guess some things never change.

Petits Morceaux de Moi, Part I

Okay. Here’s the deal. I write really crappy poetry. Or, at least I used to.

A few years ago I suddenly realized that I hadn’t picked up my pencil and Crappy Poetry Notebook in ages, so I sat down and began to think.

Think, think, think.

Nothing happened. Hmmm.

I used to be able to spit out crappy poetry like nobody’s business! What the heck was wrong with me?!

Then the light bulb went on. *bling*

I hadn’t written poetry since I’d started my life with Eric! I hadn’t written poetry since I’d become happy!

Over the next couple of years I did manage to churn out two more poems. Once right after I got married to Eric and the other, right after I had our baby, Alex. The poems are about Eric & Alex respectively. Duh.

So, it turns out that not only am I not creative enough to write poetry for the sake of writing poetry, but I’m not really even creative enough to write a decent poem even when overcome by artistic angst. Damn.

But, lucky you, Dear Reader! Since this is my way of journaling my journey, I thought that I would revisit some of those old poems and try to recall what miserable event in my past life inspired them. This ought to be fun. (Maybe not so much for you…)

Oy.

Let’s see. Where shall we begin? I could go chronologically…hmmm. I don’t know. I think it would be more fun to just pick one that strikes my fancy and go for it.

Okay. Poem #1:

Childhood Revisited

There was a place deep in the woods of Southern Illinois,
Where fairies danced and sunbeams swirled
and troubles gave way to joy.

A circle in the midst of trees where shafts of light touched ground –
Where grass so green and clover deep
made sweet every uttered sound.

I sat on stumps of ancient trees and read from treasured books –
Entranced, enchanted, lost in time,
in my dear sweet woodland nook.

In my dreams I remember this place so free from care and strife -
A lovely little paradise,
in this child’s life.

This was written in May of 1999, two years before my divorce. I’m pretty sure I was attempting desperately to cling on to any remembrance of happier times as my marriage was on its last pathetic crippled leg.

The place this poem is about was in the woods behind my grandparents’ two-story white farmhouse in Illinois. I loved everything about that house and the land around it. My sisters and I happened upon this little opening one day and decided that with its tree stumps arranged perfectly so, that it would be the absolute perfect spot to bring books to and sit and do our out loud story reading. The ground cover in the opening consisted almost entirely of dark green clover. When story time ended, we got a great deal of pleasure and frustration out of searching for four-leaf clovers.

For children who tried to stay out of sight so they would be out of mind and out of firing range of their crazy parents, this spot was a sanctuary. It’s as clear to me in my mind right now as if I were sitting there.

So, there you have it, the first of many amateur poems. Admittedly, although amateur, the writing of them certainly did provide me with some catharsis. Hallelujah for that.

For What It's Worth

How did I become a hippie?

As I sit here in my camo pants and “Peace is the Way” t-shirt (yes…it’s a statement), I think maybe I can begin to sort it all out.

Some of my earliest memories are of living in Florida near sugar cane fields. I lived there from my first birthday until the time I was five. I must have been about four or so when I recall hearing the word “nigger” for the first time. It came out of my father’s mouth. My father had a low opinion of the blacks that worked in the fields and wasn’t shy about expressing his feelings. I however, couldn’t reconcile his words with my reality. My reality was that as I stood in our front yard by the side of the road at the end of the day, the black men would walk by on their way home from work and hand my sister and I pieces of fresh sugar cane to chew on. They always had a smile and a nod for us, and that was as much a gift as the sugar cane. I liked those men. I knew that calling them, “nigger” was wrong.

When I was about seven, my family lived on a racetrack in Illinois where my father trained horses. Many of the people that worked at the track were Black or Hispanic. There was a black family who lived a few trailers down from ours, who had a son close to my age. One day when my father came home, he saw me playing with my friend and called me inside. He told me that I was never to play with “that boy” again. I cried and asked why and was told that he didn’t want his kid to be seen playing with “dirty little nigger boys.” This child was my only friend and I loved spending my days running around the racetrack with him. He wasn’t dirty either. He was always neat and clean and had excellent manners. I knew my father was wrong.

I was raised in the Mormon church and it was there I was taught about the story of Cain and Abel and the “curse” of dark skin. For nearly 150 years, the Mormon church denied its black members the ability to hold the “Priesthood” or entrance to their temples. They also have a strict policy, documented in many speeches made by their “prophets” of disallowing interracial marriage. During my school years, I was friends with the black kids in my school. I had a very difficult time understanding what was so bad about those great kids that an entire religion would want to shun them.

When I was fourteen years old, I took a bus ride from Cushing, Oklahoma to Clinton, Oklahoma for the purpose of attending my boyfriend’s 15th birthday party. My reading material for the trip was a Mormon publication of some sort. When the bus stopped in Langston, a predominately Black populated university town, a young college woman got on the bus and took the seat next to me. She looked at what I was reading and struck up a conversation. She inquired about the church’s stance on Blacks. At the ripe old age of 14, I was in the position of attempting to rationalize racism in defense of my church. We spoke for quite a while and she got off the bus before my stop came up. She told me that it had been nice talking to me, wished me a pleasant trip and told me that she would pray for me. She said it with not one ounce of spite or bitterness. I never finished that book. I pondered what she’d said not only for the rest of my trip, but also for many years of my life. I knew the church was wrong.

I remember in High School being on the debate team and being given the topic of Equal Rights for Women. I was supposed to debate why the Women’s Movement would be a bad thing. I had lots of material because once again, the church was opposed to the Women’s Movement. I had a difficult time trying to rationalize what I felt inside with what my church leaders were telling me. The church viewed the Women’s Movement as “anti-family.” I knew they were wrong.

Although the Mormon religion, as many religions do, discouraged reading or watching of material that was considered to be in conflict with its teachings, as I grew and moved away from my family’s influence and from the influence of the tight knit church group in which I was raised, I began to seek for myself what I believed about the world.

Not only did I read volumes on world religions and about other philosophies, I found myself in the world making friends with people of all colors and origins. I learned how those from other parts of the world viewed religion and race and equality. The more I became exposed to people from all walks of life and not just the church group I’d grown up in, the more my mind and heart opened.

My first exposure to the gay community was in a bar in Denver, Colorado. It was Gay Rodeo weekend there and the turnout at the bars was huge that Saturday evening. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Being from Oklahoma and having been to hundreds of rodeos, this experience was really quite something. Cowboys in Wranglers and boots and cowboy hats were slow dancing. As my Granny would have said, “Well! Now I’ve seen everything!” I had my foot stepped on by a drag queen in stilettos that night. In heels, she must have been almost seven feet tall. She was gorgeous and funny and I forgave her for the enormous bruise she left on the instep of my foot.

Since that time, I have had the privilege of becoming friends with several men and women who are gay. I consider some of them my family and would do anything in the world for them and know they would do the same for me. I don’t view them as my “gay” friends. I view them as my friends. The movement to deny them their right to marry and to legally experience the same marital joys and heartaches that “straight” people are allowed deeply saddens me. I know in my heart that those who wish to deny them their civil rights are wrong.

I don’t know if it’s a culmination of all of these events and the rest that are too numerous to mention that have resulted in my liberal views now. What I do know is that my heart and head are no longer in conflict as they were when I labored under the yoke of my religious upbringing.

My dictionary has two definitions of hippie. Number 1 is: “a person, esp. of the late 1960s, who rejected established institutions and values and sought spontaneity, direct personal relations expressing love, and expanded consciousness, often expressed externally in the wearing of casual, folksy clothing and of beads, headbands, used garments, etc.” This one made me smile. I was born in the late 60’s and have always felt a connection to that generation although I was too young to have been a part of it. I don’t wear beads and headbands, but I do have a groovy collection of peace sign jewelry and clothing. The part about love and expanded consciousness, I like!

Definition number 2: “A person who opposes and rejects many of the conventional standards and customs of society, especially one who advocates extreme liberalism in sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles." Hmmmm….I don’t like the word “extreme” because I certainly don’t feel that my viewpoints are extreme. I actually have quite a few “conservative” viewpoints. The rest of it I’ll take though.

One of my favorite quotes is from Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins. It goes thusly: “Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s clichés.”

All I can say is….right on.

A Broken Compass, Part II

Not long ago, Eric, Alex & I took a weekend trip to the mountains. As we were preparing to leave for home on the last day, we were walking down a path that led to our car. We stopped to look out over a lake and the couple behind us also stopped and then struck up a conversation with us. They were an older couple who had recently moved from Colorado in order to be closer to their children and grandchildren. They had taken a ride on their new motorcycle to see some of the local sights.

We stood and talked for several minutes and then they said goodbye and went on their way. Eric & I stood and talked for a few more minutes and then continued down the path to our car. As we approached our car, we noticed a gleaming new motorcycle in the parking lot with a completely flat tire. Just as I turned to Eric to ask if he thought it might belong to the couple, with whom we’d just spoken, we saw the couple coming out of the park ranger’s shack. We waved at them and asked if it was their bike with the flat and they responded that it was.

We immediately offered to give then a ride to where they needed to go in order to get their bike taken care of. It turned out that they lived about thirty minutes up the mountain. We moved our luggage to the trunk and made room for them in the car.

As we traveled the road to take them home, they talked to us about their lives, asked questions about ours and thanked us repeatedly for our assistance and generosity in helping them in their hour of need.

Shortly before we arrived at their house, the man turned to Eric and asked, “So, what church do you go to?” Eric responded that we didn’t belong to a church. The guy appeared visibly stunned. A few seconds later, a small, “Oh” came out of his mouth. It was clear that this fellow couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that the people who had just gone an hour out of their way to help complete strangers, didn’t go to church.

They tried to leave money in our console as they exited our car, but we promptly discovered it, and jumped out of the car and gave it back to them. We told them we hadn’t helped them because we wanted anything, we had simply done it because we saw that they’d needed help. As Eric & I left their house to make the drive home, we laughed and talked and wondered what those two said about us after we left. I figured they said something along the lines of, “It’s too bad those two don’t go to church. They’d make awfully good Christians.”

Not only am I not a Christian, I’m an atheist. It’s been interesting over the past few years to watch people respond to me when they find out. I’ve received comments ranging from, “No you’re not,” to “But, you’re so nice!”

So, the question is out there. Are atheists evil? Does being an atheist automatically define a person as somehow lacking in “moral” or ethical behaviors?

Since I am not nearly as brilliant as I’d like to be, I’ll let Sam Harris, one of my favorite writers, say it for me, because he says it best.

“If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon?

We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States. Polls indicate that being an atheist is a perfect impediment to running for high office in our country (while being black, Muslim, or homosexual is not).

Recently, crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world – burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people – in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot? Is there a newspaper anywhere on the earth that would hesitate to print cartoons about atheism for fear that its editors would be kidnapped or killed in reprisal?
Christians invariably declare that monsters like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of religion, they are never especially rational. Example: (Hitler’s atheism seems to have been seriously exaggerated…)

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man, I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison…as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”
Adolph Hitler, April 12, 1922

In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from democracy. Tyrants who orchestrate genocides, or who happily preside over the starvation of their own people, also tend to be profoundly idiosyncratic men, not champions of reason.

Kim Il Sung, for instance, demanded that his beds at his various dwellings be situated precisely five hundred meters above sea level. His duvets had to be filled with the softest down imaginable. What is the softest down imaginable? It apparently comes from the chin of a sparrow. Seven hundred thousand sparrows were required to fell a single duvet. Given the profundity of his esoteric concerns, we might wonder how reasonable a man Kim Il sung actually was.

Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. (The “blood libel” – with respect to Jews – consists of the false claim that Jews murder non-Jews in order to obtain their blood for use in religious rituals. This allegation is still widely believed throughout the Muslim world.) And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.

Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians stop pretending that a rational rejection of their faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion – as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology – is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality.

Insofar as there is a crime problem is Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France’s jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations’ human development index are unwaveringly religious.

Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the “red states” are primarily red because of the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t.

Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” states and 38 percent are in “red” states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, 24 percent in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.

Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality – belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God: each factor may enable the other: or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, however, these statistics prove that atheism is compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society: they also prove, conclusively, that widespread belief in God does not ensure a society’s health.

Countries with the high levels of atheism are also the most charitable in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; In Sweden, 13:1; in the United States where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1.

Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.”

So, am I evil? Because I do not have religion as a “moral” compass, are my behaviors “immoral?” Most evidence, and there is increasingly more each year, points towards exactly the opposite. Most atheists are also “humanists,” and believe in and work towards the preservation of the human species and the planet. We don’t believe in Second Comings or Armageddons or Raptures, so we feel that it’s our obligation now, to save the planet for future generations.

That’s not so evil, is it?