Some Pig, Indeed

This morning I was driving Laney to her tennis lesson and from the back seat, apropos of nothing, she says to me "The doctor in the book said it was the web that was the miracle not the words."

As those of you with chillun know, parenting is all highs and lows, valleys and troughs, one coming hard after the next. Count this one as a high. Big time*.

Last night was a Saturday night in the heart of the summer. After I read a chapter of "Otherwise Known as Shelia the Great" to Laney she grabbed a book from her bookshelf to read for a while before falling asleep. She chose "Charlotte's Web." I then wandered downstairs, poured myself a bourbon and sat down at the piano where, over a period of two or three hours, I'm pretty sure I came close to reanimating the corpse of George Gershwin so he could head into my living room, slam the piano lid down and say, "Look. Just... no. Stop."

I was deeply invested in playing Gerswhin terribly and it was a Saturday night in the middle of summer, so I was content to let Laney read for as long as she wanted. Turns out, she read the whole book.

We'd read it together before. The last time it was a purely collaborative experience because I was crying so hard by the end that Laney exhorted me, "Get it together, Mom!" and then took over the reading of it.

But then, last night, reading on her own she came across a passage that articulates the poetically rational philosophy that I've tried to impart to her for her whole life. The supernatural makes for great stories, but it's not real. Nature, however, is pretty fucking amazing. There are miracles all around you. Things grow and are beautiful and people are kind to one another and food tastes so good. So, rather than setting up worship of water turning into wine, enjoy water and, one day, enjoy wine. Appreciate the great art of nature.

Sigh. As usual, I'm not saying it well. That Chuck Darwin could turn a phrase:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Or, the miracle is not the words, it's the web.

* Ain't I lucky to have such a smart, book-loving kid? She's also great in that she keeps me from getting all cocky about it. For example, as I write this, Laney is sitting on the other end of the couch, legs in the air in that way that only kids and yoga masters are comfortable in, reading a book. She looked up from and said, "Do you mind? I just farted at you." I kinda did.

Coming out of Retirement - Plus a Post on the Moral Case for Atheism

I retired this blog peremptorily. It was a mistake. I'm going to keep my baby steps blog and use it for writing posts, but I think I need a brain dump one. Especially when there's something I've been noodling on for a few days. Like my own atheism.

Atheist is a loaded, scary word isn't it? I confess that when I hear it, I still feel threatened. For a girl raised in a good, Catholic home like mine, "atheist" still feels a little like something hanging out under your bed, ready to getcha as soon as you let your guard down.

But I'm an atheist. And I've been noodling for a while on the moral case for it. Because morality is the reason why I finally gave up cowardly agnoticism and embraced (as Dan Savage calls it) principled atheism.

Here's the skinny: I didn't reject God (although god makes less and less sense to me as I go on). I rejected moral absolutism. I embraced getting along with other people. If God's out there telling you the right thing to do, there's always the chance that the right thing to do becomes the thing God says is the right thing to do. Stop. Period. I'm not a bigot: God says it's a sin to be gay. I don't hate women: God's the one who says she's a whore.

There are, of course, a whole honking lot of people who interpret the will of God thoughtfully and with an eye to getting along with the rest of us earth-walkers. I'd wager a healthy majority of the church going people of the world are tolerant, respectful people. But I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about God.

The very notion of Divinity means that there is an absolute right, and absolute right leads to absolute authority. I'm a godless democrat and a wannabe socialist. I want to live in a world where the will of the majority and the rights of the minority are privileged equally and above all. There's no room for absolute authority there.

My philosophy in a nutshell: If you let go of God, all you're left with is people. And that's the point when people, including people outside your tribe, start to matter more.

I wish that John Lennon song hadn't gotten somehow to be so hokey. Because it's a radical notion. Imagine (ugh...still hokey... I wish I knew who to blame for that. Is it OK if I blame Sharon Stone?)

God Blog

For most of my life I not only believed in God, I believed in a very specific, kind of embarrassing God. I believed that there was this beneficent old man (ack!) who looked upon the things I did either approvingly or with rueful, mute recrimination. I believed in a very paternalistic God, since I was raised Catholic and that's how we roll.

So, there's that.

And then there's this: when I look back at my life, I am overwhelmed by the largesse. I was raised by two people who loved me and took good care of me. I've been educated. I'm healthy. I'm married to a good man and have a daughter who is made of awesome. I have a home and a job and an adorable dog and a cat for whom the rules of longevity do not seem to apply. I live exactly where I want to live and have some awesome friends.

There are some who'd say I've been blessed.

But, there has to be a corollary. Why would I have all this and this other person dies of dysentary at 4 and this other person loses a child to cancer and this other person is swallowed up in a tsunami?

My beneficent God, it seems, is just horrible to other people. He's like a father that buys me pretty dresses and ice cream and a canopy bed while he locks his other kid , naked, in the attic and feeds her every fourth day or something. It just doesn't make sense.

And if it sounds like I'm railing against God, I'm not. Because I don't believe in God. It offends my sense of logic too profoundly. Not the part about there being some cosmic architect. The part about him being so arbitrary. It makes no sense to me. And, so I don't believe in God.

For a lot of people of faith, as I believe they're called nowadays, the concept of atheism is anathema. It seems like an absence of something, like something is missing. But, I don't see it that way at all. I don't need God. I don't miss God. Because, I'm not alone. As my boyfriend Eddie Vedder says, I can count on two hands the ones I love. And I live in this world with a billion other people, all of whom are in this with me.

My life is as rich as ever, having evicted the beneficent old man from his perch in my brain. I'm too busy trying to live a life that I approve of, too busy scolding myself when I'm mean or small or greedy or impatient, too busy with the business of being alive to worry about what happens when I'm dead.