Temperature has remained in the 100s, dipping down to 99 at one time. This is all due to the secondary infection, which exhibits itself as a dry cough. The infection is not getting any worse and I have high hopes of it being overcome in a few more days. The excretion of the methotrexate is proceeding as planned. The bottom line is that my discharge home for a few days has been delayed. Mo already got her flu shot and Miranda will get her’s tomorrow, so we should be all set when I do get home.

Talked with Pat, the social worker, about the divisiveness of religion in the US these days. In his recent Atlantic Monthly article “Is God an Accident” (www.theatlantic.com/200512/god-accident) Paul Bloom points out that there are no significant differences between the US and Europe in the number of people that believe in God, or what they believe in. My great-grandmother, for example, lived in England and was a member of the Assemblies of God, which is, I understand, a fundamentalist church popular in the US. She apparently held that the pictures (movies in the US) were the work of the devil.

Although less extreme, as a child, I regularly attended and enjoyed church (Church of England. A former teacher remembers me attending Holy Communion daily in the small chapel in the school basement; this was in England, remember, where religion is, or was then, allowed in schools. I think that I did not keep this up for long. I may have done it for Lent, shortly before or after my confirmation. Also, this was 40 years ago.]

Today, church attendance in Europe is much lower than in the US. Why is this and does it matter?

I remember when first coming to Stow being asked if I would like to join a men’s group to study the bible. My response was, sure, if they didn’t mind having an atheist join them. The invitation was dropped.

I see many of my friends in their guestbook entries offer prayers. I’m sure that some of them don’t know that I’m an atheist, but that’s not the point – they are not. I do not find the offering of prayers at all offensive. You can even pray for my conversion if you will (unlikely) – but please don’t proselytize. In the reverse situation, if you were the one in hospital and I were the one signing the guestbook, it would be meaningless for me to pray to God for you. I would offer my deepest good wishes to you for support and recovery. Being an atheist does not mean that you become incapable of caring.

My problem with religion is when it becomes divisive.

One of the reasons, I think, why church attendance is less in the UK, at least, than in the US is because community also exists in the local pub culture. Having worked the vendage in France one year, I know that France also has its café culture. In the US we do not have anything like this spread throughout the country, but the US does have certain non-religious communities, such as soccer mums and school groups. It’s not the same, however. These communities are often tightly scheduled and have high demands on time; being a member of them can often feel more like a job than time-off. Also they are exclusive – you can’t be a member of a school group if you don’t have school age kids. What is needed is more opportunities for community (non-alcoholic included).

Mo and I and Miranda tried a few of the churches in the local area and settled, for a while, on an Episcopalian church, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Acton. It has a dynamic music director

[By the way – there’s great anagram pair in English: Episcopal:Pepsi Cola / Presbyterians:Britney Spears]

The problem was that the church made more and more demands on Mo’s time – there appeared to be no middle way. It’s difficult to avoid feelings of guilt when you turn down an invitation to play in the pageant, or help out in ushering.

Some of the mega-churches that I hear of down South have very sophisticated approaches to marketing and providing services to the community. All well and good, if that is what you want, but harmful if it competes with other communities – either national or international. It’s fine for the church to offer health care and services to the homeless, but that’s not its principal job, and if it means that government thinks it can skip providing these services then we have a problem.

Although an atheist, I see a lot of good in religion. Simon Blackburn, in his book “Being Good – A Short Introduction to Ethics” does a fine job at dismantling the traditional religious explanations for ethics (is something ethical because God says it is, or does God say it’s ethical because it is?). Blackburn then goes on to talk about Benthamism and Utilitarianism, which provides a much stronger argument for ethical behavior – but it still does not explain Mother Teresa.