After all my personal history, what is an atheist's perspective on living with cancer?  It's clean and uncomplicated.  There's no asking why me? since there's no one to ask and there are no final causes.  There's no thinking about an afterlife--either with smug confidence or with trepidation.  The end is the end.  There's no fruitless prayer, since again, there's no one to pray to and no assumption that "He" would be more interested in my fate than that of the other seven billion people on this earth.  Each of us who are atheists may react to the facts differently, but for us religion and god are empty categories that have nothing to do with what we're facing.

Some have asked, if what I just wrote is the case, why bother with spending so much time delineating an atheist's perspective.  In part, my choosing to do so at the moment I subtitled the blog was a reaction to other people's responses.  If friends or acquaintances say that they're praying for me, that's fine; their intentions are kind, and I accept them as such.  But when someone said to me that I should put myself in the hands of the Great Physician because He's the only one who could heal me, I have to bite my tongue not to suggest that if He is all-powerful (or at least all-knowing), He could've saved Himself some work by not causing (or in a weaker form allowing) cancer in the first place.  Or when, as I wrote before, while watching a black, liberal woman with whom I had agreed completely on the points she was making and thinking it would be fun to have a drink with her, she responded to the death of Christopher Hitchens with a rant about atheists' shoving their ideas in the faces of Christians and suggesting that they (we) should just keep quiet, I know that I can't be silent.  I can't imagine that there has ever been such a dominant majority as American Christians who whine so frequently and loudly about their supposed persecution. 

And if abstract arguments about the existence of god don't interest me, the power of organized religion in America is also something I can't keep quiet about.  In the one year of tax returns that Mitt Romney did release, he claimed an income of $42M, of which he tithed $4.2M to the LDS.  If he wants to tithe, that's his business, but that he gets to deduct those millions as charitable contributions affects me.  It's not charity to send mssionaries around the world to convert others or to send millions to California in support of Proposition 8.  The National Conference of Catholic Bishops is unceasing in its reactionary politics.  And, of course, the evangelical/fundamentalist Christian sects are relentless in their conservative politics and their (tax-exempt) attacks on what's left of American progressive ideas.

All of that is well known, and examples aren't really necessary, but here's one that I hadn't known about.  For several years now, hundreds of fundamentalist churches drop any pretense of avoiding political discourse (not that there was much to begin with) and have something they call "Pulpit Freedom Sunday."   This year, it's October 7, a month before the election.  On this day, they explicitly and provocatively preach politics, and then in a further act of provocation they send tapes of their sermons to the IRS, which from lack of funds, manpower, and perhaps will does nothing about it--no investigation of the blatant violations of the churches' flouting already weak restraints.  'Weak' here equals non-existent.  So I'll keep my atheist ideas to myself when religious people do the same--and it'll be a cold day in hell, so to speak, when that happens.

On a different note, Kimber, our 75# German shepherd mix, has a tumor on her underside.  We take her to the vet tomorrow to have it removed and biopsied.  The vet said it's probably benign, but "nothing to mess with" as it could be mammary cancer.  We're hoping of course for good results.  In the meantime, I assume she'll have to wear a cone for several days.  Since she's not the world's most graceful dog in the first place and is so scared of fireworks that she's constantly trying to squeeze into small, safe spaces these days, the next week is going to be hard for her.