Rednesday: Th Gods

When some people come into our home for the first time, they ask PJ how he can live with all my red. It's true I have brought a lot of red things to this relationship, but it's funny that the most prominent red you see when you step through our front door is this quadriptych, which PJ made before he and I got together.

It's also funny that this work is the first thing you see when you walk into the house of two staunch atheists. I like to call myself a Jewish atheist. I was brought up Jewish and love the culture and traditions, but don't really see how any self-respecting female can believe in a monotheistic religion.

Ex-US president Jimmy Carter is batting for my team on this one. In Today's paper, in an article about why he is leaving the church after six decades he writes:

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries.

Respect, Jimmy!

Here is what the original work – Fire Tower – looked like in situ:

I Don't Know

The other day when Z and I were walking up to town we saw a whole pile of these discarded on the side of the road. Picking one up, he asked me what they were. I told him they were for packaging fragile things. We filled my bag with them to throw away when we got to town, and kept walking.

Z told me how he'd like to fill our whole house with them while we were inside it, so it'd be impossible to go from room to room. I told him that that wouldn't be such a good idea, which led to a discussion about the evils of polystyrene and plastic and how they pollute environments and don't break down.

"I can break them down," he said as he started to shred what was in his hand. As we talked some more about toxins and ecosystems and wild animals, he understood why we had filled my bag with the litter that, before we saw them, had already started to blow all over the place.

"Why don't the factories stop making them?" he asked.

"Why don't the police put the people who make them in jail?" he asked.

"Why doesn't God tell them to stop?" he asked.

Be Your Own Ian

Years ago PJ made a sign that read: Christ is the only Christian, be your own Ian. 

We have a dear friend Ian, whom PJ calls Ianian. Today I made a batch of my blog header cookies and made these for Ian, who came over for afternoon tea.

I am a big fan of these letter cookie cutters. With PJ and I being writers and Z just learning to write, they bring us hours of delicious joy.

Between the Houses

When the first missionaries came to this land two centuries ago, they stole the Dreaming from the Aborigines and replaced it with the fear of God. They called the rituals that they didn't understand, bad. They took something that was untamed and joyous and put a barbed wire fence around it.

This fence was around Z this morning. He woke us up with breakfast in bed again. He was so chuffed with himself. 

"Oh my God," PJ or I said, I can't remember who, when Z told us that he had also made his own breakfast and for the first time ever, his own lunch.

Even though PJ and Z's mum's differences were so great as to cause them to divorce, on the whole the parenting Z receives in our house and his mum's is similar in style. Though of course there are some major divergences.

"Don't say Oh my God," Z said to us. "God is a rude word."

This issue has come up before and each time, PJ and I have explained that even if you believe in God, to say Oh my God is not being rude, it's just an expression.

Z's mum doesn't believe in God, but being the daughter of religious missionaries, it's not surprising that she censors Z according to her parents' conservatism.

I think Z's mum lets Z have a bit too much sugar and watch too much TV, but these differences are so minor compared to this indoctrination; compared to this suffocation of innocent Dreaming and the instilling of fear of something that doesn't exist.

Kill Bill

Billy, left, was getting worse. She had stopped laying, had gone off her food and was becoming increasingly antisocial. Unfortunately PJ had to kill her yesterday. I asked him how he did it, thinking I wanted to know, but when he said he wasn't going to tell me I was pleased.

Instead of letting Cuba and Dirt eat her, in case they too became sick, PJ put her in the compost. If she couldn't provide us with eggs, then let her decomposed little body turn to soil and help make our vegetables grow.

All day I have been thinking of these Monbiot words:

Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost... I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

OMG

From Arbroath in the UK:

Atheist adverts declaring "there's probably no God" could be placed on buses across the country after a fundraising drive made five times the target amount in just one day. 

Even religious groups donated money to the cause in the belief that the campaign would encourage people to think more about faith and could actually enhance support for Christianity. 

Organisers needed to raise just £2,750 from supporters in order to pay for adverts doubting the existence of God to be plastered across 30 London bendy-buses for a month, after the prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins agreed to match all donations. Previous attempts to raise the money had failed. 

But the £5,500 target was met within minutes of a page being launched on the fundraising website Justgiving on Tuesday, and after a few hours more than £31,000 had been given to the Atheist Bus Campaign – over five times the amount required. 

Now there are plans to get the message – "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" – put on buses across Britain as well as on Tube trains in the capital. 

The atheist bus campaign.