I totally agree with your points, too, I have to say, even though I do believe there is a divine energy of some sort which we tend to call god. Even if there weren’t, I think that it is what we do here and now that matters, since it’s pretty clear we are here to be loving and compassionate, not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or ‘holy’ or any other silly category of thought like that. It’s a point you make so elegantly.

To some extent we’re here to be loving, and help each other get through life the best we can - because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. I suspect those murderers are already living in a self-imposed Hell, whether they know it or not. I’d like to invite them out of it.

As you say: ‘there are no rewards for a life like that’.

It is so sad that even today, people are still killing other people for simply being born somewhere else and holding different views.

I don’t personally believe in any afterlife or any gods, but I’ll say this to the type of person who would commit such atrocities: If there is a god, it has allowed people to be born with all manner of beliefs and cultures and if you are angry with other people for not thinking just like you, you may want to take it up with your supreme being. It seems pretty terrible to think a benevolent god would allow innocent children to be born just to damn them for not being culturally identical to you.

If there is no god and no afterlife and you’ve spend your entire life fearing and hating and hurting others, you’ve lived a far worse life than anything you could inflict on another person. You have wasted the most important gift you were ever given and you have failed to leave the world better than when you joined it. There may be no retribution but there are no rewards for a life like that.

I’ve tried to identify my “flaws” and travel the threads, hand over hand, into my past to see what about my upbringing has led me to where I am today.

There wasn’t much drama in my family, more the subtle undercurrents that signaled a certain expected behaviour.

Sometimes I doubt my ability to write an interesting memoir of the times I’ve selected. I felt like a golden child in safe circumstances. My childhood radar, which detected the adults’ behaviours of an large extended family is the mystery I must make interesting to a readership.

The proliferation of horror stories on the market today, of child abuse, or high drama are my competition. So I feel I must step up to the plate and dig deeper to make my story interesting, or meaningful.

If your readership in interested in looking at my memoir writing journey, please see my blog. http://maryemcintyre.wordpress.com

Yes, that’s my hope also - that the bill, when once it is in place, will take on a status that means no other administration would ever dare to take it away.

For me, the bottom line is that healthcare is an essential of modern living, just as roads and the telephone are. A hundred years ago, if one got cancer there was usually no cure and the individual would be dead in under six months. Many ‘common’ aliments killed the sufferers in days. So, in real terms, a sick relative was sad, but often unlikely to bankrupt a family totally such that it could never recover (that only happened if the wage-earner got sick). Death kept things cheap. Those days are long gone, thank goodness. We are now in an age where health costs money. And so we have to pay attention to that.

We accept that a modern army must have lots of expensive modern weapons; but some people do not accept that a modern society needs modern defenses against illness. Would we really send our troops off to Iraq with muskets, claiming that these weapons were good enough for our ancestors so they must be good enough for us?

I love your comments, Marnie - and your Facebook contributions, too!

Allan