First Week Ends

It's been a hectic first week. Next week will be shorter because of the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King on Monday. My classes have undergone a lot of add/drop, so I guess it will feel like starting all over on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I find myself still angry with Ellie for her cowardice and easily abandoned friendship. So much for everything we went through together, all the times I sympathized with her about Liberto's intransigence regarding her job with the university. I never told her what a huge mistake I thought she'd made by leaving GaSou and going into the secondary school system (I think she discovered it all on her own), and of course, she then endured several years of misery. I was supportive of her at all times. I told her that her husband's focus on money, money, money, was wrong, that he should be supportive of her, instead. And the many letters of reference....

Now all of that sympathy, empathy, kindness, has been thrown into my face like it was meaningless, all because she thinks I insulted the Pope. Guess what, Ellie. I will continue to insult the Pope because he has done nothing to deserve any respect, not from me, not from anyone. Catholics have set up this bizarre hierarchy that they cannot bear to give up. I feel the same about the royal families of various countries. No one is royal. No one is entitled to be treated better than someone else unless and until that person does something to deserve being treated better. And even then, most of us, being complex, can be superior at one moment and inferior at another.

There is no deity. People invented gods. Prayers are not answered. People don't have souls. No one can talk to the dead (well, they can talk at them, but the dead won't answer because they are, well, dead). Horoscopes are hogwash. Ghosts don't exist. What exists, what is worthy of our attention, is science and the remarkable discoveries that humans have made (that is, when their brains haven't been hijacked by superstition).

One of my students ended an e-mail to me with "God bless." I told that student that I was a nontheist and that I would not try to convert her if she would not try to convert me. Right now everyone is going nuts over this football player who credits his god with his football successes. Yeah. If there were a god, wouldn't you think, with an entire universe to manage, with babies dying of starvation, with unending war, floods, natural disasters, etc., that this god would be insulted by anyone thinking that a football game was important? What it really is is this: The Calvinist belief that the righteous are rewarded here on earth because they have already been selected by their god to be saved. Nope. Religious people are rewarded by other religious people. They buy their badly written books. They attend their football games. They pray for each other as if it mattered. I stand by the statement that one set of hands working accomplishes far more than a thousand hands folded in prayer.