I don’t know what happened but our university cafeteria has improved dramatically this year. Instead of mountains of deep-fried and breaded stuff, we now have a person who makes salads for people right in front of them. And the salads are all great. The line to the salad person is a lot longer than the line to the hamburger stand, which is very nice to see.

We also now have stand that sells fresh fruit. The selection is not huge and the prices are high but, still, this is a great start.

Now look at this beautiful salad I just got. And I also bought two fruit salads but I can’t photograph them because they are gone already. 🙂

And a question for everybody: my colleague from Spain and I were discussing how salads are eaten in our cultures. For both of us, a salad accompanies the main course and it feels weird that here in North America people eat salad first and then the main course after that. I always have to struggle with waiters who want to remove my salad before serving the main course.

How do you eat your salads? And also, should I start posting photos of the salads I make at home? I’m a salad fanatic and I always invent new ones.

Fellow Aspie blogger Izgad and his bride Miriam used this brilliant strategy to explore their different communication styles:

Drawing from my theater experience, little game that I invented for us, as a means of thinking about our relationship and explaining how we relate to each other to others, is the BZ and Miriam skit. I play her and she plays me. She tends to play BZ as dour with a penchant for monologuing. I tend to play Miriam as jumpy and ecstatic with a touch more common sense than BZ.

I think that this is an amazing idea. Once, my students did an oral presentation where one student impersonated me teaching a class. That presentation was a lot more helpful to me in my teaching that all of my peer and administrative evaluations combined because it allowed me to see myself through my students’ eyes. And I can’t say that I liked everything that I saw. It was truly a revelation.

I now can’t wait to play this enlightening game with N.

A blogger I really like posted the following image that is being used by the Canadian Liberals to promote the Liberal party and compare it to Canada’s NDP:

As voxcorvegis points out:

THERE HAVEN’T BEEN ANY NDP FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS! It would be just as disingenuous as if I were to make a list of major scandals that have taken place under Liberal and NDP administrations, and then claim that that “proved” that the Liberals were more prone to corruption.

This poster reminded me of lists spread by woman-haters where they make a list of male and female scientists, artists, military leaders, etc. throughout history. Since the female list is less populated, they gleefully hold it up as proof that women are inferior. I always thought that it took a special level of stupidity to make such lists and not even stop to think why one side is less populated than the other.

The folks who tried to promote the Canadian Libs this way just showed themselves to be total idiots.

I need help from my readers to explain the strange phenomenon I just observed outside. Can you, please, look at the photos and tell me what caused this strange white line in the sky? It causes me intense anxiety because I can’t explain it. For decades, I have been suffering from nightmares where airplanes fall from the sky and when I saw this I immediately imagined a falling airplane. Which gave me an intense panic attack. I’m hyperventilating and shaking right now. And I’m going to go and do some breathing exercises.

People seem to think that a society where atheism has become widespread and religion has been defeated will be a place where different sexualities will be tolerated, sexual freedom will be complete, and the respect for science will reign.

I hate to disappoint but I happen to know for a fact that this is not true.

I was born in a fully atheist society where nobody went to church (let alone a synagogue), religion was ridiculed, and everybody had to take classes on “Scientific Atheism.” We weren’t a country where religion had been driven underground. After several generations of people brought up as atheists, nobody knew anything about religion except that it was “an opium for the masses” and something that very uneducated, backwards folks believed in because they hadn’t discovered the light of reason.

And you know what? Homosexuality was punished by prison sentence in the Soviet Union until 1993. The society was fiercely homophobic in a way today’s United States, a country that is quite religious, is not. Sexual morality was extremely repressive. A young woman would be slut-shamed and vilified if she had a steady boyfriend, irrespective of whether she even had sexual relations with him. Victims of rape were shamed so badly that the suicide rates amongst them were staggering. The general consensus was always that a victim of rape must have “asked for it” in some way or another.

And science? I’m sure you have heard about the persecution of geneticists and cyberneticists in the Soviet Union, right? When the completely atheist leaders of the Soviet Academy of Sciences decided that “Darwin’s evolutionary theory is reductive and unsatisfying”, they persecuted scientists that studied genetics. Many of those scientists were killed for no other crime than practicing their science. Quiet, nerdy folks, killed by an atheist regime because they believed in evolution and wanted to study genetics.

The sad truth is that eradicating religion is not a road to tolerance, freedom, and respect for science. Human beings have a tendency to react violently to the manifestations of sexuality of others, they have a tendency to blame victims as a psychological mechanism of distancing themselves, they have a tendency to fear science and to kill each other.

An atheist society does not do any better or any worse than a religious society in terms of morality, tolerance, intelligence, etc. And you know why that happens? Because the moment religious (or atheist, or agnostic) beliefs stop being a deeply intimate, personal issue, they lose all meaning and turn into yet another way of building collective identities. Their principles become empty formulas that people recite in order to feel less alone in the world.

It doesn’t matter which group you abandon your individuality for. As long as you give up on your right to figure out the fundamental questions of existence for yourself and adopt the answers of any collective, you will become that more likely to participate in barbarity and fanaticism. And atheist fanaticism is just as bad as religious fanaticism.

If you are a Russian-speaking person, then don’t answer because it’s too easy for you.

Now the question: what are the people in the photo doing and why? (Hint: “diving into the snow” and “because they are weird” are not good answers.)

Oh, I wish I could join them right now!

Reader Maxwell asks what it is that I find particularly hateful about the post ridiculing a beautiful passage from the New Testament that I linked to in my previous post.

Making fun of the religious beliefs of others is wrong. How would you feel about a person who stops next to a Muslim performing the namaz and starts laughing and pointing their finger at the praying person? Or somebody who loudly ridicules the Jews for wearing kipas? Or somebody who writes a blog post saying, “Those Hindus are beyond stupid. They actually believe that cows are sacred. What idiots”?

It’s perfectly fine not to share the religious beliefs of others or not to have any religious beliefs. But to approach a complex system of beliefs of a huge group of people from the point of view of a guffawing idiot who is proud of being ignorant of said religious worldview is a sign of nothing but sheer idiocy.

Religions, atheism and agnosticism are ways in which people approach the most important, fundamental questions of their existence. Where did I come from? What happens to me after I die? What is the purpose of my existence? How do I determine the moral code that guides me? Everybody has the right to answer these questions in the way they choose for themselves. This is a deeply intimate issue. It is more intimate than sex because, ultimately, you cannot share either your conscience or your death with anybody. And making fun of the way that some people have found to address these fundamental issues of existence is a lot worse than ridiculing others from not practicing their sexuality in the same way you do.

Now, let’s forget for a moment that the blogger in question ridiculed a passage from a book that many people consider to be holy. Let’s just say that s/he took a quote from any work of literature that has existed for centuries and has been treasured by many and ridiculed it in the “Sheesh, this is totally stupid because I don’t get what it is about” manner. As a literature professor, I have had my classes brought down to this level on a variety of occasions by students who are too dense even to attempt to see the beauty of Quevedo’s poetry and Calderon’s plays. As one student wrote on the course evaluation, “I don’t get why we had to read the poetry from 1,000 years ago. This was so long ago, who even cares any more?”

As my prof used to say, if it seems to you like everybody else in the room is an idiot, there is probably just one idiot in that room and that idiot is you. And it might just be possible that the countless people who enjoyed this text and were inspired by it were not completely deluded.