What I like about Grey’s Anatomy is its psychological plausibility. I hate shows based on the philosophy of “just because” where nobody tries to provide any explanation for what the characters do or feel.

Meredith is constantly depressed and suicidal because her mother never wanted her. She tries to get symbolically unborn by drowning, which stands for a return to the womb. This happens because her mother says she’s ordinary, which might seem like an insignificant thing to those who don’t understand how the human psyche works.

Only when her mother dies and Meredith fantasizes a symbolic acceptance by the mother can she continue to live. Meredith undergoes psychoanalysis and becomes a lot more resilient than Christina, who is from a much better family.

Christina becomes an instant slave to any man who looks at her kindly because her father died when she was a kid. She is emotionally and socially frozen at the age when her father died.

The only thing that makes no sense is Bailey’s unabiding popularity with beautiful men. It’s not entirely impossible that a short, fat, dumpy woman with bad skin and sparse hair would attract crowds of tall, beautiful, adoring, kind men with large salaries. But that woman needs either to be a sexual femme fatale (which Bailey, with her limited sexual experience and anorgasmy until her mid-thirties doesn’t have) or a woman who lights up the sun with her enveloping warmth (which Bailey definitely isn’t) or a deeply nurturing, motherly type (which she also definitely isn’t.)

A Christian journalist writes:

With oozing condescension, they lament that someone otherwise so smart and perceptive — i.e., someone who agrees with them on the issues — can’t let go of faith... I find it interesting that folks who would never judge a Muslim by the lunatics who share her faith are so ready to judge me by the lunatics who share mine.

He’s right. In academia, people find it easy to make the kind of asinine jokes and comments or to scoff openly in the face of a Christian colleague that they’d never do to a Muslim or Hindu one.

The reason is that a Muslim or a Hindu are seen as an irreducible other while a Christian is treated with the familiarity of a wayward sibling. The condescension and the idiocy stem from the residual guilt of having committed apostasy. I’m not saying anybody should feel guilt but that the attitude shows they do.