Holy Crap

I am writing this now as an escape from my duties at work. I have been asked to edit and grade one student's Australia Home Stay Journal. Usually this activity takes me about fifteen minutes to finish. I have been working on this two-page atrocity for nearly 4 hours, on and off. I have to take a fifteen minute break after every sentence to stave off the insanity and the mounting berserker-rage that grasps for ground in my mind caused by the severe lack of understanding of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

I knew it was going to be a long day when I read the first line:

The day, Having thought of Australia for the time being "Time when the homestay is done approaches. Unpleasant", thing.

I had to start a second page just for rewriting the edits. I am fairly certain that this student just plugged his/her ideas into an internet translator and copied them word for word without ever rereading it. That's fine. I have done that before. But these kids are 17-18 years old and have been studying English for more than four years. They should be able to create a simple sentence with the vocabulary they know or can learn from a dictionary. It takes me so long to edit these types of papers because I do not have even the slightest clue what this person is trying to convey to the reader. I could just rewrite the whole essay for him/her and get on with my life, but I want to try to faithful to the context and intent. grrr.

In one of my many timeouts I meandered over to Howstuffworks.com and had a mini-debate about religion and science. This was my contribution to the article:

I certainly don’t claim to “have it all figured out” but I am secure enough, through reasoning and intellectual pursuit, to know that religions are man-made concepts used to control people; to tell them what to think and what to do.

And upon historical reflection it is clear to see (to me) that religions have been the sources and the causes of some of the most horrific events in history, all in the name of god(s). Any flawless, lawful, and good God that lets its believers kill and be killed in its name, is a sociopath. Which is why I always favored the Greek/Roman Pantheon. Their gods were flawed, petty and realistic. They were actually useful in explaining the chaos of the real world. Of course, Greek and Roman mythology became ridiculous once we learned scientific reasons for the causation myths. Once we found out that the fall and winter seasons on earth were caused by the earth’s orbit around the sun and not because Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, was perpetually sad in the fall and winter because her daughter, Persephone, had to spend 6 months in the Underworld with Hades, we stopped believing in the story.

What I am saying is, once we find scientific explanations for the stories in the bible we can stop believing in the myths and move on and develop as a species. The universe wasn’t created in 6 days, it evolved for over 13 billion years. That is a scientific fact as best as we can determine today. Maybe in 2000 years humans will have a better understanding of the universe (I hope) and will look back on our science today as primitive and nonsensical myth stories. In the pursuit of truth and knowledge I hope we can stop living in the past and push forward to live in the present. I fear the only way we are going to survive as a species is if we stop killing each other over these ridiculously outdated myth stories.