There is a beautiful girl who lives in my residence hall. She and I exchange a greeting every day or two. We bow and say something to the effect of "namas thdei". Up untill today I did not know her name. I only knew her because I usually say hello to people with a bow, it is just one neurosis I happen to have. She did the same and said this strange utterance and politly informed me that that was the Indian way of saying "hello". I saw her in the dining hall today. She was sitting alone and so I asked her if I could sit down. She smiled and said yes. We had a very interesting conversation to say the least. I have come from a completely catholic background, all of my life I have been surrounded by highly religious people. My current life at NYU is really the first time I have been among the majority with the people who are sceptical of organized religion. And so she tells me she was a missionary in India, building orphanages and attempting to convert the people she met there. This astounded me. I was completely off my guard and for the first time in a long time I encountered someone of such a strong religious conviction that I have not tried to "open their eyes". I had this image in my mind of her converting all of these people in india, and how wrong it was for her to impress her delusions on other people. I realized I would be no better to impress my own upon her. She still is beautiful, and I know I'll have to work hard to keep my evangelical atheism to myself. It was just astounding, for strangely enough, I saw myself, my previous life among all those delusional catholics in her resolute beleifs in the midst of the moral decadence of New York, and I could only stop and stand in awe. Spirituality is a leap of faith that I'm not sure I'm capable of taking, and if I'm right it may just be the crutch of the weak, but she did not seem weak. And If I had a penny for each time some evangelical god squad team has told me that I'm afraid of gods love, I would be a rich man. I don't think I'd be helping her, or myself, if I tore into her with all the fury of reason and logic, but I wish I had told her that she probably isn't helping all those poor hindu people with her dogma and doctrine.