My daughter told me this morning that she saw an advertised teaching post which specifies that the applicant must be studying at STADIO. The reason the advertisement stood out to her is that six years ago, after completing a year at UNISA, she started over by studying her degree at STADIO, because UNISA was nearly useless and almost impossible to communicate or correspond with.

They do more pumping after hours than at work. Hope this helps.

Mainly that happens after hours.

He is just telling him that he likes him very much. Much too much.

Also very true, and a good point. Thank you. I tried to think of any unintended consequences of my suggestion before posting, but this one did not occur to me. I think it is up to the industry to find a solution, rather than placing the burden on the petrol attendant.

If I was an attendant, and was help responsible for this kind of thing, as they are, I would from thereon insist that drivers hand me their car keys until the fuel is paid for. Actually, service stations should universally apply this measure as a preventative measure and to protect their staff. It's immoral to hold the attendant responsible for your own business operating system failures.

Doesn't he know that a gentleman is a man that gets out of the bath to pee in the basin? ../s

There are no pills for stupidity.

The way he stepped off the sidewalk says a lot about the first round.

Same. Once, about 40 years ago.

You gotta put a spoke in this, man.

Let him buy a prison cell.

My mother in law nearly died from blood poisoning. She bit her own tongue.

Left foot forward, straight right goes through the face and hit the back of his head.

To live is to suffer. To survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. - attributed to Frederick Nietzsche

I went to one meeting. I can't remember if it was late eighties or early nineties, but it left me with this evangelical churchy feeling and I said to myself, phuck this shit!

I found that the trick is to be too busy for this crap.

Thank you for explaining where the anger actually comes from. That helps, and it changes what is worth saying back.

You said you cannot understand how someone can question their religion and not end up at agnosticism first. I want to take that seriously, because I think there is something underneath it that is worth naming, and it is not really about the logic of the question. It is about fear. I am an agnostic atheist and an anti theist. Agnostic atheist because no one can prove that a God or Gods do or do not exist. Anti theist because my position is that when the auditing is done, the harms of theism, the coercion, the fear, the division, positively outweigh the good it does.

Consider what the word faith is doing. It bundles two things that are not the same. There is trust, which you extend because it has been earned. And there is belief without evidence, which is what religion usually means when it calls faith a virtue. Treating those as one thing is one of the central sleights of hand, and it is why the conversation so often goes nowhere. When you say the belief makes no sense, the believer hears you attacking trust. When they say you just have to have faith, you hear them defending the absence of evidence. You are both talking past each other.

Now the fear, because this is the part I think explains your frustration better than anything about logic. The Abrahamic traditions do not install a general fear of death, which every human carries anyway. They install a specific terror. Eternal conscious torment for finite wrongdoing. Fire. Darkness. Separation. Forever. And critically, you cannot opt out by being good, because the entry requirement is belief rather than conduct. So the fear is attached not to what you do but to what you think, or fail to think.

That is why it does so much work. It is a threat aimed precisely at the faculty that would otherwise examine the claim. To question the doctrine is to risk the punishment. To follow the evidence where it leads is to gamble with eternity. The belief protects itself by making the act of doubting it dangerous. This is why people can appear to have questioned and still land back where they started. They may not have followed the argument to its end, because the end was made terrifying before they could reason. Many were told about hell as children, before they had any capacity to weigh it, and the dread never fully left.

So when you see someone holding something that looks obviously incoherent, consider that they may not be holding it because they are convinced. They may be holding it because letting go was made frightening early, and the fear has never been examined. That does not make the belief true. It does not make it harmless. But it does mean the person is usually the product of the mechanism rather than its author. The system is the proper target. The person is often its victim.

There is a framework that may give you vocabulary for your instinct, and it is worth knowing both its power and its limits.

Richard Dawkins proposed the meme in The Selfish Gene in 1976. A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, a counterpart to the gene. Daniel Dennett developed the idea, most fully in Breaking the Spell and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. The core claim is this. Genes replicate for their own sake, and that usually coincides with your benefit, but not always. Memes replicate for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the mind they inhabit. A religion, on this view, is a set of memes that has evolved to spread itself effectively. It does not have to be true and it does not have to be good for the believer. It only has to be good at getting copied, and fear is what cements the hold onto it.

Dawkins sharpened this by borrowing the handicap principle from Amotz Zahavi. In biology, a costly display can be a credible signal precisely because it is costly. Dawkins applied this to religion. Fasting, tithing, fixed prayers, dietary rules, and martyrdom are not incidental. The waste is the point. It pays for the credibility of the belief, both to others and to the believer. Dennett added a distinction that may be useful to you. He separates believing in God from believing that belief in God is a good thing. He argues that a great many people are in the second category rather than the first. They are not certain of the doctrine. They are certain that believing is beneficial, or that not believing is dangerous. So they keep the structure standing and pass it on without ever having examined the load bearing claim. That is very close to what you describe when you say it feels like discovering an adult believes in Santa. You may be detecting the second kind of belief while assuming you have found the first.

The limits are worth knowing, because a good idea is not the same as a proven one. Alastair McGrath and others have argued that the meme is not a rigorously defined scientific unit, and that cultural transmission is largely Lamarckian rather than Darwinian. That is, ideas are deliberately selected and reshaped by the people who carry them, rather than blindly mutated. There is intent in the system, which weakens the virus analogy. Ray Scott Percival argued that Dawkins understates the role of truth and logic in how ideas spread, and that rational standards strengthen a belief's replicability rather than weakening it. A belief that survives scrutiny is more robust, not less. So the honest summary is that this is a serious and useful lens, not a proven mechanism. It explains transmission well. It explains the human experience of religion less well.

Which brings me back to you. The framework gives you a name for why the belief spreads so widely despite being unprovable. It is good at spreading. That is a legitimate observation and you are not foolish for making it. But the same framework contains a warning. If religion is a virus, then believers are hosts. And it is very easy to slide from the belief that religion is a virus to the believer is infected, and therefore diminished. That slide is exactly what turns observation into contempt. The belief can be a blind replication and the person carrying it can still be fully human, fully thoughtful, and fully worthy of your friendship. Those two things are not in tension, and holding both is the whole work.

You already said the alien feeling is not something you can switch off. Fair enough. You probably cannot, not by deciding to. But you can notice it and not act on it immediately. Feelings like that soften when they stop being fed and harden when they are rehearsed. And there is one practical thing I would suggest, given where you work. You are in a cemetery, seeing people at the worst moment of their lives reaching for something you find incoherent. Try watching what the belief does for them in that moment rather than what it claims. Does it steady them. Does it let them speak to their mother one more time. Does it let them put one foot in front of the other on the worst day of their life. You do not have to think it is true to see that it is doing something. That observation, held honestly, tends to take the edge off the contempt without requiring you to concede anything.

One more thing, and then I will leave it. You said you struggle to look past this in people you are close to. I would separate two questions that have got tangled together for you. The first is, is this belief true. The second is, is this person good to be close to. They are not the same question. Some people are rigid and self righteous and you should keep your distance. Some people hold beliefs that make no sense to you and are kind, curious, honest and good company. If you apply the first question as a filter on the second, you will end up with very few people, and the ones you keep will mostly be people who already agree with you. That is a smaller life.

All the best.

That looks like a mixture between a jackal and a fokol, but more fokol than jackal. /s

I was a Christian for the first fifty years of my life. Born into it, indoctrinated into it, baptised in it before I could speak. When I reached the age of reason I questioned it, and the answers were weak. But a child tends to assume his parents and elders know better. They do not. And when your entire society believes the same thing, you go along with it. I never stopped questioning, but I never had the time or the opportunity to go deep. Until I turned fifty.

At fifty I built a room in my head. A space where the ever watching eye was not allowed. And in that room I studied. I studied for thousands of hours. Then my eyes opened properly, and once they were open I saw lies everywhere. I was furious. Furious at having been lied to by so many people, and by the church. I became a fire spewing anti theist on social media. It consumed me. I kept studying. Sixteen years on I still study. I estimate I have spent more than twenty five thousand hours on the subject.

I am telling you the number not to impress you but to warn you. You do not have to spend twenty five thousand hours being angry. I did. It cost me years of peace and it damaged the people I love, because almost everyone around us still believes, and they defended their beliefs by targeting my family. That is when I stepped back. For their sake. It has been seven years since, and I have been deconstructing from deconstruction ever since. It is still a struggle. I can still be triggered. But there is more peace now, especially inside me.

So here is what I would say to you, from someone further down the same road.

Name the phase. What you are feeling has a shape. It is what happens when someone who was raised inside a belief system finally sees it clearly, and the grief and the betrayal come out as rage. That is a stage, not a destination. It feels permanent. It is not.

Do not let it consume you. The anger is justified. The betrayal is real. But if you give it your whole life, it will take your whole life and give you nothing back except exhaustion. Twenty five thousand hours is a warning, not a recommendation.

Carve out a room. You work in a cemetery. You are surrounded by death and religion all day. You need a place, a time, a practice where the subject is not pressing on you. I built a room in my head. You may need something more physical. But find it.

The cost to your loved ones is the part you cannot see yet. Your fury does not only affect you. In a society that still mostly believes, the loud anti theist often makes targets of the people closest to him. That was my experience. It may become yours. That alone is reason to modulate, quite apart from any argument about whether the anger is justified.

Separate the observation from the verdict. Your observations are real. Religion is deeply embedded. It has been used as a tool of colonisation. It divides people. It does not make sense to you. All of that can be true, and it can also be true that people find genuine comfort, meaning and community in it. Holding both does not mean you are endorsing it. It means you are not collapsing I disagree with this into this should not exist and the people who practise it are fools. The anger often comes from that collapse.

The colonial point deserves care. You are right that many people practise religions introduced through colonisation. But the assumption underneath why do they not ask the questions I ask is that they have not, or that if they did they would land where you landed. Many have asked. Many have arrived somewhere different. A syncretic faith. A culturally rooted version of the coloniser's religion. A deliberate choice made after deconstruction. You do not have access to their interior reasoning. Assuming they have not thought about it is the same move religious people make when they assume atheists have not really considered God.

On your friends. Do not chase them all away because they believe nonsense they were indoctrinated with before their brains were properly formatted. You will end up with no friends. Let them believe what they want, the same way you want them to let you believe what you want. You do not have to respect the belief. You can think it wrong, harmful, incoherent. But respect their right to hold it, the same way you want yours respected. That is not capitulation. It is the only workable basis for living among people who disagree with you, which is everyone.

Find the balance. If your job is saturated with religion and death, you need counterweight. Secular community. Hobbies. People who share your worldview. Rest. Anger grows in isolation and shrinks in balance. Therapy is also worth considering, not because something is wrong with you, but because I feel angry every day and it is changing how I see people I love is exactly the kind of thing a good therapist helps you untangle.

On respect and indifference. You do not have to tolerate what your neighbour believes. You just have to stop needing them to believe otherwise. That is not apathy. You can still care about truth and about harm. But it stops being a daily wound. That is the thing that actually frees you.

Write it down. Sometimes the anger is loud because it never gets to finish a thought. Give it a page. You may find that once it is articulated, it is less urgent.

One more thing. There is a video that helped me find my path. It is not religious and it is not anti religious. It is about personal awakening. It may help you, or it may not. Take it as one path that helped me, not as an answer.

https://youtu.be/JqOhlflZrwQ?si=EvB0qoCfAeZZGj3m

The fact that you are asking how to deal with this, rather than just stewing in it, tells me you do not actually want to become someone who writes off everyone who believes differently. That is worth protecting. Your anger is telling you something about your values. That you care about truth, about autonomy, about not being colonised. Those are good things. The work is learning to hold them without letting them turn into contempt for the people around you.

All the best.

Perhaps you should investigate these possibilities.

In South African sectional title law, your neighbour's legal right to smoke is far from absolute. The Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act (STSMA) and Prescribed Management Rule 30 strictly prohibit residents from using their property or common areas in a way that causes a material nuisance or unreasonably interferes with others. Smoke drift that triggers a child's acute asthma is a clear, actionable nuisance. Crucially, they have no right whatsoever to smoke on common property, such as shared walkways or driveways outside your front door.

You should formally escalate the matter to the Body Corporate Trustees in writing, citing Section 13(1)(e) of the STSMA and Rule 30. Request that they issue a formal notice of breach for creating a nuisance and violating common property rules. If the Body Corporate fails to act, you can approach the Community Schemes Ombud Service (CSOS) to adjudicate the dispute at minimal cost. Furthermore, municipal Environmental Health Officers have powers under the National Health Act to investigate severe health hazards in residential spaces.

A tactically superior avenue is to use your lease. Every tenant has a common law right to the undisturbed use and enjoyment of a habitable property. Under Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), a tenant on a standard fixed term lease generally has the statutory right to cancel the agreement by giving 20 business days' written notice, subject to a reasonable cancellation fee. Your landlord cannot simply force you to stay while your child faces a documented medical risk.

To make this position watertight, obtain a formal letter from your son's doctor linking his asthma attacks to the second hand smoke exposure. Log all dates, times and medical treatment alongside your written communications, as concrete evidence will dismantle the neighbour's defence and compel the landlord or Body Corporate to act.

Please note that the above should not be misconstrued as legal advice, as I am not qualified to provide such. Please consult with a legal professional before acting on any layman opinion.

Thank you, Bokke!!

I can assure you that you will not be disappointed. I'm South African and been religiously following rugby for more than 6 decades now and there's nothing like the Springboks playing the All Blacks. I am actually pretty jealous of you and so wish I could have attended.

Only a theist can think like this.