MULTIPLE CHOICE, MUNA

And so now I guess we have to talk about that. In brief: don't be a dick. However, the episode makes it pretty clear, reading between the lines, that Muna has been making her relationship with God everybody else's problem for a while now, and we're only just seeing it. I don't think anybody -- and Kristine's pretty likeable, like she's not a bad person -- would go from 0-60 like that otherwise. I myself got my hackles up a little bit last week when Muna told Surya she'd pray for him, because that's my honest response, even though he himself didn't take offense and frankly he needs all the prayers we can give him. But God is, like sex and money and politics, something that requires excellent room-reading skills, in that almost everybody has religious issues of one kind or another. So while your relationship with God is beautiful, it does not, in and of itself, make you special, and that's how it's going to look after a certain number of mentions. I don't know if Tarek ever mentioned his Mensa status -- or frankly the importance of religion in his life -- but I do know that's all we know about him, and it's de facto a bad impression, if that's all there is to you. Christians among Christians can talk about it all day long, but you don't live in a Christian world, and religion itself carries a bunch of signifiers and connotations that, while they may or may not be true, are still going to get attached to you. If you act in accordance with the negative connotations, as Muna does, then you're stereotyping yourself, and at that point it stops being about both you and God, and starts being about the thing that you can't drop. I don't know if I'd be as dickish about it as Kristine, no matter Muna's extremity (which again, I'm positing) but I do know that I would be doing everything in my power to try and subtly communicate that she was creating problems for herself. It's back to the Mean Girl thing: we're not trying to make you hate yourself, we're trying to make you feel just bad enough about yourself that you cut out the behavior that is bringing you down. Maybe after a certain number of "weeks" with no sleep, I'd get this rude about it, but that's only at the point that you make it clear -- as again, I honestly believe Muna has done at some point -- that you're doing it on purpose.