Professor Poopy Pants

To my dear Blueberry Girl,

In Terry Pratchett's excellent novel about a fictional Australia, The Last Continent, he introduces a character that happens to be an atheist. Nothing unusual about that, considering that Pratchett himself is a outspoken atheist, except for the fact that that character happens to be one of the many gods that inhabit that world. Yes, an atheist god.
Oxymorons like that do exist in our own real world, I'm afraid to say. Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert at the age of 15, came to a realization after years of research that the Prophet Muhammad did not exist. And that God did not write the Quran because that's not how God would operate, writing books.

Unlike the violent backlash that ruined the lives of those infamous Danish cartoonists depicting unflattering images of Islam, I welcome Kalisch's theories. I really do. He makes some valid points, such as the first coins to bear Muhammad's name came 6 decades after the religion was established. Or that the first biography of his life was written a hundred years after his death and that no known copies exists (only references were made to it in later biographies). I see this is as a window of opportunity for other scholars to disprove him wrong which would only further reinforce the credibility of Islam as the one true religion. I would do it myself but I am hardly up to the task. My Ph.D was in Midievil warfare tactics, so if anyone would like to disprove the existence of the trebuchet I am the man you're looking for. Unfortunately I don't meet too many people who doubt its existence, or even care to have a conversation with me. I live a solitary life, but my books and the hazy scent of centuries old pulp keeps me warm during the nights. Sometimes I even bother to read the text instead of huffing the pages like a glue addicted fiend.

But enough about me! It's good to ask questions. It's good to look for answers too, which is what Kalisch did. If not him then surely somebody else would ask those same questions, wouldn't they? 

"Yes," you say, agreeing with me as usual but adding "and don't call me Shirley." Touche! Quoting the late and great Leslie Nelson will always win any argument, especially ones about who would look better in pants, bears or high rise buildings. (Bears. Always bears. Bears beat anything, even middling theologian professors from Germany. Even Leslie Nelsonquotes.).

"I do believe that other gods exists," says the atheist god from Pratchett's novel, paraphrased because I don't have a copy with me right now. Ok, I do but I don't feel like walking to the other end of the room, about 4 steps, take it down from my shelf of the best literature in all of the western hemisphere, and then find that page. So this dialogue is recanted poorly from memory. "I do believe that other gods exists and that they're knocking about, I just I don't believe in them."

There's a connection to that somewhere that ties everything up, only I can't be bothered to spell it out. I have some student papers to correct, some glue to sniff and company with local druids in an hour where we will ingest psychedelic pills and run naked and amok through the countryside. Yes, this is how I spend some of my nights when I'm not with my books.

Forever in your service,

Professor Poopy Pants.