Been ill for a while but am doing better now

For the last couple of years my life has been getting progressively more painful. After a recent "we tried everything else" test gave a possible clue to an autoimmune problem they gave me Prednisone as a temporary test to see if it helps. It helps a lot. I hope this leads to better things.

Meanwhile I have been reading because that is about all I could do. I am currently reading Xenocide, the third book in the Ender's Game series. One of the worlds settled in this book is one totally settled by Chinese. They follow the old gods and the traditional Chinese philosophy. The closest they have to royalty is the god touched. Those who can sense the gods. Since the gods are perfect people who are god touched feel they are filthy. The early sign of a god touched is a person who compulsively washes their hands until they bleed. To test if they are truly god touched they put the person in a special room, dip their hands in dirty grease and leave them alone. If they try to kill themselves rather than live with the dirty hands then they are truly god touched.

I wish most of the religions people followed made even half that much sense. I mean this was freaky to read but compared to the popemobile it made a lot of sense!