We now consider sports part of the entertainment industry and a big business, so we do not begrudge athletes their exorbitant salaries even if it means paying $75 for a ticket to a baseball game and shelling out $100/month for sports cable channels. "Let them get what the market allows," goes the argument.

Writers don't get that same consideration because this country sees physicality as rarer than intellect and creativity. People read and write every day. We write notes to teachers, fill out complaint forms, post to blogs, read blogs, magazines, books.

Because we do a bit of it, a lot of people believe writing is easy. Writing a note is easy. Writing well is difficult.

It is attention, emotion and time consuming work. It is good work, sometimes fulfilling work, work that doesn't involve physical labor, but it's hard work. The difference between writing and writing well is the difference between first aid and medicine. It is the difference between me taking cello lessons and Yo Yo Ma practicing. It is the difference between Matt Drudge and Edward.R. Murrow.

No one imagines becoming an architect, a steel worker or a contractor without training and for compensation. The structure of a plot or a character depends upon the skill of a writer or writers. Writing is an occupation that requires particular, relatively rare skills.

Somehow we've been coerced into believing that market value represents our choices rather than our acceptance of what we've been offered. Market value is not social value or moral value. Market value doesn't indicate anything more than how the topmost tier distributes attention.

It's easy to target the writers of popular shows as being greedy because people imagine they make enough to live well in Manhattan or LA. In fact, most writers write live on less than teachers' wages (and we know how little that is) and write in hope of striking it big just once doing what they love. Isn't this what most of us want? To be conpensated well for doing something we enjoy rather than spending 75% of our lives doing something we hate so our boss can make a bonus equal to our entire year's salary?

The hosts of popular shows, like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, do a make good money, but not on the scale of executives who control the production of those shows. Those executives are compensated well beyond the wildest dreams of Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant or Derek Jeter or any of us. Writers, the people who make the product the rest of the the entertaiment industry relies upon for generating income, are at the bottom of the pay scale and do not share in the revenue made off their work.

Workers, like writers, are not an afterthought to economic process. They are the foundation of all economies and should be treated as the vital elements they are.

As with pilots' pay, I've seen the Pummer's sort of misrepresentation of teachers' salaries as I have of many professions that we take for granted. People say they highly value certain things - getting to a destination on time and safely, education, child care, clean food, safe drugs, information - but when it comes to the cost of getting those things, suddenly we cheap out.

Pilot's hours, like teacher's hours, are not compensated for the real time they are at work. It's not just air time that counts for pilots as it's not just in classroom time that counts as teaching. There's homework, continuing education, the before and after school/flying hours, the stress of the job itself.

We like our myths, especially the ones that tell us everything is easy or simple or somehow mediated - better yet, solved! - by technology. To those people I ask, "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"

Theology is a metaphor for coping with the world around us, not a method by which we are able to examine the world. A theological mindset inhibits rather than encourages exploration because in the beginning and at the end is not a curiosity to banish ignorance, but a renaming of the unknown as the unknowable. More confusingly, postulating an omnicient God creates a tension between God and the universe He (always "He") created.

Prayer is the coinage of theology; inquiry. especially scientific inquiry, is the currency of discovery. Prayers, by Mr. Haught's own explanation are made intended to be answered, but are made to be denied for the greater, invisible to the individual, good. That dynamic denies the very personal relationship Haught espouses as basic to religious belief.

Although Haught denies it, investing in prayers or miracles separates and elevates believers over heathens. Yet the preponderance of historical evidence provides more examples of theology excusing cruelty, encouraging ignorance and injuring those Haught says it serves. Acquinas and other philosopher scientists always came up against the power of established religion and the mythology of God.

Hope doesn't need the justification of theology; it may, like theology, simply be a coping mechanism. It is not a question of belief in the ineffable - athiests understand that knowing the molecular structure of water is not the same as sensing water's motion. Religion positions an intermediary between us and experience.

Therein lies the tension. We can't know the universe without God, but we can't know God. God defines and creates the physical world, spritual existence and morality, yet God is above and outside all those spheres. This means for us to allow evil to happen without acting upon it is morally wrong, say allow creationists to misapprpriate theology for politcal power, but for God it's not only OK, it's the core of His being.

Although being or doing good might require some faith, it does not require God. It does require asking some really good questions.