Cure for Crohn’s disease? Eat worms

Good news for chutney’s wife.

Weinstock’s theory is that our immune systems have evolved to cope with the presence of such parasites, and can become overactive without them.

What would Baby Jesus wear?

04.11.04 | Permalink | Comments Off

In a further move to crassly commercialize this website, I’ve opened MyIrony Feed & Seed—a collection of t-shirts, trucker hats, and beer steins featuring the new MyIrony logo. Proceeds will go to my cashew addiction.

And in an Easter announcement, I’ve also opened up a second shop—Baby Jesus Fine Women’s Wear. Now you can tell the world that you—or your favorite infants—are Baby Jesus.

While I was looking around at other shops over at CafePress, I noticed that one Unitarian group has some great stuff for sale—honestly the first UU stuff I’d consider wearing. Beatiful renderings of the seven principles (one and two) and another set of products offering a word of welcome. Too bad they don’t have posters, though. They’d make great art for RE classrooms and good promos for campus and new UU groups.

Why not atheism?

04.10.04 | Permalink | Comments Off

Kathryn Joyce has a good piece on atheism over at The Revealer. In contrast to modernist predictions of the decline of religion (and the rise of atheism and secularism), we’ve seen a rise in popular spirituality and fundamentalism. With author Alan Wolfe, she wonders what atheism has done to contribute to its own demise.

The truth is most atheist evangelists I’ve run into are pompous, self-assured little shits. That can’t help.

Then there’s the question of whether an intellectual position that self-defines in opposition to another intellectual position (“a-theism”) can really expect to blossom. There are other terms, of course. There’s “secularism,” but its historical meaning involves the removal of religion from this or that institution or public sphere—another opposition. There’s “freethinking,” but it seems designed to imply that everyone not in the club already isn’t thinking freely. “Brights” was proposed just in the last year or two. Which would make everyone else dull, I would assume. Not how to win friends and influence people. Click to continue reading “Why not atheism?”

This Easter: Kill the wabbit!

04.09.04 | Permalink | Comments Off

As reported by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (no link yet) and elsewhere on the web, this Resurrection Weekend it’s all the rage to kill the wabbit.

People who attended Saturday’s performance at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who took her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.

If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao

04.08.04 | Permalink | Comments Off

Ron Hogan has put out a fun new translation of the Tao te Ching, the key text of philosophical Taoism. At only eighty-one short poems, it’s a quick read. Here’s how Hogan renders my favorite:

If you drink too much, you get drunk.
The engine won’t start
if you’re always tinkering with it.

If you hoard wealth,
you fall into its clutches.
If you crave success,
you succumb to failure.

Do what you have to do,
then walk away.
Anything else will drive you nuts.

(Hat tip to Richard Chlopan.)