Dec 18, 2020Would you eat chocolate manufactured by a company that keeps getting prosecuted for false labelling?People keep telling me I’m anti-vax, though I have been diligently avoiding the subject for years. I lost two friends this year over the matter (one because I’m clearly too stupid to be worth the bother, the other because she is) and a recent review of my first book noted…Medicine9 min readMedicine9 min read
Published inInterfaith Now·Jun 2, 2020How the High Priests got HighCannabis and other drugs among the Ancient Israelites — Cannabis residues have been identified on the altar of a Judahite shrine in Israel dating from the 8th century BC according to the Tel Aviv Institute of Archeology.¹ This is not the first time it has been found in the area — in 1993, archeologists found cannabis at a burial…Scripture6 min readScripture6 min read
Apr 24, 2020And then came the virus (3/3): All over with a vaccine?[Part 1 of the series is here] “Microbial organisms are tightly interwoven into the ecological fabric of this planet and on this planet there is no escape from global ecology. This virus, and a great many other things, are trying to explain our error to us. They will get more…Health11 min readHealth11 min read
Apr 7, 2020And then came the virus (2/3): Crisis[Read part 1 here] Crisis was a medical term before it was applied to the crises of middle-age and Cuban missiles. From krinein, “to separate, decide, judge”, it is the stage of a disease that precedes either recovery or death. We have lived with crises since before we were human…Plague10 min readPlague10 min read
Published inInterfaith Now·Apr 5, 2020Psalm 90: a Gnostic meditation on meaning and mortality (read by an 11-year-old girl)We’re theologically all over the place at my house, but the most regular practice of our family cult is to get drunk over Friday night dinner and read a Psalm or two while pounding the table. Psalm 90 is acutely apt for our present pandemic, and not just because of…Psalms2 min readPsalms2 min read
Apr 2, 2020The Monk, the Mystic and the Mosquito: Disease as a friend to humanityChapter 6 of Science Revealed ‘Ka ga imasu!’ I complained, as the monk led me into a sparsely decorated temple hall. ‘There are mosquitoes!’ ‘Imasu ne,’ he said sagely. ‘Indeed, they exist’, but I wasn’t getting any sympathy from him, nor any smalltalk. He bade me sit down in lotus…Meditation17 min readMeditation17 min read
Mar 31, 2020And then came the virus (1/3): The Nematode AwakensIn a Moscow lab in 2017, three years before the outbreak of COVID-19, a nematode worm emerged from a deep sleep into a world much changed — but then a lot can happen in 42,000 years.¹ The Upper Palaeolithic was just getting going when the worm bedded down into a…Coronavirus8 min readCoronavirus8 min read
