I don’t mean to be profane, but I’m wondering about the Pope’s tracheotomy. As I understand it, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the Pope surely believes, holds that the special bread eaten during the ritual of communion actually becomes the body of Christ after it’s swallowed. But if the Pope has a hole in his neck then what if the bread falls out again? Wouldn’t that be a holy relic far more potent than the Turin shroud?
Archive for the 'Religion' Category
I was helping put out the food at the daughter’s school Christmas party yesterday. I found it a bit disturbing for several reasons.
The first thing that worried me was that I seemed to be the only person helping who washed his hands before handling the food. I’m no cleanliness fanatic, far from it in fact, but this did seem to be a rather obvious case for a bit of rudimentary hygiene. Parenting is a mucky business and the food we were putting out was going to be sitting at room temperature for at least an hour.
The next alarming thing was the pork. There are loads of Muslims at that school, as well as a few vegetarians and yet there was no plate on any table that didn’t contain sausages and sausage rolls, often heaped up against cakes, sandwiches and other foods. I mentioned it to one of the other helpers, a former teacher, and she didn’t think it was an issue at all. I think that religious food laws are simply insane but some people feel very strongly about them. Surely we should at least make an attempt to respect their views.
The worst thing though was the terrible quality of the food. There were a few token carrot sticks and chunks of cucumber but everything else was a series of variations on salt, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil and flour. Not to mention the supporting cast of nasty additives. I saw virtually nothing that I would feed my children at home; most of it I wouldn’t eat myself. I got the impression that the people who contributed food had just bought the cheapest possible snacks they could find, maybe it was stuff that they wouldn’t normally give their children either. But surely a party should be an opportunity for fantastic, beautiful, exciting food, maybe delicacies that one normally wouldn’t indulge in. There’s simply no point in serving up a load of revolting junk, not really food at all, and in such quantities that most of it ends up in the bin anyway, which is where it belongs. What are we trying to teach our children - Eat well when you must but eat crap when you’re having fun?
I’ve always found the idea that gay people are born that way a little depressing. Gay men are usually more stylish, funnier, cooler dancers and better at empathising with people than straight guys. They have a much wider range of sexual partners available to them and casual sex is much more acceptable to those partners. It just seems like more fun being gay. Unfortunately I have a very hard time finding any man sexually attractive and I’ve always believed that I was simply born this way; there was no cure.
However help may be at hand. The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality says that people become gay because of things that happen to them in their childhood; they’re born with the same sexual preferences as anyone else. And they believe that people’s sexual orientation can be changed by the use of therapy. The site is rather biased towards people who want to stop being gay, presumably because they want to become right-wing politicians or live in a really small town, but obviously the therapy could be used to enhance the patient instead of restricting his desires. I couldn’t find any sections on heterosexual reorientation in the site but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
Latest Comments
RSS