I almost titled this post “I found myself in the goddamn ER again …” but thought better of it.

My wife had exploratory surgery yesterday to find a reason for the daily bouts of abdominal pain she’s been suffering from for the past three years. The good news is the surgeon found some possible culprits and addressed them. The bad news is she had some pretty severe nausea after discharge and couldn’t keep her pain medication down, so we ended up back in the ER last night. She’s doing fine now, and we’re optimistic for the future.

Episode 111 “What Is Truth?” co-hosted by Matt Wakefield has been recorded but I haven’t had time to edit it. I may not have time in the near future, but I will get to it when I can. The book is divided into two sections: a treatise on why science is wrong about evolution and why True Scientists™ support intelligent design, and a section on why Kirk Hastings’ religion is true and every other religion on the planet is false. We covered the first section (briefly — honestly this part is so filled with garbage we could have spent months trolling its depths) in Episode 111. I think we’ll try to do a 112 on the second section before closing up shop here.

I’ve narrowed the title ideas for my podcast to “Unapologetics” and “Chuck Tracts” and acquired both domain names (unapologetics.com is registered to a cybersquatter). In typical Irreligiosophy fashion, I’ll ask for your feedback and then promptly ignore it and choose whatever one I want.

Also, we’ve finished recording the next episode, so I’ll be editing that over the next week or whenever I can get to it. Be on the lookout for that.

EDIT: Apparently the poll crapped out at 163 votes. Final tally was 70% for Unapologetics, 27% for Chuck Tracts, and 3% for some blank option that somehow popped up in the last day or so.

There’s a thread right now at the Irreligiosophy fan page about favorite episodes, and it got me thinking: now that the show is nearly complete, what were your favorite moments?

To get the ball rolling, I’ll list some of mine: telling my pullup story for the first time to anyone during the “Advice to Young Men” episode (at that point I didn’t think very many people would ever listen to the show), laughing at Hovind’s poem and letter to the editor that he stuck inside his doctoral “dissertation,” interviewing Robert Price about Mormonism, way overpreparing for the second E4F debate (the debate itself was excruciating, but in prepping for it I read a lot of good books and essays), coming up with new ways to annoy and berate our listeners (the Bonerderm commercial comes to mind), and finally just getting to vent publicly about all of my frustrations with religion in general and Mormonism in specific.

It’s been a fun ride.

So it looks like Matt and I will be getting together some time this week to record — look for the podcast to appear some time next week.

And then I’m not sure what to do. I’m thinking of wrapping up Irreligiosophy and leaving it as is, with the RSS feed intact and all the content in place. That way it will stand as its own body of work without a “second coming” that regardless of quality, will never be the same as the first.

If I do start a new podcast, I’ll be needing a new name. It seems the podcast community is all about puns, so any suggestions would be appreciated. If left to my own devices, I’m sure I’ll come up with another name equally obscure and difficult to pronounce as Irreligiosophy.

I have been flooded with requests to re-enable the donate button to allow people to send the site some money. I feel bad about that, I didn’t mean to turn the end of Irreligiosophy into some sort of cash drive. But I also have to say that I’m touched. I honestly had no idea how much this podcast meant to some of you until I got hammered by all the emails and comments over the last two days.

So I’m going to acquiesce and put a donate button back on the site for the time being. But I’m also going to do something for you all. There is one episode of Irreligiosophy left, an interview we did back in February with Dan Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. I don’t think it’s one of our best interviews (which means it may well be one of our worst shows), but hey, it’s done and just needs to be edited. So I’ll break out the audio program one last time.

Seriously, all of you. Thanks.