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Gregg Miller mortgaged his home and maxed out his credit cards to mass produce his invention — prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs.

What started 10 years ago with an experiment on an unwitting Rottweiler named Max has turned into a thriving mail-order business. And on Thursday night Miller's efforts earned him a dubious yet strangely coveted honor: the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

The Ig Nobels, given at Harvard University by Annals of Improbable Research magazine, celebrate the humorous, creative and odd side of science.

... Miller has sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles, more than doubling his $500,000 investment. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness.

from The Winner Is... Fake Dog Testicle Creator

Past and present "Ignitaries" have included the guy who invented Karaoke (Daisuke Inoue), the creator of the Nigerian spam, the discoverers of Murphy's Law, and a scientist who discovered that duct tape (which fixes everything, right?) should not actually be used on ducts. See the list of Ignitaries here.

The humble sweeper who removes paper airplanes from the stage during the Ig Nobel ceremony, Roy Glauber, this year won the Nobel Prize for Physics. ("Asked what he would do with more than $640,000, the 80-year-old physicist said, "I haven't the foggiest.")

mercy is power

Now we find the Church in the midst of another [in a] long line of infamous purges. ... Even Boston's Archbishop Sean O'Malley, when he arrived in his lowly cassock, showed the ruthlessness of a medieval monk and, shrewdly shifting attention away from the misdeeds of the Church, entered the political fray over gay marriage. Rather than make the institutional hierarchy more accountable for its crimes -- and aiming for more transparency in the Church leadership and all along the chain of command -- the Church under Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to answer the victimization of one group with the victimization of another.

...[A]ny institution with the scope and resources of the Church, particularly in the social realm, that argues for essentially second-class status for any class of citizens, is a danger to an open society. The Catholic Church is not simply a private club, and this is not merely about restricting its membership. This is about right versus wrong, about power versus mercy. The Church has once again forgotten its basic truth: that, in fact, mercy is power. That's the very catholic message of an increasingly un-catholic Catholic Church.

--Boston author Mike Mennonno, in an opinion piece in Tuesday's Boston Metro

Since the great majority of pedophiles identify as heterosexual, including most of those who abuse boys, the re-affirmation of the Church's intent to ban gay priests is not an answer to the problem of child sexual abuse by priests. It does nothing to actually address the problem and instead makes the Church look even more backward.

But the author of the above touched on an important point which is often left out of the discussion about how Christians should treat queer people. "Mercy is power." Just from my own experience, the times in my life when i have felt loved, valued, and accepted, just as i am, without having to pretend to be someone else have felt like i have wandered into an oasis after crossing a vast, dry desert.

That is really the heart of why i am no longer a Christian -- it has much less to do with doubts about doctrine or lack of faith. I have not felt mercy within Christianity.

It is not about seeking a place where i will not be criticized. I expect the ones who love me to tell me when they think i have erred. If Christians believe homosexuality is a sin, then they can impart this message without shunning, political agitation, persecution -- the way they often do for gamblers, alcoholics, and criminals. It is not easy to give a message like that with love; it takes more bravery to show mercy than to show hatred. But mercy is precisely what Jesus said that God demands.

When the church -- any church, not just the Catholic Church -- shuns people out of anger, or agitates politically against a class of people -- it is not acting out of mercy in any conceivable way. It is demonstrating with clarity that it has abrogated its spiritual mission and has become part of the world; it has turned away from promoting wellness (soteria) and has instead taken up its place as a cog in the archontic cannibalistic Empire. It has become that which the church was intended to oppose.