Everybody, Out of the Pool! ...

August 30, 2004 (more or less)

Why all of the drama and the unpleasantness seen in some of the pages on this site? Why mention these unpleasant incidents of sordid or childish behavior? Recently, this was asked of me by somebody who, for a variety of good reasons, I eventually banned from my guestbook. Normally, such incidents are not ones that I view as being ones worth reporting, but this one stuck out in my mind because he offered arguments which I suspected would be in circulation, and generally ought to be answered. There is an obvious incentive for me to put such accounts online somewhere - they prove highly effective at putting an end to rumors, and save one a lot of time that would otherwise be eaten up by the constant need to tell the same stories over and over. And our visitor, who apparently turned out to be one of the people in one of those accounts, and who didn't seem to like the idea of the truth being put in plain view for all to see, had his own incentives.

Fine and dandy, but does that necessarily have anything to do with you, as a visitor to a Traditionalist site? In some cases, I came to the conclusion that the answer to that question was "no". In such a case, I either sent the account over to my own personal homepage ("Placeholders 'R Us"), put it into a page not linked to from the main section of the Almond Jar, reachable only by search engine or links from elsewhere, or in some way made an effort to see to it that the only people being presented with the material were those who had gone looking for it. But, in some cases, I felt that it was relevant to a broader section of the online population, and so I included it here, for reasons which I'm about to get into.

No, I didn't ban my visitor for asking a few questions. I don't do that. The gentleman had taken to playing the ever popular online game of lying about what I had written, what he had written, and what everybody else had written. If you've gone through some of the accounts of online silliness on this site (and some of the ones affiliated with it), you've seen people like this one in action. You've also seen what it takes to deal with them - doing a compare and contrast, quoting the exact words used vs. the misleading summary of those words offered by the offending party. This, on a website, can prove very effective, which is one reason why one sees trolls ranting and raving about the existence of such pages so much, and why some of them try to harass providers into censoring those pages. However, you also probably noticed that creating such pages is a time consuming process, as is reading them, and the time demands seem to go up exponentially as a function of the length of time the discussion was allowed to continue.

This is probably why that version of trolling is as popular as it is - the time demands that go into combatting it eventually become unbearable. This is also why, as a moderator, when I see somebody engaging in this practice, I am not going to be patient with him. Much of the low moral tone of present day Neo-Paganism in particular, and the Internet in general, probably owes its existence to the fact that so many found that the quickest, if the only route to political success was to lie, lie, lie. It is thus a matter of both personal expedience and moral principle for the moderator to put an end to such efforts quickly, and if he should be the one who finds himself trolled, the reasonability of that conclusion does not change one bit.

I am, and I state it with some small measure of pride, a practical man with a life lived outside of both Paganism and the Internet, one that does a lot to keep me grounded when others have lost their sense of perspective and are taking themselves and their causes far too seriously. As the reader may have gathered by now, in the course of going through graduate school, I've branched into engineering in order to be able to make a living - and a very pleasant and rewarding way to make a living it is, offering both intellectual satisfaction and the pleasure of knowing that one's work benefits society in general. The pay is good, the hours are reasonable and the people are wonderful. One could not ask for a more pleasant detour. But like any profession, that of engineering has its awkward moments, and I don't mean the one that comes at the departmental mixer when we realize that none of the actual women have shown up, out of the four who've taken classes in the department that year.

One such moment came as, out of curiosity, I watched a film of a group's project. Different branch of engineering, but it looked like fun. It's usually not a good sign when one's efforts lead to the creation of a new expression, but this one did - "swimming pool engineering". One really had to feel for the kids. It was a group of undergraduates who decided to create a remote controlled submarine. As those who've been to graduate school in the sciences or a technical field know, the conceptual leap from senior level work in undergrad to first year in graduate school dwarfs that going from freshman to senior year in college. This is why one sees so many first years wandering around in a heartbroken daze, sure that they're doomed to flunk out, thinking that the admissions committe MUST have made a mistake when it let them in. It's a rough transition, one that most faculty would love to smooth over, if only somebody could figure out how.

One of the many things that makes that transition difficult is that this is the point at which the tidy, simplified theoretical world that the undergrad has been living in, suddenly is intruded on by the messy complexity of the real world. It's a powerful, humbling and fascinating experience that teaches one just how much one doesn't know. But these kids hadn't learned that lesson yet.

They worked long and hard crafting their unmanned ship, testing it out in their family swimming pool - a surprisingly large and deep one. The project seemed to be a perfect success, with the sub responding to every command with lightning speed. Much pleased with their progress and excited about the possibilities, they then made the mistake of testing their sub in the ocean, instead of in, say, a lake or other smaller body of water. The results were heartbreaking. The sub headed right for the bottom, and as this was the Pacific coast, that bottom was a long way down. I seem to recall that they never did find it again, which wasn't surprising - the ocean currents were strong, and, sad to say, tended to pull objects in the direction of some of the deep water abysses, a few miles down. Forget about diving - even if the riptide didn't get you, the pressure surely would. Even a navy sub couldn't go down that far. Nothing less than an Alvin class sub could have survived the attempt, and those are difficult to come by.

These were not dumb kids. Within the tidy, idealized theoretical world they were used to dealing with in class, everything was designed flawlessly, but an ocean is not a swimming pool. A swimming pool does not have currents, it doesn't have thermal gradients that can throw off sonar, it doesn't have its own, unexpected noises that could be mistaken for a signal sent by the control crew. I would have liked to have seen more detail in the film, but one point did come across clearly - so many things could have gone wrong, that they never did find out what caused that uncontrolled dive. But they did learn from the experience. The real world is messy, and the messiness does not go away just because we forget to think about it, and we fail to plan around that messiness only to our own sorrow. Learning that lesson and putting aside the overconfidence of early youth is what marks the beginning of the transition from being a student to being a professional, or from being an adolescent to being an adult. Regrettably, some never make that transition.

We see entire philosophies crafted regarding the way in which people are to live, without any concern for the realities of how human beings really are, in the flesh and not some utopian dream. The standard that is applied in support of the Western adoption of Eastern philosophies and other bold and recklessly innovative breaks with tradition almost invariably is the same: an oversimplified Kantianism, in which we are called to imagine the world as it would be, if all lived by the standards of the proposed way of life. One of the many messy realities that such an argument overlooks is that of free will: the 100% compliance scenario is an unreal one, because opting out of compliance is always a possibility, and in a large population, that which is possible is almost invariably seen, sooner or later, as a matter of simple probability, even if it is unlikely on any specific occasion. Imagine a pair of dice that never come up with a pair of sixes. On the first roll, you would hardly be surprised, but if this pattern persisted after a few days of continuous rolling, you would almost certainly be feeling the suspicion that something strange was taking place.

The question that is so often glossed over in so many daydreams about perfect worlds is this: what about the people who don't live by the rules the proposed creed sets forth? How are the faithful to deal with them? This question, I find, almost never get addressed by those who speak of religion. They almost seem to think that reality is too grubby a subject for them to be concerned with, or to allow other people to concern themselves with, either.





We find ourselves called on to build our philosophies around idealized, classroom-like models of the world, which bear as little resemblence to the real place as that swimming pool bore to the Pacific Ocean, leading us toward efforts bound to prove as disappointing as the launching of that ill-fated sub. One might notice the slight homage to Plato's style in "Interview with a Brave Man", but "Tractatus" is not even close to being as friendly in that account as Socrates is in the Republic. This, some see as a failure which needs to be rectified, in a rewriting which I have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue, and mainly, not the inclination. With all due respect for the historical greatness of Plato's accounts, this is one aspect of them that should not be emulated.

Consider how people speak in these books. "Yes, Socrates", "No, Socrates", "Verily, how could it be otherwise, Socrates?" Even in a university setting, one doesn't find people talking like that in real life, least of all when they start to lose an argument. In Plato, one rarely, if ever, sees a debater lie about what he said five minutes ago, pretend to believe something that he doesn't for the sake of rhetorical advantage, try to pressure others into refusing to listen to his opponent, or otherwise fail to act like a gentleman. But in real life, people do these things, and the question is, how do you deal with that?

The answer some would pressure us into accepting, is that we should play make believe and proceed as if these things weren't true, in the apparent hope that the problems we ignore will just magically work themselves out with no human intervention required. Thus, we see calls that we let our politically correct brethren drop by and speak freely, with no thought about the fact that this consideration has, historically, never been returned, meaning that we would be left honoring a one-sided social contract, grossly tilting the rhetorical playing field. But then, knowing what a "social contract" is, is no longer in fashion either, as we are asked by many to think of law and order and the existence of a civil society as being things that just happen, not things that need to be maintained through a continuing process of re-creation. We are called on to treat all views as being sincere, even when they demonstrably are not - and are not supposed to dwell on the process of infinite recess and the circling discussions that result. And, we are asked to portray our fellow polytheists at their best, even if "their best" is behavior at has never been seen out of most of them.

Yes, one does get to see a lot of less than ideal - if fact, sometimes absolutely disgraceful and scandalous behavior in these pages, but only because this is the behavior that we've witnessed, and if the sad and unfashionable truth be told, it's behavior that is becoming more and more typical. You're not getting feel-good fiction, on this site. Even in the fictionalized "Interview", the rants are real ones, and in no way atypical. Some feel that these are things which ought not be shown, which should be pushed under a table where nobody has to look at them. And if your idea of religion is something that you go do on Sunday, when the world is kept safely at bay on the other side of those heavy oaken church doors, maybe that will work for you. But Hellenism and its Volkish offshoots are religions we live, not just escapist fantasies we vanish into when the ugly work of the real world is safely behind us for a moment. That ugly, messy rough and tumble reality that a world denying eastern religion might ask us to turn our backs on, is the very world that Hellenic Traditionalism, in all of its forms, focuses on. How do we live in this world, right now, is the focus, and that's what all of those sacrifices, and all of those efforts to build a sense of communion with the Divine are all about. If, then, we refuse to look upon life's many blemishes, just to appeal to a few prissy individuals who can't cope with hearing bad news, we end up sacrificing the entire point of the religion in order to remake it to the delight of those furthest from enlightenment.

It is precisely by diving into that world - and noticing what one sees - that one finds clarity, even as the gods answer one's prayers for understanding in ways one won't appreciate until long after the fact. When I found myself butting heads with somebody who thought that he was being cool when he argued that getting killed was no big deal, obviously I wasn't talking with a gentleman or a scholar, but ... he argued so poorly, that step by step I found that I always knew how to respond, and found myself drawn toward the concept of implicit affirmation, the notion that one assents to certain positions just by being where one is at the moment. That is, as I have pointed out, a basic foundation stone of this site's entire philosophy, and it came out of a discussion with somebody who probably shouldn't be trusted to fill a gas tank. Point by point, guided along the way to a point that the man himself never got, with others just as clueless helping the process along. And then I got it. Aphrodite had given me the needed guidance that I had asked for, just by giving me the good luck that brought that unpleasant meeting, thus bringing me the questions that would bring me understanding, in an almost Socratic fashion. As we used to say in Synagogue, "thank God for every good and every evil that comes your way".

Like the distinction between matters of taste and matters of opinion mentioned in "Traditionalism, Neo-Paganism and the Failure of Moral Subjectivism", a series of just thoroughly stupid discussions pointed me in the direction of a basic philosophical principle needed for the establishment of a basis for an objective morality, leaving me in a far stronger position when more skillful adversaries came along. One of the virtues of studying the lunacy of the common idiot, in a dysfunctional community like the Neo-Pagan one, is that what others do subtly and skillfully, he does crudely and blatantly in a manner easy to make out. Having done so, achieving what might seem the worthless accomplishment of understanding his madness, one finds that much of what one sees in his much slicker spiritual guides now seems strangely familiar - and unmistakably clear. Know the acolytes and one will know the teachers in ways they would prefer that you not. So, yes, there are lessons and truths to be found in these accounts, and if others should be bothered by this, they can get over it or depart. I write for the sake of the truth, not for the sake of popularity.

Especially when the motives of those who expect me to opt for the latter so often prove to be so much less than pure.





As is so often the case on this site, I've changed the name of the party involved - who was writing under a pseudonym that nobody has ever heard of before, but, uh, whatever. It's changed and that's that. My brief encounter with the man began when he posted some remarks in my guestbook. While his tone was seemingly friendly, and maybe even hinted at a willingness to be helpful, a few disturbingly familiar notes made an early appearance, one of them being, as I have indicated above, misrepresentation of remarks made on this site. To read what he had written, one would be left thinking that we had reported a lengthy series of flamewars on sites under my own personal management (or the management of my associates at the Shrine), carried out by my own people. One might be left with the amusing (and throughly inaccurate) picture of me trying to carry on a philosophical discussion with an unruly member while he was creating a disruption.

In reality, where I've been the moderator, I've responded quickly and decisively, suspending or banning the offending party when he's become a problem. Not only do I clearly state, from the beginning, that I will not tolerate trolling, but take a good look at the Uniform Base Code of Morality, cited as "required reading" for would-be members of the Shrine. I define what "trolling" is, in such sufficient detail as to leave little room for doubt, so if somebody should get out of line, he isn't going to get a warning, because he has no excuse for not knowing better. He's simply going to get sanctioned in some way by me, his host. I may give him a time out (ie. a suspension from the list, or a request to leave my home), or if he's gone sufficiently far, to in one sense or another, leave and never darken my door again. I take more than a little pleasure in the observation that now that I'm a bit more selective about who I allow to drop by, I almost never have to do that.

This is not because I've set the standards I hold others to so low, but because those this site attracts hold themselves to standards that are so high - and as reciprocity would demand, will hold me to standards that a bit higher than those of the Neo-Pagan norm as well. When you see me set down policy on this site, you also get to see me lay out reasons for those policies. Assertiveness is not the same thing as arrogance - I recognize the existence of objective standards by which what I do and what I say may rightly be judged, and make the case for the reader that what I say and what I propose to do live up to those standards. The kind of people whose interest I hope to attract would accept no less from me, nor from anybody else asking for their attention. The Neo-Pagans, however, do things differently, as one might expect given their rejection of the concept of objective morality and indeed, even of objective reality in many cases. Recognizing the existence of no objective standards, they are left with no standards to hold themselves to, aside from those set by collective whim. The behaviors and attitudes that arise in the resulting groupthinking free-for-all end up being bizarre, irrational, and much less than uplifting, as seen in some of the incidents detailed here on this site.

The flamewars reported on the Almond Jar (and affiliated sites), in general took place in forums run by those in no way affiliated with the Shrine, and even the Prima Nocturne incident (which came in response to an incident on one of our lists) was no exception to this. One might also note that in not a single case was the offending party (or parties) a member of the Shrine. What we are reporting, in these accounts, is the idiocy and sleaze in the NEOPAGAN community, that lead us to the decision to walk awy from that community, breaking all connections to it. One of the recurring notes in these accounts, is of the damage done to the process of discussion by people who were willing to lie about what others had said, in order to set up straw man arguments, finding a community willing to be supportive of their dishonest methods and willing to go on the attack in response to the questioning of those methods. And what would I find here, in dealing with my newfound online friend? A willingness to lie about what I wrote, and then about what he wrote when I contested it, and then to go on a ranting spree when I put an end to that. The irony of his post was that he was exactly the kind of person who he was telling me that I needed to crack down on, more. He also beautifully illustrated why it was, that the New Agers were such a problem - a combination of utter dishonesty, and tireless perserverance.

The sad truth is that this unwholesome combination of personality traits is likely to prove to be self-reinforcing. It is going to make one unwelcome in the more pleasant parts of society, leaving one with less of a life to miss out on, as one wastes one's day on these ego-based crusades. Like an alcoholic who finds solace in his bottle from the damage that alcohol has done to his life, the person who is consumed by these non-issues finds that he can distract himself from the reality of what his life is becoming by diving ever more deeply into the pointless tasks set out for him by his obsessions. The more time that passes, the more of one's life one has wasted in this manner, and the harder reality will face should one choose to return to it. The damage done to one's character becomes the focus of a kind of addiction, leading one to find it difficult to not do more and more of what one should be making the struggle to do less and less of. To the defense of the elders in the New Age movement, then, that they give people no more or less than what they freely choose to accept, we would respond in part by pointing out that like anybody who panders to any kind of addiction, they have been subverting the very free will whose existence is being appealed to as an excuse for their actions.



That was one problem the visitor to the guestbook to the Almond Jar was presenting. Another was the not altogether unfamiliar practice of making complaints in vague enough terms that knowing exactly what the complainer is getting at is difficult. Does one leave those remarks unrebutted, leaving a third party who is casually looking over the exchange with the impression that one couldn't think of an answer? Or does one attempt to guess at what the complainer was referring to, only to have him protest that one has misrepresented HIS remarks, saying "oh no, I wasn't saying this" (referring to one reasonable interpretation of what he had written), "I was saying this" (referring to another interpretation). No matter which interpretation of his remarks one addresses, and no matter how reasonable it may be, if he stays vague enough, he can always do that. This is a very manipulative way to communicate, not one that earns my trust, and it's one that I see out of the "subjective morality" crowd, very frequently. What a surprise.

I suspected that what I was seeing was a variant on the "assertiveness training" concept of "fogging". Remember Ellen's opening remarks in the Prima Nocturne Incident? This post seemed very reminiscent of Ellen's opening gambit, when she vaguely complained about her friends being "violently trashed" - while declining to say who her friends were or what she considered to be the "violent trashing" that they experienced until I dragged it out of her. Experience has taught me to be on guard when I see somebody posting in that fashion: the friendliness is almost invariably no more than a facade. There's nothing genuinely friendly about the attempt to put somebody else on the defensive by communicating with him in such an evasive manner.

Experience does have its uses, yes? Seeing where this one was headed saved me a lot of hassle, and my familiarity with the warning signs helped me notice little details that, in the past, would have left me saying "if only I had noticed that". Once the poster's intentions were made clear, he was gone, but in the meantime he did raise a point or two worth addressing, because they're points that I expect that others would wonder about, as well. Why not take the opportunity to address them?

Breaking in here for a second ... for those unfamiliar with the antics of the New Age, attempts on their part to appeal to Quantum Mechanics in an effort to make their superstitions sound scientific are so common as to have become a cliche. The technique is almost invariably the same. The New Age "quantum theorists" mention the impact the "observer" has on the experiment observed, going on to say "see, science has shown that reality is subjective, just like witches have been saying all along". Except that's not what Quantum Mechanics tells us, at all. Consider the example of neutron diffraction cited in Feynman (1). "Who" is "the observer" in that experiment, in which a diffraction pattern is observed without any experimenter ever measuring the spin of so much a single atom? There are a number of "observers" actually : each of the atoms whose nuclei have a different spin than before, because each records the impact of a neutron.

"The observer", in (usually popularized) discussions of Quantum Mechanics is a term of art, a phrase that in professional (or semi-professional) usage doesn't mean quite precisely what it means in common usage. The atom is as mindless as anything can be, and holds no opinions or expectations regarding the neutron, the ongoing experiment, or anything else. But by being where it is, and being impacted on as it is, it creates a lasting record of an event (an "observation"), and thus, in a quantum mechanical sense (though certainly not in a popular sense) "an observer". Consciousness is not an issue at all, and so there is nothing in the recognition of the role such "observations" play in the wave function collapses they cause that serves as a vindication for any sort of Berkelian idealism, or any other belief in the subjectivity of physical reality.

When those who actually know something about Physics tell this to New Agers, though, the smugly ignorant response that usually follows tends to leave the scientist wanting to strangle the New Ager. "Let me take you by the hand and explain this to you", one of them actually had the nerve to say to a PhD candidate. "To say that somebody is an observer is to say that he was aware of what he was observing" ... he started, blinking in incomprehension when the PhD candidate, not amused at being condescended to in his own area of expertise by a high school dropout, said "yes, you incredible moron, and that's why I told you that the word was a "term of art", leading to much sobbing from the high school dropout's friends about how "mean" the PhD candidate was being, counting on the fact that to somebody who wasn't really paying attention, the PhD candidate might seem that way. But kindness, like patience, has limits.

This encounter was typical. With a little selective editing and biased camera work, to say nothing of a conscious effort to seek out a few individuals with conveniently eccentric views which one can then portray as being representative memebers of a large segment of their professional community, one can create many illusions on the screen. But, if you, as the reader have any doubts on this point, I'd suggest that you hop on down to the nearest Physics department, ask people there how much they'd look forward to a visit from the crowd from the "psychic fair" in town, and count how many pairs of eyes you can see rolling.

What the New Agers who posture, expressing an interest in "Science" have historically really proved to be interested in, has been the validation of their own beliefs, not in the opportunity to learn anything that they didn't already know. When they discover that Science simply is what it is, and is not subject to haggling or open to requests that it revise itself for the sake of somebody's self-esteem ... well, you've probably seen the Pre-Ptolemaic Electrification Argument and the thread that followed in the review of the House of Netjer on this site. They take the news with all of the maturity one would expect of a spurned teenage suitor, right after he's had a few beers: endless ranting about how evil science and scientists are, apparently because neither would put out, even after the New Agers offered to buy them dinner, in some sense.

For all of the griping they might hear, however, scientists in general know better than to let themselves be had, and so did I. While "Traveller" would, in a post I've since deleted, express an interest in learning more about my beliefs, note his answer to the question about the nature of morality: "subjective". This, on the guestbook of a site a large chunk of which is devoted to a development of an objective theory of morality, and argument of the necessity of such. Looking at his post, did you notice how he spelled the word "magick"? In a typically New Age fashion, as opposed to the way in which most people would: "Magic", right?

Note that since the very beginning of this site, this has been billed as the homepage of a non-magical, non-New Age group, and so why would I or anybody else in the Shrine (past or future) have an interest in any discussion of "magick"? Looking at his post, especially in the next few lines which you'll see below, and reading through the lines as much as his vague prose would allow, one finds that what he, as a New Ager (with their usual belief in the subjectivity of morality) trying to pass himself off as being something else, seems to be saying is that I need to do to improve my site is to take the teeth out of its criticism of the New Age and of the concept of subjective morality. While I can certainly see the merit this might have from the point of view of somebody who wishes to promote the New Age or Moral subjectivism, I don't see a good reason to be grateful to Traveller for this kind of self-serving "advice", which really seems to be little more than a roundabout form of evangelism.

Imagine a Catholic dropping by a Presbyterian website, trying to pass himself off as a Presbyterian, and then "helpfully" suggesting that what the Presbyterian really needs to do to make his a better Protestant site, is to do more to promote deference toward the pope and remove some of those nasty critiques of church doctrine, because "none of us Protestants want to read that kind of thing." How much appreciation should the Presbyterian be expected to show in return for such "help" given by those who, must like the New Age mystics who try to write their teachings into modern Physics, are clearly there to help themselves? Being nice does not mean that one has to be stupid or weakwilled enough to blind oneself to motivations that are carelessly left in clear view. Traveller, however, seems to expect me to feel otherwise ...

To a reader who has just come breezing through here, this might sound like a supportive remark, something that I'd have to be a horrible, censorious tyrant to object to, but in context, really it is not. Remember, and I hope that I'm not overrepeating myself on this point: on those occasions when somebody has been a problem on one of my forums or in real life, I don't respond with lengthy philosophical essays. When there seems to be an innocent mistake due to a lack of understanding, I will occasionally try to clear up the confusion, as I must. What I'm trying to create is community, and that arises through mutual understanding, not through fear. But where and when somebody has been truly, aggressively out of line, and visibly not listening ... but I'm repeating something that you'll see in my post below.

So, what, in context, could "Traveller" possibly be referring to? I've written this site largely as a page of "apologetics" - an explanation of what I do and why I do it, in matters of faith and the practice through which that faith finds expression, and there - and almost exclusively there - is where I "explain myself". To say that I shouldn't be spending so much time "explaining myself" is, then, in effect a call that I dismantle this site, deleting the pages on which I make the case for the non-New Age philosophy I pursue in such matters. And he manages to issue this demand that I destroy my own site in a way that would sound, to somebody casually browsing through the guestbook (and probably unaware of the specifics) sound like a pep talk being given to a discouraged moderator. I am feeling discouraged as I write this, but not because of any concerns that "Traveller" addressed.

I am feeling discouraged because I find that the very concept of reason is shown so little respect. I am feeling discouraged because when I seek to dispel any possible misperception that I've been as arbitrary as the moderators I've criticised, by laying out my operating philosophy (including both what I do and why I do it) and showing that there is nothing capricious about it, I find myself more likely to run into somebody who will try to manipulate me into silencing myself than I am to run into somebody who will even bother to try to understand what I'm saying. But no matter how discouraged I might become, I can not agree to blind myself to the fact that the Hellenic Tradition is not Wicca or Kemeticism, and neither are those Jewish or Christian ones that I draw from. One can not seperate Hellenism, or any offshoot of Hellenism, from the Classical Hellenic cultural tradition, one that comes to us from the first people on earth to have known democracy, a people who expected to be reasoned with.

One might say the same of their cultural heirs throughout Southern Europe, and of my own (generally non-Mediterranean) Midwestern American neighbors, wherever people have not suffered the effects of Political Correctness and postmodern "enlightenment".

I probably tell this story too often, but remember what happened when the Persian ambasaador showed up and demanded soil and water, as a sign of submission? He was thrown to the bottom of a well, where he was told that he could find plenty of both. This, the Greeks did in face of the likelihood that they'd face reprisals from the greatest military power they knew of, an empire many times the size of Greece in its entirety, to say nothing of any of the individual city-states. They thought that little of the idea of being ordered around, so little that they were willing to face extinction just for the sake of their freedom and personal dignity, and the thought that they might be leaving both of these to their descendents.

I am, to say the least, a far less awesome presence than the Persian host. I'm a lot less nasty than Xerxes, and even if I wasn't, what's the worst that I could do? Not invite somebody over for dinner? If I somehow succeeded in getting people to simply back down and give me what I wanted, with no explanation required, backing down to just little old me, then how much of that Hellenic spirit would I have encouraged in them? How much of the spirit of the culture would be left, after I fed my ego in such a fashion, if my people were to let me get away with that? And what kind of servant of Aphrodite would I be, if I gutted the very culture that gave the religion in which she was honored, its life and its spirit, just for the sake of short term administrative convenience?

Aphrodite entered Greek religion as a war goddess as well as a goddess of love for a reason - because where there is weakness, there is neither real friendship, nor love, nor community, nor any of the things that make life in a free society something worth fighting for. How, then, is it a victory for me, or service to the gods, if I should help condition members of a historically free people to surrender their freedom so lightly? Yes, this is what Political Correctness (much of the New Age) has been about, but it's not what we're about. And given what I am outside of Paganism - a scientist (albeit in training), a scholar and a teacher - even if I had never had the pleasure of knowing the presence of the gods in my life, it is not something that I ever could be about. It's not what I'm here for.

This was a little awkward. Obviously, one does not wish to respond to an offer of help with a slap in the face - or even seem to be doing so. But, on the other hand, what if somebody makes a huge show of seeming to be helpful and supportive in a way that really isn't that helpful, or really that supportive, and then uses a few passages in order to slip the knife in? Does one leave the objectionable comments without response? Does one return the favor, feigning friendliness in return, in the time wasting manner that the Emily Post crowd would expect? Or is one direct, having the sense to understand that civility is not the same thing as ettiquette? But, let's start by responding to that seemingly kind offer. If I were to take such an offer at face value, I would have to say "thanks, but no thanks".

This is a page of philosophy. If I had wanted to make the Almond Jar a searchable site, I could have easily done so by making use of a utility offered by Bravenet, or similar ones offered by a number of the search engines. But this would not have served my purposes, because philosophical arguments build on themselves, point by point. Such an argument is not a series of unrelated soundbites; one has to see what came before to appreciate what follows. Were I to put a site search in, this would enable visitors to skip over that chain of argument, in effect breaking it. What results may look slicker, but it would be less effective for my purposes, one of which is to challenge a notion near and dear to the heart of any moral subjectivist - that these beliefs we find are no more than arbitrary choices, because in the mind of the casual reader, those arguments would have been reduced to a series of those little soundbites.

Helpful, this offer really was not, and even less helpful was his decision to lie about what had been reported on this site, and that I had to respond to.

Part of what I'm trying to get across to some people, often with little success, is that when I say that "this won't work" or "that won't work," and I present one with arguments as to why "this" or "that" are exercises in futility, I'm not just speculating. I've seen these things tried - and guess what? They didn't work - the only topic left open to serious speculation is that of why they didn't work. This, the reader gets to see illustrated by real events in a real world setting, with all of its flaws and blemishes. One of those blemishes is my own considerable fallibility, which made its appearance every time I stumbled into a place where I wish that I had not been, or somebody that I knew did the same. But, we're human and we do that - and we're not about to pretend otherwise.

And there you have it, what is essentially the point. I do not completely disagree with Traveller's comment, that the Almond Jar should be more focused on what it is about than what it is not, though I'm not about to weaken the prose in the way he seems to expect. This is why the links to the articles that discuss the political practicalities of Pagan community building have been broken. Believe it or not, I don't enjoy the drama, as he puts it, and so I pushed it to the back of the site, where it will only be encountered in passing as we discuss subjects that touch on the issues mentioned in those articles.

But I really can't just make the drama go away either, as I discovered when, in putting together the Bravenet version of the Almond Jar (the newest of the three), I tried to cleanly seperate the more enjoyable theological material from the grubbier and less pleasant political nonsense - discovering that there was no way to do this. I won't go so far as to say that everything that happened to me along the way happened to me for a reason. That gets us too close to the self-refuting concept of karma. Nor am I saying that I will go back to the Reader Circuit or any other Neo-Pagan community, and that there are many more such articles to come. I get the sense that even in its decline, the history of the community I encountered has imperfectly come full circle, and that while what comes after this may offer me a few surprises, they won't be very great ones and certainly not ones worth the trouble that would go into finding them. But even as you see me getting my teeth kicked in, metaphorically speaking, in these accounts, you're seeing me have more than a few learning experiences along the way, and I won't shy away from letting people see them.

As I say, I am not Tamara Siuda. I do not encourage people to attach any sense of awe to my person. I'm not going to tell you any fairytales about my infallible judgement, or my spiritual or magickal prowess, about my role as a conduit of divine wisdom into this world, about being the vessel for Aphrodite's ka, or any other hubris filled nonsense. Every time I stub my toe in the dark on the way to the washroom, lose a game of chess to my ex-fiancee, or get a good look at myself in a mirror after I squeeze myself into a swimming suit, I get a fairly solid reminder that I'm not one of the gods. I'm not even a prophet, and I never try to pretend otherwise. I'm just a guy with a website, who wants to do something to honor the deity who found him when he was lost, and helped him connect to the unfamiliar culture he found himself in, when the place that would have been home for him and his family was no longer there to be returned to, doing so out of no motive more scheming or self-serving than that of acting out of the kindness of her heart.

What can I say other than "thank you". What could I do other than serve? If you want to see me do a little self-promotion, drop by one of my math or engineering lectures, and maybe I'll think about it, but not here. Praise here is for the gods and the gods alone, and if the figure I seem to be cutting in these accounts is an all too human one, then that is how it should be. At least I still remember how to be human, and judging from what I've seen around me, that's not always easy, and I do know who to thank for a goodly portion my success in that area - one of the many reasons I gladly offer worship.

As for Traveller? He did come back, ranted on some more, tried to pretend that he had posted something other than what was still up in the guestbook, and threw a royal temper tantrum. I suppose that I could have held onto the rest of his posts, and documented an account of yet another bizarre incident. But that point's been made. Shall we move on?

(1) The Feynman Lectures in Physics, �3-3, p.3-7 (note the unusual format used by Feynman; the singular p instead of the plural pp is not a misprint) � 1965 by the California Institute of Technology, published by Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-02118-8-P LOC number : 63-20717

(2) And how very interesting that, complaining about the amount of "drama" on this site, that Traveller then complains about the absence of links to articles that would probably only add to the perceived level of drama, as they focus on the question of how we deal with some of that less than ideal behavior that Traveller doesn't want anybody to hear about. Some people are difficult to please.