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by spyder 
My own take on May the first in 2007.

The following represents the strands of ribbons to become entwined as we dance around the axis mundi in the commons of a forest meadow. Each a line of thinking of the royal screwing that this day represents, so fertile and fecund, so phallic and virile, dancing about the shaft that has been deeply inserted into the mother, into the consecrated Earth. Plunge that puppy right in there, and dance the night away.

The Rites of Spring
Beltaine was a time of fertility and unbridled merrymaking, when young and old would spend the night making love in the Greenwood. In the morning, they would return to the village bearing huge budding boughs of hawthorn (the may-tree) and other spring flowers with which to bedeck themselves, their families, and their houses. They would parade back to their homes, stopping at each house to leave flowers, and enjoy the best of food and drink that the home had to offer. In every village, the maypole—usually a birch or ash pole—was raised, and dancing and feasting began. Festivities were led by the May Queen and her consort, the King who was sometimes Jack-in-the-Green, or the Green Man, the old god of thewildwood . They were carried through the village in a cart naked save the covering of flowers and enthroned in a leafy arbor as the divine couple whose unity symbolized the sacred marriage of earth and sun.

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By Dr. Free-Ride

Before I have a go at addressing some of the comments from the original post, I need to express my gratitude (and frankly, my amazement) at the quantity and quality of those comments. Long live civilized discourse in cyberspace!

Questions and comments that can be answered briefly, answered briefly.

1. In comment 69, Janus said:
“I have never read anything by a theistic scientist who understands the scientific method so well.”

I never said I was theistic. And, while I was trained as a physical chemist, I am not a working scientist. I am currently working as a philosopher of science — which is to say, understanding the scientific method is part of my job.

2. I am not claiming that atheists don’t take a lot of crap in the U.S. at this moment in history. They do. Nor am I claiming that “believers” are persecuted in the halls of science. To the best of my knowledge, they are not.

My initial post wasn’t trying to establish a point about current power relations in American society at large, nor in the community of science in the U.S. Rather, it sought to establish that proper use of scientific methodology to answer scientific questions need not keep a scientist from holding certain beliefs that aren’t certified as knowledge by the scientific method.

3. Hank Fox, in comment 8:
“The generosity you allow religious, faith-based, subjective believers is not shared by the other team. AND … all of this takes place against a political backdrop — a statistical field in which, no matter the eventual real-world benefits and results of the two mindsets, NUMBERS of believers on both sides matter.”

I agree that, in the current political landscape in the U.S., religion has an unfair advantage and appealing to folks on the basis of reasoned arguments is generally not a winning strategy. This depresses me like you would not believe. (Lately, I have this hunch that the real reason Socrates drank the hemlock was that he was fed up with folks who should have been susceptible to reasoned arguments but stubbornly resisted them.) However, I think it would be unfair to cast all the “faithful” as enemies of reason. (The Jesuits who trained my dad, for example, were huge fans of reasoned arguments.)
Even if the “faithful” fight dirty, I personally am not ready to say that scientists and science fans should sink into the mud as well. To my mind, intellectual honesty and fighting a clean fight go hand in hand. Then again, there’s probably a reason that the whole “philosopher kings” idea never caught on, so don’t let me stop you from formulating your own political strategy.

4. Several commenters raise the issue that various flavors of religious belief involve a deity who intervenes upon the material world from time to time. Religious beliefs of this sort would seem to have an empirical content that might render them testable using scientific methodology, thus making them eligible to be supported or undermined as “knowledge”.

I purposely avoided using any beliefs of this sort as examples in the original post because I agree that there’s a serious challenge in maintaining these kinds of beliefs while still embracing scientific methodology. But this is not the only sort of belief to which the hard core scientific-method camp objects. (And, there are people who identify themselves as believing in a deity who don’t believe in an intervening deity.)

5. In response to the fine points raised by Aloysius (comment 42ff.), I won’t make any further claims about David Bowie’s best album. While I have strong opinions on this matter, it’s really not my area of expertise.

The issues that require longer responses:

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By Aaron Barlow

One of Philip K. Dick’s worst books, Counter-Clock World has events moving backwards while our time sense moves forward. We periodically regurgitate food that takes shape on plates that we remove, scooping into pots and pans, etc. And, of course, we shove… er… well… up our… uh, you get the picture.

Not everything moving in a direction opposite of what we expect is necessarily inane, of course—but we do tend to disparage anything that is “backwards.” But it may be that we have it a bit wrong. Hell, if Ginger Rogers can be lauded for ‘doing everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels, and backwards,’ maybe there’s something to be said for it.

Since the explosion of online publishing possibilities, from blogs to on-demand book creation, there’s been little sense of direction at all in Internet publishing as a whole. Everyone heads where they will, but most of us still look offline for “real” publishing—even if we write extensively for the Web.

Why is that?
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