http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/15/do-we-really-need-a-religious-bill-of-rights/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29

Freedom of religion does not mean you must be able to be comfortable in all situations in society. If you choose to take a teaching role in society, realize there are certain things you will need to teach and certain things you may need to bite your tongue on. Just as creationism has no place in biology classes, neither does energy work. Pagans try to avoid this issue by trying to agree with science, with our cop-out being “well, science just doesn’t understand this yet.” Sure, to Pagans that makes sense — but to non-Pagans, they see it for what it objectively is, a cop-out for us to avoid disagreement with science.

Dude, what we do is religion, not science. We should stop portraying what we do as science and internalize energy work, auric photography et. al. as what it is – faith! Additionally, calling it faith doesn’t mean it wont work on an anecdotal level. If we didn’t think our particular song and dance would work, we wouldn’t be doing it in the first place!

Sure, it’s great that we endorse the scientific method as a method of analyzing our religious practices. It’s even interesting that scientists have determined some of our practices actually have some science to them. However, there comes a point where we’re pretending all Pagan practices are backed by science. Eventually, those folks realize Paganism is some sort of religious thing and go Atheist. They may even host a popular podcast and shock Pagans that were stuck in disbelief when this finally happens.

Okay, got a bit off-topic in this rant. To summarize:
- Phil and I agree on something, holy shit!
- Pagans need to stop pretending EVERYTHING we do is backed by science. Sure, some herbology is backed by science but let’s not pretend “science doesn’t understand it yet.” If you’re so hellbent on it being proven by science, go out there, become a scientist and work on it! Just don’t be like one of those climate scientists that just do biased research rather than science.
- Pagans relying on science to explain everything are just Atheists in denial.

Comments?

Context Sensitivity FAIL

In an attempt to find ads related to our subject matter and similar shows, Ustream.tv fails colossally every time!

You had Nazi Germany, embracing the Nazi religion (a cheap knockoff of the parts of Norse and other Germanic mythology the leaders of the Nazi party thought reflected well on them). Aspects of that history survive till this day. Then you also had Imperial Japan, a blatantly Pagan culture. Siding with Germany was the Tibetan Monks training Nazis in their metaphysics. I must admit, I am impressed with the metaphysical research the Nazis did as it is arguably the greatest quest for metaphysical research in the history of mankind. They scraped every corner of the globe for metaphysical knowledge. Kinda makes you wonder, what ever happened to all that research?

I’m not going to pretend their opposition was entirely Abrahamic or monotheistic. However, instead of painting the entire picture for you, I’ll let you do your own research and paint your own picture. You want to know what a Pagan dominated world would look like? Just look at the 1930s and early 1940s. Maybe the Wiccans do have a good idea about doing things in balance, peaceful co-existence and all that hippie crap we like to mock.

Christmas has no date.

So a few words on why the website has gotten a facelift recently, because I know a few of you are probably asking “Dave, what were you thinking?”

In our ongoing mission to automate mundane, repeatitive tasks, I came up with the idea of automating the releases of PCP. Up till last week, the podcast feeds were all maintained manually, by hand, in Notepad++. Not was this a pain, but there were many tasks that needed to be done in sequence to release an episode, which took about an hour a week. Worse, there was no reasonable way to do things in advance with our needs to edit both old and new episodes on an ongoing basis (as part of our Episode Documentation Operation). Every edit can (and often has) resulted in a broken feed.

Then, one day I was asked about an easy way to release podcasts. I came across Powerpress by Blubrry. I was amazed at how much thought went into that program. I’ve since created 1 Powerpress installation for all of our podcasts. Not only can any of the PCP crew now potentially edit past episodes, but we can schedule podcast releases and automatic updating of our RSS feeds. This will allow us to have a much more regular release schedule! Also, this lets us do more work in advance to focus on reviving PCP: The Blog.

A huge factor in us abandoning the Pagan Comedy Minute was the constant coddling we had to do manually with that feed. Now that we have migrated it over to Powerpress, we have a reasonable shot at resurrecting the comedy minute! As soon as I can locate all skits that have not made it into the comedy minute, that podcast can be resurrected. Think of it as the latest resurrection of good Pagan podcasts (a-la Lance and Graal and Eat My Pagan Ass).

Not just that, but we kinda had some nostalgia for the old blog and wanted to bring it back .

I left Texas on Saturday, October 31 (Samhain) taking Northwest Airlines arriving in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton (AVP) at around 7pm. Taking a limo is cheaper than taking a taxi to my mom’s place so I just took a limo. I love my mom, she had a nice home cooked meal ready for me.

The following day my mother and I attended what can best be described as a Catholic Samhain ritual. The hospital where my father died was holding a remembrance service to help move beyond the deaths of the past year. I’m familiar with the Catholic Day of the Dead, and I have to say this felt basically like a Catholic-ized version of Samhain to me. I’m very thankful to the hospital for putting on this service. Seeing as my parents are Catholic, I really had no issue with attending a Catholic service. I actually found it to be better fitting than a Samhain ritual I was hoping to do, as it better reflected the beliefs of the deceased rather than me feeling like I’m imposing my beliefs upon a situation. I feel very deeply that death rituals should reflect the person who died rather than the people they’re for – which is really the living survivors.

I spent some quality time with my mother on Monday. I told her to make a list of stuff for me to do so I would get it done. I also managed to fix my mother’s craptacular internet connection as best I could tell… yay for that. While driving her around, we came across some wild turkeys:

Rented me a Honda Civic from my favorite rental agency (I’m definitely a frequent renter there ). Got a good deal thanks to the Entertainment book… which is now sold at Borders (one more reason Borders is awesome).

Tuesday, just drove around bored… typical fucking Pennsylvania, nothing to do. I was going to go to the shooting range but passing by it… well, let’s just say I know where the firing ranges are in Texas and the ones in Texas portray themselves better with regards to safety. Then I came up to the top of a hill and had this scenic view:

I had to pull off and take some pics.

Wednesday, Ashlee and I went to visit Qwertos. Since I was driving the 600 miles round-trip, Ashlee was the one with most of the pictures of the trip. Remember everyone, fill up with gas BEFORE you leave PA when going to NY. Man, gas is expensive in NY.

As we get to our meeting spot, Ashlee spots this scene:

Seriously, how is anyone going to reach up there to get those fire extinguishers in the event of fire?

Kudos for Facebook, for we were able to find Qwertos’ phone number when we realized we didn’t have it and couldn’t find Qwertos.

After eating some pizza near some middle schoolers having bizarre conversations, we raided a Barnes and Noble. Ashlee went to the music section, where we just followed her because our mindset was “buy… music? Who would do that?”

We spent a good 30 minutes in the New Age section making fun of books. I stumbled upon Spiral Dance. Not that I particularly agree with Starhawk… ever, but I do want to be informed about where people get their source material for random crap they spew on forums etc. So I bought the 20th anniversary edition of that.

The Barnes and Noble in Rochester also had a used book section. Nothing terribly interesting there, but I did pick up a book on Nazis and the Occult since I’m doing research into the small religion that Hitler allegedly (according to the History Channel’s show: Nostradamus Effect) perverted into the Nazi party. At the time, I had no clue this was a Jewish neighborhood. I’m not comfortable with Nazi stuff and this poor cashier is having a hell of a time getting a price off the Nazi book. It was two steps away from “price check on the Nazi Occult book” but all was good. But I hate it when stores ask me for my email, so I might as well make them uncomfortable, so I give my ImBleedingProfusely.com address – which always arouses interesting reactions from cashiers.

On the way out of Barnes and Noble, we find this hippie-mobile:

The trip was uneventful on the way home. While at a rest area on the thruway, I did buy a nifty keepsake glass that I’ll have to take a picture of when I get home.

As with my tradition of trips to Rochester, I coasted across the PA border basically on E, avoiding the high gas prices of NY.

The following day I was supposed to go see my friend Kimberly, but she never contacted me with when/where to meet her so Ashlee and I made alternative plans.

W00t, at this point the trip had turned from vacation to pilgrimage. Ashlee’s… friend with benefits shall we say… guided us to Columcille. This was much better than Ashlee’s directions of “It’s on the mountain.” Those directions are not useful when you’re among hundreds of hills!

Columcille was awesome, I have a bunch of pics on the PCP photo stream of Columcille!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/pcppodcast/pool/

We then kept with tradition and did a Chinese Buffet. Orgasm in the Mouth buffet had closed, so we went up to Dickson City. The guy spent 10 minutes meandering trying to fill up my Pepsi. Karma got back though, Ashlee had some crab meat and when pulling on it, slipped and knocked over a full glass of Pepsi! Ha, retribution!

After realizing Ashlee has no wi-fi, we meandered to the nearest free Wi-Fi which Borders now offers. Ashlee has already discussed that at:

http://imbleedingprofusely.com/forum/topic/pcp-the-trip-borders

We were most productive, finally hammering out an ad for PCP. We followed up the following day with similar productivity before I left for Texas on Saturday morning.

I’ll probably remember more later, when I’ll add more commentary.

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