Starting my first blog

Hi. Just setting up this blog, and my thanks to Dan S. of rightwingofthegods for sending me an invite to join blogger.

The name of this blog is self-explanatory, if a little generic. What I put in the Almond Jar is carefully worked over, if not always adequately proofread, and occasionally returned to and slightly redone. With a blog, I don't know if one can do that; I'm guessing that one can't. What you see here is just what I've decided to jot down. Maybe it's going to be a little more spontaneous; certainly it's going to be more error prone, in the sense that it will include more comments that in retrospect I'll wish that I had phrased differently or maybe haven't even made at all. Such is the risk of blogging, I suppose, and of reading blogs.

There are two things that you won't see me do, probably. While I may occasionally retract a remark, I'm not going to apologise profusely for my occasional verbal missteps or even for a poorly thought out or unfair position. I try not to take those, but unlike more than a few polytheists of my past acquaintence, I don't pretend to be anything more than human. I make mistakes. Deal with it.

Sound a little arrogant? No, try a little exasperated with what much of popular culture has become during the Golden Age of Political Correctness - a joyless, unforgiving quest to find excuses to morally one-up everybody around one. Once there were discussions, now there are scapegoating sessions, and lot of the truly crazy dogmatism you've seen me and others document on our websites probably is a reflection of this. A reasonable level of humility used to win one a certain amount of moral credit; now, in some circles, it seems to be viewed as an advertisement of weakness, and a providing of free ammunition to those who wish to gain status by shooting somebody else down.

Hard to imagine a real discussion taking place in the presence of that much oneupsmanship; where is room left for a give and take? Arrogant? No, which brings us to the second thing you won't tend to see me do - turn hyperdefensive when I truly am in error. Which I will be, sometimes. Not taking any ... um, fertilizer ... is a matter of giving oneself room to back off from a bad position, because every tiny error doesn't become the basis for a catastrophic loss of face.

Looking at some of the things that one can see people going ballistic about on the Almond Jar (eg. the ancient Egyptians allegedly harnessing electricity!), I think that one can see the dangers of not giving oneself that kind of room. It's bad mental hygeine, in that it gets one out of the habit of recognizing and accepting the fact of one's own fallibility, and of the need for caution as one reasons out one's positions. It's the first giant step, in Paganism, toward fluffitude, one that I could end up taking myself were I so carelessly inclined.

By profession, I'm not a Classicist or a Historian or an Archaeologist. I'm a sort of Applied Mathematician in training who went out looking for a group to join, back when his leanings were more purely Reconstructionist, and found nothing but Eclectic Wiccan groups that tried to pretend that they were the same thing as Recons - and radically liberal eclectic Wiccan groups at that. This blog will be a moderately conservative one by my definition, which is to say one revealing me to be somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan by the standards of some others. You have been warned.

Let's have fun. (Note: Originally posted 9:59 pm Central Time, Sunday, November 13, 2005; deleted original copy in order to delete spam in comment section).