It’s pretty unlikely that anyone’s following my blog and not the much superior blog of Sarah Constantin. But if you are, take a read of her most recent post, In Defense of Individualist Culture.

I care very much about protecting individualism, and I think this clarified a couple things for me. One, this is at root of much of my objection to ritual and other holidays; they are not religious, but they are still usually anti-individualist in form if not in content, and I think that’s where most (70%?) of the danger of religion actually lies. Two, why I have a strong, visceral “Enemy!” response to David Chapman’s Meaningness and other pieces of postrationalist thought that descend from it.

While I’m on the holiday topic: I have let this project lapse quite a lot, and have moved to the South Bay where it’s harder to work on. I do have ideas for an August holiday and some next steps (look for tall buildings with rentable open-air access high up), though, so I’m going to give it a shot. (I’m also on the list of potential Winter Solstice organizers, but that’s not my call.)