Faith under fire: Student told to remove rosary

[Warren DeMontague]

176. I'm not really being linear, I admit.

Eris is the Goddess of chaos. Discord. The legend of the Golden apple; it has something to do with the trojan war, or something- The Gods held a party on Mount Olympus and Eris wasn't invited, so she tossed the golden apple inscribed "For the prettiest one" into the party, and so of course ALL the gods and goddesses fought over it.

Eris also has the distinction of being the name (Mike Brown clearly being a fan of certain authors) of the largest- larger than pluto- to date discovered Kuiper belt object. Too big to fit into any previous categories, forcing a re-evaluation of the categories entirely, in fact (no one had, to that point, bothered to define what, exactly, constitutes a "planet&quot ... so true to form Eris forces a reevaluation of the semantic maps and categories through which we view realty- the "real" reality, of course, not fitting so neatly into that nice diorama we all remember from grade school, of the sun and the nine round planets all in round orbits.

In terms of "what I believe"- I'm a stone cold skeptic, a firm believer in the scientific method- for purposes of the political debate in this country I categorize myself as an Atheist (although I do find it helpful to define exactly what it is I'm supposed to not be believing in before I give an answer whether I 'do' or not ... a key fact I find glaringly missing from most "debates" on Theism) ... do I "believe" in Eris? Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? They're useful metaphors or teaching tools or maps or maybe thought experiments or, like I said, jokes.