Thanks for the mention Mark, I recently found your site when tracing through site referrals. I made mention of you in a recent entry: holoplex.blogspot.com/2010/07/few-updates-and-thanks.html

It's great to find similar minds out there. I also wanted to say that I think Jay's view of the World and history makes a lot a sense when you slot in other researchers material. He is an extremely well read guy and I find his interviews very informing and great for dot connecting. Check out his youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/SacredMysteriesTV (some excellent astrology videos recently).

I've been listening to podcast #4 on the holoplex, and I'd like like put forward one thing to all the connections being made; correlation does not imply causation.

In my opinion the correlation argument speaks to the mechanics of what some people call "belief" and although some beliefs or theories lack any credible proof the speculation and attempted extrapolation has some merit when taken with a grain of salt and a spare Occam's razor in ones pocket. These regions of speculation can often times run off the tracks at times, but to me that's part of the appeal of non main stream media.

The podcast in question was attempting to understand the meaning behind specific ritual events being initiated on dates with occult meaning. This is a topic I'd like to learn more about and would appreciate any perspective Cosmic Cookout readers might have.

Trying to understand the meaning of something presupposes that there is one. Cue Ockham's razor.

Or to put it differently, just because we humans like things to have a meaning or purpose, doesn't mean that there is one.

The intresting question is then why we want things to have a reason. I think the reason is twofold. One, our brains are wired for inductive reasoning; trying to draw practical conclusions from incomplete data. I found the article "The bright side of wrong" by Kathryn Schulz quite informative in this respect. Second, in the natural world, events have causes, even if we can't see them; the wind rustles the leaves of trees even if you can't see the wind. A cause however is not the same as a meaning, but I think we often confuse them.

If we can't see any meaning of an event because it is outside our experience or because, our inductive reasoning goes looking for it, and can wander astray.

This is not to say that our brains are faulty. For the handling of day-to-day events it works quite well. But it is important to realize that the probability of a correct answer parallels the amount of available data. If you have very little data to work with, the chance of finding the correct answer shrinks.