Axial Tilt Is The Reason For The Season

Follow me on this one, it gets twisty.

So, Kris Straub (you know Kris, he makes Starslip) retweeted Brian Denham's "Only 364 shopping days until Christmas." tweet. I don't know Brian, but I glanced at his feed and saw that he had retweeted a Richard Dawkins post about "7 Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays".

Now, in that article, in reason #3 was the line "Axial tilt is the reason for the season!" I just love this line! A quick google search found a 2007 post on Bad Astronomy, and that points to a 2006 post by Lore Sjöberg (he who used to write Table of Malcontents for Wired), which is where the image on this page comes from. (Sidenote, I wonder if this product is affiliated, or a rip-off? It's clearly the same artwork.)

It's like... it's like all the people I follow on the Internet all know each other.

Anyway, the OLDEST post I could find for the line was way back in 2005, in the Pagan Prattle. I'm just hearing it now for the first time‽

Eggbeaters

It is curious that the strongest believers in the soul tend to be people who denigrate material things; yet they then turn their own philosophy on its head by insisting that when an evident process -- life -- comes to an end, there has to be a thing that continues. No. When a process stops, it's no longer 'there'. When you stop beating an egg, there isn't some pseudo-material essence-of-eggbeater that passes on to something else. You just aren't turning the handle any more.

Terry Pratchett, The Science Of Discworld, p187.