As Chatterbox reported in two earlier items (“Is It Religious To Believe in Cold Fusion?” and “More on Cold Fusion and the Patent Office“), Paul LaViolette, a dismissed employee of the Patent Office, recently persuaded the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that his “unconventional beliefs about cold fusion and other technologies should be viewed as a religion and therefore protected.” (The quotation summarizing LaViolette’s complaint is from the EEOC’s July 7 decision.) As a result, the Patent Office is now considering whether it should reinstate LaViolette.
After the items appeared, LaViolette pointed out three minor errors, which Chatterbox has now corrected by amending the original two items.
LaViolette also complained that Chatterbox mischaracterized his religion as “astrology.” In a letter to Chatterbox, LaViolette wrote:
None of my writings deal with natal astrology, which is the conventional meaning of astrology. In fact, nowhere do I state that I believe that natal astrology really works.
In conversation, LaViolette elaborated:
I’m doing a very unconventional thing in astrology. Astrologers have criticized me for this … There are myths about each constellation, and also there’s a lore in astrology, which is ancient, that was in existence before it was used for horoscopes, even. Just like there are stories about other constellations, not just Zodiac constellations. My theory on this is that this was information being handed down from very ancient times that was encoded in this system of signs, just in the fashion that we encoded the information in the message we sent out on Pioneer 10. The radical thing that I’m proposing is that there would have been a civilization advanced enough to encode these advanced concepts into these myths.
Readers wanting more details about LaViolette’s views should consult his Web site, Etheric.com.
