Well I'm doing some serious updating in all sorts of directions. Primarily in my assessment of the attitudes of this community. I very strongly expected my response (a few twinges of worry) to be one of the most moderate responses here. In that I was correct. Most comments here seem to be of the "this is awesome" school of thought. I was expecting roughly half the comments to be people freaking out about how we're becoming a cult.

My concern is based entirely around the nature of ritual. I am not in any way opposed to poetry, music, or any other form of art based on a rationalist idea (so long as it's, you know, good). But the idea of rituals does make me worry a bit. It boils down to this: if in ten years, we learn something that causes us to abandon [insert any core idea of LW here]. Assume we've been singing a song about it for ten years. Assume the tune is really catchy. Assume that the singing of this song is something that a non-trivial number of our fellow rationalists especially look forward to each year. I am very confident that at least some members of the community will really want to keep that song as part of the yearly ritual "for tradition's sake".

I should probably note that a possible source of this concern is my own past and present attitude towards the song "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". And certainly the emotional prediction is based off of my own personal feelings.

It might be possible to avoid this by writing new songs every year. If each year, the melody and lyrics of the song for any given idea is different, it would likely make it easier to give up that idea in that year's celebration. I do expect that this would somewhat diminish the power of the ritual. This post only really discusses the power of rituals as a positive point in their favor. But there are some possible downsides to letting loose a powerful social force in our community without knowing what it will do.