Tall tales of Don Juan

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a semester-long class called Introduction to Psychology.  The teacher was Dr. Loren Farmer -- I never found out if he actually had a Ph.D., or if people simple called him "Dr." Farmer because of the air of erudition he had.

The class was taught in an unorthodox fashion, to say the least.  Dr. Farmer was pretty counterculture, especially considering that this was Louisiana in the 1970s.  He stood on no ceremony at all; we were allowed to sit wherever we liked (my favorite perch was on a wide bookcase by the window), and class was more of a free-roaming discussion than it was the usual chalk/talk typical of high school back then.  Even his tests were odd; we had a choice on his final exam of ten or so short-answer/essay questions from which we were to answer seven, and I recall that one of them was "Draw and interpret three mandalas."  (I elected not to do this one.  My ability to sling the arcane-sounding bullshit was and is highly developed, but my artistic ability pretty much stalled out in third grade, and I didn't think I could pull that one off.)

Some time around the middle of the semester, he instructed us to go buy a copy of a book that would be assigned reading over the following few weeks.  The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda.  I had never heard of it, but I dutifully purchased the book.

I was nothing short of astonished when it turned out to be about the use of hallucinogenic drugs.  Castaneda tells the story of his apprenticeship to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui native from Mexico, wherein he was given peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms, and Datura (Jimson weed), inducing wild visions that Don Juan said weren't hallucinations; they were glimpses of an "alternate reality" that sorcerers could use to gain power and knowledge.  Castaneda starts out doubtful, but eventually goes all-in -- and in fact, wrote one sequel after another describing his journey deeper and deeper into the world of the brujo.

I was captivated by Castaneda's story.  I read the sequel to Teachings, A Separate Reality.  The third one, Journey to Ixtlan, was even better.  Then I got to the fourth one, Tales of Power, and I began to go, "Hmmm."  Something about the story seemed off to me, as if he'd gone from recounting his real experiences to simply making shit up.  I made it through book five, The Second Ring of Power, and the feeling intensified.  About two chapters into book six, The Eagle's Gift, I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

But something about the stories continued to fascinate me.  The best parts -- especially his terrifying vision of a bridge to another world in the fog at night in A Separate Reality, and his witnessing a battle of power in Journey to Ixtlan -- have a mythic quality that is compelling.  But the sense that even apart from any supernatural aspects, which I predictably don't buy, the books were the product of a guy trying to pull a fast one on his readers left me simultaneously angry and disgusted.

I discovered that I'm not alone in that reaction.  Richard de Mille (son of Cecil), an anthropologist and writer, wrote a pair of analyses of Castaneda's books, Castaneda's Journey and The Don Juan Papers, that I just finished reading a few days ago, explaining my resurgence of interest in the subject.  De Mille pounced on something that had been in the back of my mind ever since reading Journey to Ixtlan -- that it would be instructive to compare the timeline of the first three books, as Ixtlan overlaps the years covered by the first two, Teachings and A Separate Reality.

And what de Mille found is that the books are full of subtle internal contradictions that one would never discover without doing what he did, which is to lay out all of the carefully-dated supposed journal entries Castaneda gives us in the first three books.  Among the more glaring errors is that Castaneda is introduced for the first time to a major character, the brujo Don Genaro, twice -- over five years apart.   Also separated by years are events in which Castaneda saw (the word in italics is used by Castaneda to describe a mystical sort of vision in which everything looks different -- humans, for instance, look like bundles of fibers made of light) and in which Don Juan tells his apprentice "you still have never seen."

Worse still is the fact that Ixtlan recounts a dozen or so mind-blowing experiences that allegedly occurred during the same time period as Teachings -- and yet which Castaneda didn't think were important enough to include in his first account.  Add to that the point de Mille makes in The Don Juan Papers that not only do the Yaqui not make use of hallucinogens in their rituals, Don Juan himself never tells Castaneda a single Yaqui name -- not one -- for any plant, animal, place, or thing they see.  Then there's the difficulty pointed out by anthropologist Hans Sebald, of Arizona State University, that Castaneda claims that he and Don Juan went blithely wandering around in the Sonoran desert in midsummer, often with little in the way of food or water, never once making mention any discomfort from temperatures that would have hovered around 110 F at midday.

The conclusion of de Mille and others is that Castaneda made the whole thing up from start to finish, and the books are the combination of scraps of esoteric lore he'd picked up in the library at UCLA and his own imagination.  There was no Don Juan, no Don Genaro, no glow-in-the-dark coyote that spoke to the author at the end of Ixtlan.  Distressing, then, that de Mille's rebuttals -- which were published in 1976 and 1980, respectively -- didn't stop Castaneda from amassing a huge, and devoted, following.  He founded a cult called "Tensegrity" which alleged to teach the acolyte the secrets of how to see Don Juan's alternate reality.  He surrounded himself with a group of women called "the nagual women" (unkinder observers called them the "five witches") who did his bidding -- Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Patricia Partin,  Amalia Marquez, and Kylie Lundahl -- all of whom vanished shortly after Castaneda died of liver cancer in 1998.  There's been no trace discovered of any of them except for Partin, whose skeleton was discovered in Death Valley in 2006, but it's thought that all five committed suicide after their leader died.

So what began as a hoax ended up as a dangerous cult.  Castaneda seems to have started the story as a way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his advisers in the anthropology department at UCLA (it worked, given that Journey to Ixtlan is essentially identical to his doctoral dissertation), but as so often happens, fame went to his head and he moved from telling tall tales about an alleged Yaqui shaman to using the people who bought into his philosophy as a way to get money, sex, and power.

And it can be imagined how pissed off this makes actual Native Americans.  Castaneda hijacked and mangled their beliefs into something unrecognizable -- placing his books in with Seven Arrows as yet another way that non-Natives have appropriated and misrepresented Native culture.  (If you've not heard about Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm, it's a mystical mishmash containing about 10% actual facts about the Cheyenne, and 90% made-up gobbledygook.  Storm himself -- his actual name is Arthur -- claims to be half Cheyenne and to have grown up on the reservation, but the Cheyenne tribal authorities say they've never heard of him.)

What's saddest about all of this is that Castaneda could have simply written "fiction" after the title of his books, and they'd have lost nothing in impact.  It's not that fiction has nothing to teach us, gives us no inspiration, doesn't consider the profound.  In fact, I would argue that some of the most poignant lessons we learn come from the subtexts of the fiction we read.  (I have tried to weave that into my own writing, especially my novel Sephirot, which is about one man's Hero's Journey placed in the context of Jewish mystical lore.)

But instead Castaneda lied to his readers.  There's no kinder way to put it.  He told us that it was all real.  Not content with writing an excellent work of inspirational fiction, he instead is relegated to the ignominious ranks of clever hoaxers.  (Or at least should be; de Mille says there are still lots of college classes in which Castaneda's books are required reading, and not as an example of an anthropological hoax, but as real field work in ethnology and belief.)

So however entertaining, and even inspiring, his books are, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.  In short, truth matters.  And the fact is, Carlos Castaneda was nothing more than a sly and charismatic liar.

If the spirit is willing

Turns out, you have to be careful what you label "non-fiction."

Warner Brothers Studios is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that falls under what lawyers technically call "being between a rock and a hard place."  It all started when they released their horror film The Conjuring in 2013, which is all about fun and entertaining things like demons and curses and exorcisms and parents attempting to kill their children.  The Conjuring was based on the book The Demonologist, by Gerald Brittle, which told the story of two demon hunters named Ed and Lorraine Warren, who go from town to town rousting out evil spirits, which is apparently lucrative work these days.

Brittle had an exclusive contract to tell the Warrens' story, and when he found out that Warner Brothers had made a movie based on it, he told them they'd violated that agreement and (in essence) made a movie based on his book without permission or compensation.  Warner Brothers fired back that Brittle's book is labeled "non-fiction" -- meaning that he was claiming the events were true, and therefore part of the "historical record."  As such, they're open for anyone to exploit, and such accounts would come under fair use law.

This is where it gets interesting.  Brittle's attorney, Patrick C. Henry, says that Brittle now knows that the Warrens' account is "a pack of lies."  Further, Henry says that it was impossible for Warner Brothers to make the movie they did without basing it almost entirely on Brittle's book.  "It is very hard to believe that a large conglomerate such as Warner Brothers, with their army of lawyers and who specializes in intellectual property rights deals, would not have found The Demonologist book or the deals related to it, or Brittle for that matter," Henry says.  "The only logical conclusion is that the studio knew about the Warren's agreement with Brittle but just assumed they would never get caught."

So Henry filed a lawsuit on Brittle's behalf, to the tune of $900 million.  To Warner Brothers' defense that you can't invoke intellectual property rights law over events that actually occurred, Henry had an interesting response.

If Warner Brothers is claiming that The Demonologist (and therefore the events in The Conjuring) are real, then Brittle will drop the lawsuit -- if Warner Brothers can offer up concrete proof of ghosts.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This puts the film giant in a rather awkward position.  If they can prove ghosts are real, then the claim that story in The Conjuring is non-fiction has at least some merit.  If they can't, it's fiction, and the studio is guilty of ripping off Brittle's work as the basis of their movie.

Sort of reminds me of the old method of determining whether someone is a witch.  They tie the accused hand and foot, and throw them in a pond.  If they drown, they're innocent.  If they survive, Satan was protecting them, and they're a witch, so you burn them at the stake.

Of course, the difference here is that Brittle is just one guy, and Warner Brothers is a multi-million dollar corporation that can afford huge legal expenses without any particular problem.  Although Brittle's defense is clever, I'd be willing to put money that the lawsuit is going to get settled out of court -- whether or not Warner Brothers can produce a ghost.

On the other hand, maybe they will find a spirit that's willing.  Then not only will Brittle have no choice but to drop his lawsuit, Warner Brothers will be in good shape to win the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge.  So stay tuned.

Bleach supplement

New from the A Little Bit of Knowledge Is Dangerous department, we have a guy in the UK who is selling a health supplement that contains "stabilized negative ions of oxygen."

The product is named, with no apparent irony intended, "Aerobic Oxygen."  Presumably to distinguish it from all of that anaerobic oxygen floating around out there.  The company that produces it, Vitalox, says that their product is "the foundation of good health," and that sixty drops of their product consumed per day, "in any cold drink," plus another few added to your toothpaste and mouthwash, will bring you to the peak of health.  "Cellulite," we're told, is what happens "when fat cells are starved of oxygen."  (Never mind that "cellulite" is simply fat in which the connective tissue surrounding it has developed minor hernias, but otherwise is indistinguishable from regular old fat.  But why start trying to be scientifically accurate now?)

Oh, and consuming "Aerobic Oxygen" will reduce your likelihood of developing cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure.

You might be wondering what's in this miracle drug.  I know I was.  The ingredients list reads as follows: "Contains purified ionised water, sodium chloride 1.6 micrograms per serving, Stabilised Oxygen molecules."  Which doesn't tell us much beyond what their sales pitch said.  What sort of additive would provide "stabilized oxygen?"  It's not simply dissolved oxygen; that would diffuse out as soon as you opened the bottle, and in any case the solubility of oxygen in water is low enough that you can't dissolve enough in it to make a difference to anyone but a fish.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So a chemist named Dan Cornwell, from Kings College - London, decided to test "Aerobic Oxygen" to see what was really there.  And what he found was that the "stabilized oxygen" in the solution is coming from a significant quantity of either sodium chlorite or sodium hypochlorite.

For the benefit of any non-chemistry types, sodium chlorite is not the same as sodium chloride.  Sodium chloride is table salt.  Sodium chlorite (and sodium hypochlorite as well) are highly alkaline, reactive compounds whose main use in industry is as a bleach.  Cornwell found that not only is "Aerobic Oxygen" a bleach solution, it has the same pH as Drano.

"The two main conclusions I can draw is that the Vitalox solution has a pH of about 13, putting it in the same region as concentrated household bleach – which contains sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide – or an oven cleaner," Cornwell said.  "And when it combined with the potassium iodide it produced iodine, which shows that there’s a strong oxidizing reaction.  I’m not 100% sure of the nature of the oxidizing agent, but since it has a basic pH and gave a positive result with the iodine test it’s reasonable to say it’s probably sodium chlorite or something similar."

David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College - London, was even more unequivocal. "You don’t absorb oxygen through your stomach," Colquhoun said.  "There’s not the slightest reason to think it works for anything...  A few drops in a glass of water probably won't actually kill you, but that's a slim marketing claim."

But don't worry if the "Aerobic Oxygen" doesn't quite live up to its claims; Vitalox also has a "Spirituality Page," wherein we find out that "Our spirit is real and we all have one, like it or not.  Recognise it or not.  It needs feeding too or it will get sick and may even die."  One of the features of the "Spirituality Page" is a "A Radio Stream to Wet [sic] Your Appetite," which is an odds-on contender for the funniest misspelling I've seen in ages.

So the whole "Aerobic Oxygen" thing is not only bullshit, it's potentially dangerous bullshit.  The site boils down to "drink our expensive bleach solution, and even if it doesn't kill you, your spirit won't be sick."  The take-home message here is, don't be taken in by fancy-sounding sort-of-sciencey-or-something verbiage and fatuous promises.  Do your research, and find out what you're thinking of ingesting before you buy it.  And that goes double when someone tells you they're selling you "aerobic oxygen."

Far beyond tone-deaf

Is it just me, or do the members of the Trump administration have a really poor sense of timing?

At a gathering to launch Black History Month, Trump caused some serious head-scratching with his comment that Frederick Douglass "is doing an amazing job," which is doubly impressive given that Douglass died 122 years ago.  He declared April "Sexual Assault Awareness Month," and on April 4 said that conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly "should not have settled" five cases in which he was accused of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior.  (In fact, he said, "I don't think Bill did anything wrong" -- which, considering that he's said that you have to "treat women like shit" and that it's okay to "grab them by the pussy," might not be the most weighty endorsement O'Reilly could have hoped for.)

Then, the White House released an official statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day -- and never once mentioned the Jews.  This was followed up by Sean Spicer's bizarre comment two days ago that "even Hitler didn't sink to the level of using chemical weapons," ignoring the fact that chemical weapons were used to gas six million Jews.

Which statement he made in the middle of Passover.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, this goes way beyond tone-deafness.  This is beginning to look like a deliberate campaign to minimize the suffering of anyone who doesn't directly contribute to the Republican party.  These aren't "gaffes;" a "gaffe" is John Kerry describing his nuanced approach to support for the Iraq War as "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."  Okay, that was stupid and inarticulate, and he was the recipient of well-deserved ridicule for saying it.

But this?  This goes way beyond stupid and inarticulate.  In fact, even "insensitive and insulting" don't begin to cover it.

Fortunately -- if there is a "fortunately" in this situation -- the backlash against the latest crazy comment was immediate and blistering.  Here is a sampling of responses to Spicer's Hitler comment from Twitter:

This doesn't really answer the question about why doing it from a plane is worse than building gas chambers in death camps, of course. 

Sean Spicer just called concentration camps "Holocaust centers" and said Hitler didn't use chemical weapons despite Zyklon B.  Happy Passover, guys. 

A list of things that come to mind when you think of Hitler: (1) mustache; (2) gassed people. 

Hey, Sean?  "Clarify" doesn't mean "make way worse." 

Being Press Secretary for Donald Trump is hard.  But it's not as hard as he makes it look.

Then, there's my favorite one:

PEPSI: Check out this PR disaster.
UNITED: That's amateur hour.  Watch this!
SEAN SPICER: Hold my beer.

The most trenchant comment of all, however, was from Spencer Ackerman, blogger, writer, and editor of The Guardian.  Ackerman wrote: "Hitler was not 'using the gas on his own people,' says Sean Spicer, writing German Jews out of history."

Which appears to be what this is about -- marginalizing people who don't fit in with the Trumpian version of Volksgemeinschaft, or worse, pretending that they simply don't exist.  You make a statement like that once, you can pass it off as shooting from the hip, bobbling an opportunity to make an inclusive, insightful statement, having a brain fart.  Maybe even twice.

But four times?  This is beginning to look deliberate.

I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, here.  But this administration is establishing an appalling pattern of cultural and racial insensitivity.  If you needed further evidence, Trump himself went on record as saying, regarding the threats against Jewish schools, Nazi graffiti defacing Jewish community centers, and desecration of Jewish graveyards -- all of which have increased drastically since Trump's win last November -- that it might be the Jews themselves perpetrating the attacks.  It's not always anti-Semites doing these things, Trump said.  "Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad."

So tell me again how all of the other things that have come out of the mouths of Trump and his spokespeople have been simple "gaffes."

I've been trying to hold my outrage in abeyance.  I understand that it's hard to think on your feet every time you're on the spot.  People in the public eye are scrutinized, they inevitably make mistakes, and their missteps are played and replayed and analyzed and reanalyzed.  But if this administration wants to regain its credibility, it needs to give more than lip service to stopping this kind of shit.  We need more than Trump's statement that "Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your entire life.  Number two, the least racist."  These last few months have left me feeling a little dubious on that point.  I think a fitting place to end is with a quote from Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who said: "President Trump has been inexcusably silent as this trend of anti-Semitism has continued and arguably accelerated.  The president of the United States must always be a voice against hate and for the values of religious freedom and inclusion that are the nation’s highest ideals."

You are a magnet, and I am steel

Yesterday one of my Critical Thinking students brought to my attention one Miroslaw Magola, the Polish man who claims that metal objects spontaneously stick to his body.

Magola attributes this phenomenon to psychokinesis and his ability to "load his body with energy;" others have tried to explain it by saying that he is able to "concentrate and focus a magnetic field."

Upon doing a bit of research, I found that Magola is not alone in making such claims.  There's also Liew Thow Lin of Malaysia, who not only says that metal objects stick to his body (and there are photos on the website showing him, lo, with metal objects stuck to his body) but that it's evidently genetic, because his son has the same ability.

All of this makes me wonder how these men would manage to walk through, for example, the kitchenware section of an Ikea.  You'd think that they would become the center of a whirlwind of flying kitchen implements, rather like when Wile E. Coyote tried to catch the Road Runner with an Acme Giant Magnet, and would end up with paring knives and cheese graters and vegetable peelers protruding from their bodies.

James Randi, the venerable debunker of all things psychic, has investigated Magola, and apparently put paid to his animal magnetism by the simple expedient of sprinkling talcum powder on the metal object he was trying to adhere himself to.   After such a treatment, his power mysteriously vanished. Randi has stated that his conclusion is that Magola either is making use of the natural stickiness of skin oils, or (more likely) has coated his skin with a thin layer of adhesive.

You'd think that'd be case closed, but some people are not to be discouraged by a simple thing like a controlled experiment.  Magola, apparently undaunted by his failure, responded by making a YouTube video "debunking Randi," in which he is shown, sitting in front of a variety of metal objects, and he sprinkles talcum powder on one, and proceeds to make it stick to his hand.

Well, that's all well and good, but I find myself highly suspicious when an alleged psychic can't demonstrate his/her powers under controlled conditions -- it fails in Randi's lab, but when he's by himself, his ability miraculously reappears.  I'm reminded of the dreadfully uncomfortable experience of watching Uri Geller having his clocks cleaned on the Johnny Carson Show -- Geller, the Israeli psychic spoon-bender, couldn't so much as bend a piece of Reynolds Wrap when he wasn't allowed to provide his own props.  He attributed his failure to "the atmosphere of suspicion and pressure" that Carson had created, and followed it up by saying that he "wasn't feeling strong tonight."  That didn't wash with Carson (who had spent time as a professional magician, and knew how easy it was to bamboozle people), and it doesn't wash with me, either -- not in Geller's case, and not in Magola's.  I don't know about you, but I think it's a little puzzling that Magola can only do his funny stuff on his own terms.

All of this brings up one of my biggest criticisms of psychics of all stripes; the fact that they explain away their failures by blaming the skeptics.  "Your disbelief is interfering with the phenomenon," is something you hear all too often from Camp Woo-Woo.  My question is, "why would it?"  If whatever psychic phenomenon you pick -- let's say, telekinesis, since that's what Magola, Lin, and Geller all claimed they could do -- only works when no one suspicious is present, then all I can say is, that's mighty convenient.   It reminds me of the character of Invisible Boy on the movie Mystery Men who is capable of becoming invisible, but only when no one is looking.

And, of course, I always am looking for a mechanism.  If you think you're magnetic, I want you to explain to me how it works without resorting to jargon-laden bullshit like "focusing the frequency of psychic energy fields."  If you say you can move objects with your mind, I want you to do it while undergoing a brain scan, and see what's happening in your brain that the rest of us slobs don't seem to be able to manage to get ours to do.

I find myself in complete agreement with a character from a book by, of all people, C. S. Lewis.  His skeptical scientist MacPhee, in That Hideous Strength, says, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I'll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

To which I can only say; amen.

Aliens, belief, and magical thinking

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, which was about the weird, counterfactual things people believe, we have a study in the journal Motivation and Emotion looking at the psychology of belief -- in particular, whether there is any correlation between belief in the paranormal and religious belief.

The study, by Clay Routledge, Andrew Abeyta, and Christina Roylance of the University of North Dakota's Department of Psychology, was titled "We Are Not Alone: The Meaning Motive, Religiosity, and Belief in Extraterrestrial Intelligence." The authors write:

We tested the proposals that paranormal beliefs about extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) are motivated, in part, by the need for meaning and that this existential motive helps explain the inverse relationship between religiosity and ETI beliefs...  [We] found support for a model linking low religiosity to low presence of meaning, high search for meaning, and greater ETI beliefs.  In all, our findings offer a motivational account of why people endorse paranormal beliefs about intelligent alien beings observing and influencing the lives of humans.

Routledge was interviewed by Eric W. Dolan of PsyPost and had some interesting insights into his team's results, which showed that the non-religious actually have a higher likelihood of believing in extraterrestrials: 

Research using traditional measures of religiosity such as religious affiliation, church attendance, and even belief in God suggests that the US and the Western world more broadly are becoming less religious, more secular.  However, there are good reasons to doubt that this is entirely true.  Sure, fewer people go to church or think of themselves as religious, but this does not necessarily mean they are any less engaged in religious-like spiritual activities or any less in need of the psychological benefits these activities provide.  For instance, there is reason to believe that certain non-religious magical beliefs such as belief in supernatural energy, agents, and forces are actually increasing as is general interest in the paranormal.  So one possibility is that it is not that people leaving traditional religion are becoming more secular but instead that are switching to other types of religious-like beliefs and interests to pursue spiritual needs.

Which I find particularly interesting, given that my experience with my fellow atheists seems to indicate that most of us ended up where we are because of rejecting non-evidence-based frameworks of belief -- so that would include belief in extraterrestrial visitation, which at present has little in the way of hard data in support.  However, as a student of mine used to say, "the plural of anecdote is not data."  Routledge says:

If atheists reject a belief in God, why would they, or at least some of them, believe that there are intelligent alien beings monitoring the lives of humans (these are the types of paranormal ETI beliefs we measured)?  In this research we looked at the motive to perceive life as meaningful.  We found support for a model in which low religiosity (and atheism) were associated with low perceptions of meaning and a high desire to find meaning (what is called search for meaning), and this desire for meaning in turn predicted ETI belief.  In other words, people who were not getting meaning from religion were vulnerable to deficits in meaning and these deficits inclined them to search for non-traditional sources of meaning.  Why ETI beliefs in particular?  Part of the reason religion gives life meaning is it helps us feel connected to something bigger and more enduring, that we are not here by chance.  ETI beliefs do not typically contain a traditional belief in a creator, but they do suggest that we are not alone in the universe.  And intelligent aliens are often construed as agents watching over us.  A lot of specific ETI beliefs involve being part of a cosmic brotherhood.  And ETI beliefs seem, on the surface, more scientific as they do not typically invoke the supernatural.  This makes them more palatable to atheists.

Which is pretty fascinating, and also explains why I have a poster in my classroom with a picture of a UFO and the caption "I Want To Believe."  While I certainly think that the evidence thus far brought to light about the possibility of aliens visiting the Earth is below the standard I'm willing to accept, I have to admit that the thought that aliens are not only intelligent, they're here -- well, it's tremendously exciting.  I would love nothing more to have unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, up to and including having a giant UFO land in my back yard.

Of course, if they act like most of the aliens in movies, the next thing they'd do is start vaporizing my pets, and I wouldn't be so thrilled about that.  But on balance, it would still be up there amongst the peak experiences of my life.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Routledge recognizes the existence of people like myself, and in fact draws an interesting distinction:

Some hardcore skeptics might point out that they do not believe in any of this stuff, that they are completely guided by reason and empirical data.  It is true that being a hardcore skeptic tends to make one an atheist.  However, this does not mean being an atheist makes one a hardcore skeptic... There are atheists who reject belief in God but, as I documented in my work, still hold other paranormal and supernatural beliefs...   In other words, even atheists are a diverse group.

Which stands to reason.  One of the most common errors in thought is the package-deal fallacy --  assuming that groups are homogeneous, and that the beliefs or characteristics of one member is indicative of the beliefs and characteristics of everyone else in the group.  It's to be expected that we atheists have just as many approaches and nuances to our unbelief as religious folks have to their belief.

Myself, I find this reassuring.  I wouldn't want everyone to think alike, even if it meant that they by some fluke all ended up agreeing with me.  As I've pointed out many times before, a willingness to consider the flaws in our own understanding is absolutely essential to a rational and accurate view of the universe.  That goes double for those of us who already are under the impression that we're the pinnacles of logic and reason -- there's nothing like a bit of conceit to blind us to our own misapprehensions.

We have nothing to fear but...

It's become increasingly apparent to me, over the seven years I've written here at Skeptophilia, that most of the time people think with their guts and not with their brains.

Even the most cerebral folks can find themselves swayed by their emotions.  I like to think of myself as logical and rational, but many's the time I've had to stop, and turn slowly and deliberately away from my instinctive, knee-jerk reaction, and say, "Okay, wait.  Think about this for a minute."

Which is why I found the results of a survey done by Chapman University, released last month, so simultaneously fascinating and alarming.  The survey asked the question "what are you most afraid of?", and asked respondents to elaborate on that fear -- the specifics, causes, and any subcategories that might be applicable.  It also asked what things they believed in for which they had no concrete evidence.

Here are a few of the most interesting results:

46.6% believe places can be haunted by spirits
39.6% believe that Atlantis, or something like it, once existed
27% believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth in our ancient past
24.7% say aliens have come to Earth in modern times
13.5% believe that Bigfoot is real

But it's when you get to the conspiracy theories that things get really strange. Here are the percentages of people who believe the government is covering up information about...

9/11 (54.3%)
the assassination of JFK (49.6%)
aliens (42.6%)
global warming (42.1%)
plans for a one-world government (32.9%)
President Obama's birth certificate (30.2%)
the origin of HIV (30.2%)
Antonin Scalia's death (27.8%)
the moon landing (24.2%)

I suppose I should find it heartening that at least 4 in 10 Americans think the government is covering up the evidence for global warming, because at the moment, they kind of are.  But that optimism is tempered by the fact that 5 in 10 still have their knickers in a twist about JFK, and 3 in 10 think that HIV is some kind of government plot.

For fuck's sake.

Of course, it's clear where at least some of this comes from; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Connected to History Channel is probably responsible for the majority of the Atlantis and extraterrestrial visitation bullshit, and belief in ghosts and spirit survival have been with us for as long as humanity has considered such things.  President Trump certainly bears most of the responsibility for the Obama birth certificate nonsense, and Breitbart is the origin of the claim that there was anything more to Scalia's death than an overweight 79-year-old dying of a heart attack.

Oh, but I forgot to mention: 19.1% of respondents believe in telekinesis, and 14.1% think that astrology and other types of fortune telling are accurate and scientifically supported.  Although now that I come to think about it, if someone had asked me to estimate the last one, I'd probably have guessed that it was higher, so I suppose that's something to be glad about.

The scary part of all of this goes back to what I started with; that people are much more likely to be swayed, even on important topics, by their emotions and not by their brains.  Some of the beliefs that the survey investigated are harmless enough; I doubt anyone ever came to grief by believing in Bigfoot, for example.  But freaking out over a one-world government -- a major concern of a third of the respondents -- could certainly affect the way people vote.

But on a deeper level, it's troubling that so many people admit to deep-seated beliefs that fly in the face of the evidence.  Believing in Atlantis may not be a big deal, in the grand scheme of things.  But the fact that someone -- in fact, 4 out of every 10 someones -- is willing to accept a counterfactual proposal in the complete absence of evidence indicates their susceptibility to falling for other, more insidious ideas.

So we're back to where we often land; it's imperative that we teach children how to evaluate evidence and think critically.  It's also important to ask, "Why do you believe that?"  It's not easy to pry people away from loony claims to which they have subscribed based on emotion and gut reaction -- but it's pretty important, especially considering how many loony claims are out there and how important it is for people to base their conclusions on the facts.