"I worry that, especially as the Millennium nears, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?
"Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.
What Sagan didn't mention, perhaps because he was more optimistic than me, or because it was only 1995 and things were relatively saner then, was that fanaticism and superstition feed off each other, creating even more fanaticism and superstition.
....than I....
Posted by: Richard Reiser | 31 October 2009 at 19:30