Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7286 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com
Few can talk with more personal authority about the range of human beliefs than Michael Shermer. At various times in the past, Shermer has believed in fundamentalist Christianity, alien abductions, Ayn Rand, megavitamin therapy, and deep-tissue massage. Now he believes in skepticism, and his motto is "Cognite tute--think for yourself." This updated edition of Why People Believe Weird Things covers Holocaust denial and creationism in considerable detail, and has chapters on abductions, Satanism, Afrocentrism, near-death experiences, Randian positivism, and psychics. Shermer has five basic answers to the implied question in his title: for consolation, for immediate gratification, for simplicity, for moral meaning, and because hope springs eternal. He shows the kinds of errors in thinking that lead people to believe weird (that is, unsubstantiated) things, especially the built-in human need to see patterns, even where there is no pattern to be seen. Throughout, Shermer emphasizes that skepticism (in his sense) does not need to be cynicism: "Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known." --Mary Ellen Curtin

From School Library Journal
YA?Dedicated to Carl Sagan, with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, this book by the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the Director of the Skeptics Lecture Series at California Institute of Technology, has the pedigree to be accepted as a work of scholarly value. Fortunately, it is also readable, interesting, and well indexed and provides an extensive bibliography. The author discusses such topics of current interest as alien abduction, near-death experiences, psychics, recovered memories, and denial of the Holocaust. Never patronizing to his opponents, Shermer explains why people may truly believe that they were held by aliens (he had a similar experience himself) or have recovered a memory of childhood satanic-ritual abuse. He clearly explains, often with pictures, tables, or graphs, the fallacy of such beliefs in terms of scientific reasoning. While teens may find the first section of the book about "Science and Skepticism" a bit too philosophical and ponderous, the rest of it will surely captivate them. Read cover to cover or by section, or used as a reference tool, this book is highly recommended for young adults.?Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee
This sparkling book romps over the range of science and anti-science.

Customer Reviews

So that explains it
I got this book (an autographed copy, no less) after a debate between the author and a Christian apologist. The debate was very polite (possibly too polite; I think they were worried about how the students watching would behave if either side decisively won) and I don't think any minds were changed. Mr. Shermer spent most of his argument explaining why Theists believe what they believe, and why atheists don't. I remember wondering why he didn't simply argue against the beliefs themselves (many of which are beliefs about the world that can be proven one way or the other, such as whether God answers prayers like the Bible says he does). After reading this book, I understand it! Whether the beliefs are true is not the main deciding factor for most people; this book does an excellent job of explaining the way people's minds justify various beliefs.

Why Anti-Christians Repeatedly Resort To Cheap Shot Inuendo to Prove the Bible Is Bad
Because they are pleasure addicts who have no evidence that the Bible is bad and in hypocrisy, attack it.

Just look at the stupid title. So whatever is "weird" and "odd" must be wrong huh? That's a childish school bully's insult: look at that guy over there, he's a weird because he doesn't dress, talk like us or agree with whatever we think is cool, so he must be inferior and let's keep insulting him.

The authors reject this over 1900 years old common sense advice:

"Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgment." - Jesus

"There is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof leads to death." - Proverbs

They reject it, hence why their book, even the title, is stupid.

What's weird is believing that unimaginably complex amount of ordered life-sustaining and replicating information, a super beautiful universe with life-friendly areas; living replicating, emotional, multi-sensory, biological robots which enjoy singing, dancing, learning, and doing good and evil were created by an exploding bomb from dozens of billions of years ago with no explanation as to why it exploded which no one saw explode in the first place, and which the evidence shows did not ever happen.

Nor is there any evidence to explain why many living kinds of animals that are supposed to evolve over time (according to evolutionists) have not evolved after millions of years, but only lost some features such as the ability to defend against a certain kind of disease or digest some sort of food (like how non-animal humans have been losing the ability to digest milk or bread well). Nor is there evidence to explain why there are very high-tech ancient man-made tools in millions of years old strata when evolutionists claim man wasn't evolved enough at that time to make them or how an exploding MATERIAL bomb can create SPIRITUAL things like GOODNESS, EVIL, INFORMATION, and THOUGHTS. To believe the impossible over the evident and probable is what is "weird".

But what if the truth is often weird?
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

As it turns out, the truth is often considered weird before it is fully accepted as factual and common sense. It just depends on "timing" really, which is another way of saying political and economic agendas. If a certain political point of view, or certain economic theory, or certain treatment for disease, or certain archaelogical find, or certain scientific discovery does not provide direct benefit to THE POWERS THAT BE (TPTB), then it will promptly be dismissed in the mainstream media as weird, kooky, quackery, pseudoscience, snake oil, conspiracy theory, or otherwise. Everything mainstream that is "accepted" in our society as not weird, or as "scientific" ALWAYS provides direct and enormous benefit to TPTB, in terms of more money, more power, and most importantly more CONTROL. This has been going on for hundreds of years.

Case in point: there have been various people (including engineers, physicists, and biochemists) over many decades who have run their vehicles entirely or partially on water. I have been in one such vehicle. A fair amount of information about different techniques exist on the internet, including a number of videos that take you step by step through the different processes of how to covert your engine to run partially or entirely on water, for anywhere from about $400 to $1500 dollars total cost. This is fact and quite scientific as it is repeatable and readily observable, but yet the idea of running a car on water still is firmly under the heading of WEIRD, or RIDICULOUS, or IMPOSSIBLE by books such as these. But what if books such as these were sponsored by the oil and gas industries? Do you see where I'm going with this???

Simply put, books like this keep us stupid, keep us ignorant, keep us arrogant, keep us in the box and firmly under control. Whereas the World of Weird is often where the liberating truth lays. Ironically, there is often far better "science" involved in some of these so-called kooky ideas and snake oil schemes, than that offered to us by the mainstream (Tier 2 and 3 Science) academia. The total shams of "peak oil" and "global warming from human CO2 production" are two good examples. In fact, the very idea that we must be so dependent on oil and gas is completely weird and wacky to me and many other scientists, biochemists, engineers, and geologists because there are MANY, MANY other scientifically valid and laboratory proven methods to run cars and machinery indefinitely, BUT the Powers That Be would lose far too much money, power, and control over us to ever consider letting that happen. [Ooohhhhh noooo, not another crazy conspiracist you say???] Thus, good creative people always get suppressed and sometimes hurt, and books like this get published and the sheeple never know any different. It's all just another page from the military-industrial complex's playbook. Find out for yourselves.