Another Stupid Debunking Book to Skip//Our Wasted Science Dollars

An Example of Our Wasted Science Dollars by Whitley Strieber

Few more outrageous and prejudiced books have been published in recent years than Quantum Leaps by Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins. Covering such subjects as out-of-body experiences, astrology, ghosts and UFOs, the book takes a uniformly negative tone.

It doesn’t cite any evidence for its conclusions that all such subjects are pure bunk, instead citing as authorities a laundry list of skeptical books by the likes of James Zwingle (the Amazing Randi), Martin Gardner and Michael Shermer. This would be just another piece of meaningless drivel, except that it has been published through the facilities of the National Academy of Science, given a rave in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and is from two authors notably prominent and powerful in science.

This is a piece of the rankest, most repugnant and probably entirely fallacious propaganda. The National Academy of Sciences should be ashamed of itself for supporting drivel like this, filled as it is with conclusions, but completely devoid of evidence. The book makes a mockery of the scientific method that is described in the first chapter.

It isn’t science, it’s superstition, pure and simple: the superstition that what we know now is all that is real. This superstition has been dogging science since Voltaire issued the opinion that fossils were fish bones dropped by travelers. The science establishment must face the fact that there are thousands of experiments in which the application of the scientific method has led to the inescapable conclusion that unknown phenomena such as ghosts can be measured and observed. Until it does so, our world must remain immeasurably less than it could be, cut off from important wonders of nature and life simply because a narrow-minded few refuse to recognize them, and control the means of our understanding what they really are.

And there is the rub,The AMA. Right Doctor Fragger ? LMAO

Translation: This stuff hurts Strieber's book sales. You should only waste money on HIS stuff.

Excellent insight from Strieber (of all people). Yes, it really does seem that the 'belief' state has been petrified into our modern society, perhaps as strongly as it has ever been since the middle ages.

Nice contribution Art.

H.Ellis Ensle

I would agree, Whitley Strieber is an example of our wasted science dollars.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood...

Given that Randi, Gardner and Shermer _do_ have meaningful things to say about such things, it seems odd to reject the book on that basis.

What is wrong with the book again, other than it disagreeing with what you would like to believe?

What conclusions did they reach which are contrary to available evidence?

Mark

Unlike abductees (or is it takeners from now on?) no one asks my OOB types do not bring back a used alien lotto ticket.