Posts Tagged
Superstition
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (part 8)
Jeremy Rifkin by Revilo P. Oliver Ain’t Science Wonderful? UNFORTUNATELY, for our race (I am not interested in others) common sense is not enough. Despite, our race’s characteristic recognition of the supreme authority of ascertained facts, it has a psychic need to escape now and then from the trammels…
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth? (part 2)
Arthur Conan Doyle by Revilo P. Oliver Scientific Suckers IT IS TRUE that quite a few men who attained competence, and some who attained distinction, in some one of the sciences have evinced remarkable gullibility, but that was almost always a susceptibility to some superstition about the supernatural…
White Voodoo
by Ian P. McKinney A FEW YEARS AGO, while living in southern Louisiana, I needed to obtain an herb that my wife used for making a tea from which she obtained some relief from a digestive disorder. Before we had moved to that state, we had obtained this common herb from a local health food store. However, in…
Masonic Nonsense
by Revilo P. Oliver I HAVE READ many books on the subject of Masonry, some of which contain valuable information (i.e., authentic descriptions of rituals and ceremonies), but almost all are written by Christians, who naturally are incapable of objectivity — or even rationality. (ILLUSTRATION:…
Of Quacks and Quackery, part 3
by Revilo P. Oliver IN CERTAIN circumstances (which it should be the task of an honest sociology to catalogue and define), superstition is contagious, perhaps by a psychosomatic communication analogous to the contagion of hysteria, of which a clear instance in a British girls’ school was studied…
Of Quacks and Quackery, part 2
by Revilo P. Oliver THE LONG and involved history of astrology in the West began with the imputation of the doctrine from Asia in the Hellenistic Age, when the intellectual vigor of the Greeks, sapped by internecine wars, social catastrophes, and an influx of aliens was declining, but still sufficed…
Of Quacks and Quackery, part 1
A gallery of ancient and modern hoaxers by Revilo P. Oliver (pictured) FOR MANY YEARS, each issue of the Scientific American has been enlivened by a series of mathematical and logical puzzles presented, and often devised, by Dr. Martin Gardner. In June 1974, however, the ingenious mathematician tried…
