Saturday, June 03, 2006

People Believe the Strangest Things

I’m reading Carl Sagan’s last book, The Demon-Haunted World, and one question it asks and examines is why people believe weird things. For example, why would folks credit the idea of cancer healing crystals, alien abductions, and ancient ruins on Mars and the moon? Personally, I’m trained as a scientist and that’s one reason why I’m a skeptic. But I also find the very idea of global conspiracies to be faintly ludicrous. I mean, how could a government full of people who are not all that bright keep captured interstellar spacecraft and alien corpses secret for decades?

On the other hand, the weird things are fun, aren’t they? I hope there’s something odd hiding in Lock Ness; I hope they catch a Bigfoot one of these days. I’d be scared to see an alien space craft approaching Earth through a telescope, but damn it would be cool, too, eh? People hunger for the new, the surprising. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they read fiction. I know, for me, that I pick up a novel so that I can get lost in a world of “what ifs.” In part, I write for the same reason. Thank goodness for the strange.

But how about you? Believed in anything weird lately?

6 comments:

James Reasoner said...

Hi, Charles. Thanks for letting me know about your blog. Plenty of good stuff here.

As for weird things, well, I saw something once that was so bizarre I would have thought that I imagined it, if my wife hadn't seen the same thing at the same time. But I'm not going into details because everybody would think I was crazy. And writers are already considered crazy enough.

Charles Gramlich said...

This is a story you'll have to tell me in Cross Plains some time, James.

cs harris said...

Well, I never really believed New Orleans would be swamped by a hurricane, so...

Sidney said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Sidney said...

Nothing strange ever happened to me, but I had a neighbor once. She came home to find her Doberman passed out and...

Nathan Prophet said...

I believe that people who say they are a skeptic BECAUSE thy are a scientist are very weird people indeed. Many scientists are not skeptics, and many are devout believers in their religion.