Blog Cliques Often Devolve Into Stupid People Reinforcing Each Others Stupidity And They Can Lead The World Into Darkness

Of course you people who read my blog know that I knew that posting that link to Mark Vernon and Rupert Sheldrake's  Science Set Free podcast yesterday would provoke the atheists who monitor this blog.  Thought I certainly would have posted it on its own merits if that weren't true,  I knew that they'd get into a swivet over it, and they did.  I can't claim to not see that as a bonus, I do like to push that particular button and watch the predictable response.

Also in the e-mail newsletter I get from Rupert Sheldrake, listing his recent activities and recommending things he's read and heard, there was a very good and, from what I gather, badly received speech which the science journalist John Horgan gave to a "Skeptics" convention.  I recommend it as well worth reading.  Even though I sometimes disagree with some of what John Horgan says, like one of my scientist-materialist-atheist heroes, Richard Lewontin, he's an honest person and I suspect even something of a kindred spirit.  He says:

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

So I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

Well, I'm not a science journalist but I endorse most of that, especially the last paragraph.  I certainly have found it to be the case in online commenting communities, which can get stupider as they go on, or maybe it's just that anyone who isn't prone to stupid group-think drop out of them.

His discussion of various lapses in scientific honesty and practice, especially when motivated by the ideological program of materialists and anti-religious atheists, isn't something I haven't gone over before but it's nice to see that I'm not the only one who has noticed that, even skeptical science reporters have.

The organized "Skeptics" are and always have been a fraud, they aren't skeptical about anything.  They never question their own assumptions, they have absolute faith in what they believe in even as they deny that their belief is belief but declare it is knowledge.  They have shown themselves to be able to lie and commit fraud and to refuse to look at evidence and to admit what it shows when they see it as any other fundamentalists - and fundamentalists they are.  I would say that the current crop of anti-religious "Skeptics" are even more uniformly closed minded, anti-intellectual and dishonest about their motives and their behavior than many who fall in the category "evangelicals" and even many who might be called religious fundamentalists.  I think it's more likely that someone who seriously believes there is a God-given requirement to be honest and to question your motives to grow past that than materialists who don't believe they are required to do that, though the difficulty and emotional challenge of doing that is hard for any of us.

We disagree about a number of things but I agree with him that "Skepticism" is largely a fraud and the attitude they have is, actually, destructive of science.  His take down of Lawrence Krauss in his emergence as an ideological cosmologist says things I've been pointing out about that for about as long as he has (his links to his previous articles are well worth following up on).

And it should be noted that John Horgan is critical of the field of scientific inquiry that Rupert Sheldrake is often engaged in these days, Psi.   Sheldrake clearly isn't going to let that keep him from recommending that people read what he says.  Another thing that Rupert Sheldrake  recommended in his newsletter is a blog post by  Massimo Pigliucci, as he points out a big S Skeptic and atheist who is finding that his fellow ideologues are, in fact, anti-intellectuals and less open and honest than could produce real skepticism or even intellectual honesty.  He goes into the matter of Krauss and other heroes of the neo-atheist-skeptic movement.  I wish I could hear more of what Pigliucci has to say about the late Paul Kurtz, one of the biggest figures in turning pseudo-skepticism into a self-congratulating, anti-intellectual club of conceited, ignorant snobs.  The pseudo-skeptics are, ironically enough, leading us back into the same intellectual decadence of the worst of pre-scientific scholasticism, only without the intellectual standards they practiced back then.

I don't see, a. that science under the regime of the materialists is going to reform itself, or b. that these critics will be taken seriously.  I doubt that they will even really fix the wreck that peer review has become in the age of Big Science.   I believe that we are well into the materialist-atheist dark age, the unlightenment.  And the basic reason for that is because people have been sold on the idea that there is no sin, there are no moral obligations to tell the truth or to care about consequences.  A lie is as good as the truth if you can get what you want with it.  That is the result of this, even the few honest atheists and materialists are not going to save us from it.  That will have to come from outside of it.