Don't give me that bull shit. CSICOP, now called CSI to try to get it past the sTARBABY SCANDAL is a gang of atheist thugs, their influence on journalism and science has been mostly that of an intellectual protection racket, the fee they collected is promoting their ideological thuggery. You can say the same thing about the James Randi "Educational" Foundation, Michael Shermer and all the other pseudo-skeptical rackets out there. It has succeeded with the cowards of journalism and to a great extent within science journalism and science. It has been a total flop with the general public who are far more interested in its Index of Prohibited Topics since its founding than they were before.
I used to think the bad state that the public understanding of science is in had little to do with CSICOP, now I think it probably has more to do with that than I once did.
CSICOP and the rest of the atheist-ideological agitation have no interest in the truth, no more than neo-Confederate revisionists or Hollywood are. It's a sleazy racket.
I wish there was some way to know which of you guys are doing this so I could know which of your heroes to target. But I've got no problem with targeting them all, even the media saints like Sagan.
* Which showed that its founders and even some of the scientists were able to be every thing from totally ignorant of science - Paul Kurtz, James Randi - to practicing basic scientific incompetence - George Abel, Marvin Zelen - to duplicity and cover up - virtually all of the rest of the CSICOP "council" and "fellows" and other big wigs involved in it, especially the allegedly sainted Martin Gardner and Carl Sagan and the professional "skeptic" and now retired psych prof. Ray Hyman.
Update: If you're not going to bother to read the things linked to that support my claim, you're going to continue to not know what you're talking about. The incompetence and fraud were blatant, the cover up as well, even Richard Kammann, then a current "Fellow" of CSICOP, as willing as he was to bend over backward to look for innocent motives was, through the continued cover up and lies, forced to face the fact that the whole thing was a scandal and he resigned from the cult.
Still getting no response from the 4 stony faces on CSICOP's Mt. Rushmore [ Gardner, Hyman, Randi and Kendrick Frazier], I submitted a completely new paper fully documenting all the scientific errors with sources and omitting all charges of a cover-up by Council. Called "Statistical Numerology in the Skeptics' Response to the Mars Effect," and strictly limited to a small circle of addresses, this paper finally got some results.
George Abell produced 71 pages of explanations and apologies, accepting "Numerology" with two minor disclaimers (both wrong). Ray Hyman concurred on the errors but saw them as ordinary slip-ups in the process of science. Many scientists, he argued, try to publish nonsense but are blocked by a strong system of peer reviews and editorial control. Of course, there were no such controls for The Humanist or The Skeptical Inquirer, especially since Paul Kurtz had ultimate control on both. Ken Frazier agreed that a shorter and softer version of "Numerology" could be published in The Skeptical Inquirer but emphasized that nobody was interested in this dull old topic.
My faith in the goodness of CSICOP now flowering, I set to work on a readable third version of the paper. With Hyman's case for ordinary human errors humming in my head, I hit upon the subjective validation scenario for some of the errors (see Part 1) and even convinced myself that the whole cover-up was merely selective perception by Rawlins. The happy ending was in full sight.
The glow didn't last long. Frazier cabled that the editorial board was split and to shorten it severely. Meanwhile, my innocence theory was cracking under the strain to cover all the errors, and I sensed that no version I could write would be acceptable. Strong letters from Martin Gardner and Philip Klass now defined the situation as "resolved" by the Abell and Hyman letters. I was now exhausted and feeling the pressure to pronounce the benediction.
A reply to Hyman from parapsychologist R.A. McConnell said, "Nonsense. What we are talking about is elementary statistics--Abell and Zelen's specialty--and a third professor who is enhancing his status by lending his name in a field in which he presumably has no competence whatsoever. Of course, I'll buy your claim of no conscious dishonesty. [I suspect in the context, he said I'll NOT buy your claim.] Neither was it a chance occurrence. Unexamined dishonesty is rampant in this world. I don't see how you can excuse scientists' publicly trading upon their professional reputations when they are not willing to exert self-discipline." I tried to ignore McConnell, but that phrase "unexamined dishonesty" kept haunting me. The happy ending was slipping from my grasp.
There is one thing that Richard Kammann claimed that I totally reject, his claim that Paul Kurtz, the atheist god(less)father of neo-atheism was innocent of fraud due to his total, absolute ignorance of statistics - a defense that James Randi and Phil Klass also took. There is no way to have an informed opinion on the topics they declared forbidden without having a sophisticated knowledge of statistics, they have to be held responsible for dealing ideologically with controlled scientific research out of a basis of total ignorance of what the findings of that science were. That is intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind, perhaps topped only by those who do know bending things every which way to try to make the carefully done science disappear out of ideological motives. Which would account for virtually all of the rest of the CSICOP gangsters.
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