SimpleWeblog

Unlikely Cult?

Lest you think I am turning this weblog into a link-free zone, I thought this article was interesting. It seems naive to me to think that reason is unlikely to lead to cultish behavior. Humans can be very silly creatures, and we all like to think we adhere to principles of some sort even though we keep making mistakes. Maybe we all just like picking different people to blame for those mistakes, or coming up with different ways of trying to compensate and explain away the mistakes.

But it was also interesting to me to see a leader of a skeptic organization base a lot of his feelings on a belief in free will. I'm reasonably sure people haven't actually figured out the whole consciousness thing yet. I guess everyone has a different threshold for applying skeptical ideas.