Five years ago, Robert Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger and 34 other books, died on January 11, 2007.
Mark Frauenfelder is celebrating with “Robert Anton Wilson Week on Boing Boing.”
Mark notes that one of his favorite things about Wilson was his skepticism towards skeptics. From Wikipedia, Mark passes this along:
Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his newly-published book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, Wilson commented: “I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they’re governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They’re so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic… I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity… I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical… The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they’re rational! …They’re never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They’re only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They’re actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college…”
How does this apply to cryptozoology’s “skeptics”?
Follow “Robert Anton Wilson Week on Boing Boing” during the next few days, over there, but if you wish to comment on what RAW said about skepticism as it applies to cryptozoology, you can leave comments here.
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