An opinion piece by Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer in the LA Times has stirred up lots of strong opinions amongst Angelenos. What do disinfonauts think?

The House voted 396-9 this week to reaffirm as the national motto the phrase “In God We Trust” and encouraged its pronouncement on public buildings and continued printing on the coin of the realm. The motto was made official in 1956 during the height of Cold War hysteria over godless communism and — in the words of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove” — “Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

As risible a reason as this was for knocking out a few bricks in the wall separating state and church, it was at least understandable in the context of the times. But today, what is the point of having this motto? There are no communist threats, and belief in God or a universal spirit among Americans is still holding strong at about 90%, according to a 2011 Gallup Poll. The answer is in the wording of the resolution voted on: “Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured.”

What is troubling — and should trouble any enlightened citizen of a modern nation such as ours — is the implication that in this age of science and technology, computers and cyberspace, and liberal democracies securing rights and freedoms for oppressed peoples all over the globe, that anyone could still hold to the belief that religion has a monopoly on morality and that the foundation of trust is based on engraving four words on brick and paper.

If you think that God is watching over the U.S., please ask yourself why he glanced away during 9/11 or why he chose to abandon the good folks of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and why he continues to allow earthquakes and cancers to strike down even blameless children…

[continues in the LA Times]

Michael Shermer. Photo: David Patton (CC)

Matt Ridley for the Wall Street Journal:

Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the sinister Zionist cabal that deliberately destroyed the twin towers and blew a hole in the Pentagon while secretly killing off the passengers of the flights that disappeared, just to make the thing look more plausible.

He tells this story in his fascinating new book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. In Mr. Shermer’s view, the brain is a belief engine, predisposed to see patterns where none exist and to attribute them to knowing agents rather than to chance — the better to make sense of the world. Then, having formed a belief, each of us tends to seek out evidence that confirms it, thus reinforcing the belief.

This is why, on the foundation of some tiny flaw in the evidence — the supposed lack of roof holes to admit poison-gas cans in one of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers for Holocaust deniers, the expectant faces on the grassy knoll for JFK plotters, the melting point of steel for 9/11 truthers — we go on to build a great edifice of mistaken conviction.

I say “we” because, after reading Mr. Shermer’s book and others like it, my uneasy conclusion is that we all do this, even when we think we do not. It’s not a peculiarity of the uneducated or the fanatical. We do it in our political allegiances, in our religious faith, even in our championing of scientific theories. And if we all do it, then how do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories, too?

There was a time, when I was younger, when I was confident that I knew how to tell a barmy belief from a rational deduction. I have lost some of that confidence…

[continues at the Wall Street Journal]

Here is the latest action by Prof. Anthony J. Hall and I. We were so disgusted with Prof. Michael Shermer’s lack of knowledge about 9/11 that we were compelled to intervene during his parodic lecture at the University of Lethbridge last night. Shermer purports to be a skeptic (his magazine is named “Skeptic Magazine”) who has read “ALL of David Ray Griffin’s books” (DRG is actually his colleague at the Clairmont Graduate School ). However, Shermer is clearly somebody who has never engaged with any of the critiques of the government narrative about 9/11, a subject which he nonetheless talks about authoritatively to public audiences, conflating 9/11 truth-seekers with UFO spotters, Holocaust Deniers under the rubric of “conspiracy theorists”. As part of his deliberately satirical analysis he showed the audience cross-sections of the human brain indirectly implying that “conspiracy theorists” think how they do due to their biological makeup which harkens back to the notorious days when cities like Lethbridge and the wider hinterland of Alberta were leading the way in the eugenics movement. Like Sebastian Junger and Christopher Hitchens Shermer is somebody who serves the war machine’s agenda by poisoning the public consciousness of our society. He has blood on his hands for his role in depoliticizing society, enabling the murderous 9/11 Wars. We attempted to expose him as somebody who was profiting from the official story of 9/11. A true “conspiracy entrepreneur” indeed. Like Hitchens he declares himself to be a materialist and sombody cocnerned with scientific reasoning. Yet, like Hitchens, when science becomes politically inconvenient he reverts back to government-sanctioned superstition whilst at the same time showing cross-sections of the brain and comedic imagery to audiences to convince them he is an authority on subjects which he is in fact seemingly ignorant of. When I asked him to name one of DRG’s books, all of which he purports to have read, he could not. When I asked him to name one academic who has defended the government conspiracy theory he cited himself. Shermer’s comedy show was not worthy of an educated audience in a Canadian University. Prof. Hall should be acknowledged for making sure we attended the event and for speaking the truth in front of his colleagues many of whom sniggered like sophomoric school children. One of the U of L professors in the audience implied that I was an “asshole” (that’s ARSE-hole for the British recipients of this email). The behaviour of these quack-a-demics speaks volumes about the state of the academy in the 9/11 induced Age of Impunity and Superstition.