Help Stamp Out Absurd Beliefs

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Currently, German science is agog with its exciting discovery of "E rays," which are said to come from deep within the earth and cause cancer and which cannot be detected by any known scientific instrument. Fortunately, they can be sensed by a dowser carrying a forked willow stick. The trusting viewer in what was the Soviet Union places a bottle of water atop his TV set every morning so that a faith healer can "charge" the contents with curative power via Channel 6. In Finland and Sweden the private, expensive and government- accredited Rudolf Steiner schools teach children to cast horoscopes and believe that sprites inhabit trees and rocks.

Why are the populaces of every culture so eagerly embracing claptrap that should have been left behind with the superstitious and emotional burdens that brought about the Dark Ages? The reason is to be found in the uncritical acceptance and promotion of these notions by the media, prominent personalities and government agencies.

Those Washington spoon-bending parties are regularly attended by top brass from the Pentagon. The German government paid DM 400,000 (about $250,000) in 1990 to hire dowsers to scan federal offices and hospitals so that desks and beds could be relocated out of the path of the deadly E rays that authorities have accepted as real. Our own Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, has urged government funding for supernatural research, fearful that Russian scientists might be ahead of the U.S. in paranormal matters. Until recently, Pell retained a special assistant with top-secret security clearance who devoted himself solely to such research, for a paycheck of $49,000 a year. And, can we ever forget, a U.S. President and his First Lady arranged even their official schedules on the advice of an astrologer in San Francisco? Even TIME magazine sometimes slips into the trap, as it did in a recent cover story on alternative medicine when it included the absurdity of "crystal healing" as a possible medical remedy.

Acceptance of nonsense as a harmless aberration can be dangerous to us. We live in a society that is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made available to us. To mix our data input with childish notions of magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world around us. We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of dead absurdities.

At the risk of being unbearably realistic, I must tell you that Elvis is really dead, the sky is not falling, the earth is not flat, and the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.