Carl Sagan

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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Amazon.com ReviewCarl Sagan muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience. Along the way he debunks alien abduction, faith-healing, and channeling; refutes the arguments that science destroys spirituality, and provides a «baloney detection kit» for thinking through political, social, religious, and other issues.

From Publishers WeeklyEminent Cornell astronomer and bestselling author Sagan debunks the paranormal and the unexplained in a study that will reassure hardcore skeptics but may leave others unsatisfied. To him, purported UFO encounters and alien abductions are products of gullibility, hallucination, misidentification, hoax and therapists’ pressure; some alleged encounters, he suggests, may screen memories of sexual abuse. He labels as hoaxes the crop circles, complex pictograms that appear in southern England’s wheat and barley fields, and he dismisses as a natural formation the Sphinx-like humanoid face incised on a mesa on Mars, first photographed by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976 and considered by some scientists to be the engineered artifact of an alien civilization. In a passionate plea for scientific literacy, Sagan deftly debunks the myth of Atlantis, Filipino psychic surgeons and mediums such as J.Z. Knight, who claims to be in touch with a 35,000-year-old entity called Ramtha. He also brands as superstition ghosts, angels, fairies, demons, astrology, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and religious apparitions. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  • Nurlan Süleymanovshared an impression5 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot

Quotes

  • Kamil Khanhas quoted6 years ago
    It didn’t rise to 40 years until around the year 1870. It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80 (a little more for women, a little less for men)
  • Anna Chasovikovahas quoted3 years ago
    Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds written by Charles Mackay
  • Anna Chasovikovahas quoted3 years ago
    I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative and communicative

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