Science,
Belief, and the Cultural Burden of Superstition
Table of
Contents
Introduction
The Vast Edifice of Culture
Anti-intellectualism and the Ability
to Evaluate Evidence
The Mind of a Dog: Human Reasoning
and Misdirection
Conspiracy Theories and the Inherent Difficulty in Communication
The Flat Earth Experience
The Contamination of Ideas in the
Internet Age
Santa Claus and God
Debbie and the Fairies
Gaming the Luck System
Ghosts and Messages from Beyond
Forerunners
A Dream about Juan Carlos
Ghosts, Logic, Listening, and Learning
Belief Systems
Bowing before the White Man: Colonialism,
White Supremacy, and Christianity
Depredations of the Missionary Movement
The Bible is Perfect. No Wait, It's
Not
Religious Tolerance, Ethics, and
Conjoined Twins
Christian empathy in Dean Koontz's
Innocence
Why People Believe in Gods: Coincidence
and the Workings of Chance
Workarounds for Religions and Luck
The Locked Room at the Top of the
Stairs
Checking Our Delusions
Science and Its Discontents: Clawing Our Way Out of Superstition
A Match We Have Just Got Alight
The Khoisan People and their History
The Hard Work of Contributing to
Intellectual Society
A Use of Old Cannonballs
Cultural Inertia: the QWERTY Keyboard and the Standard Railway
Gauge
Ancient Science at the Planetarium
The Lesson of Piltdown Man
Don't Tell the Archaeologist
The Poor are Lazy and Other Cultures
Do Not Value Competence
Polk Science: Perpetual Motion and
Cars that Run on Water
Shifting Blame and Abdicating Responsibility
The Ignorance Effect: Simple Systems
Travelling Without Geography
Trying to Explain Geographical Realities
Media images
Beware of the Fog in Winnipeg
We Have to Control Our Own Learning
Textual Reality and the Phenomenological
World
Lack of Self-Knowledge
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Prove How Smart You Are: Or, Are
You Dumb Enough to Play?
What I Learned in Graduate School
Ego
Halfway Across the Country
My Brother's Dinner with Andre
Emotional Thinking
Emotional Arguments: Pit Bull Defenses
The Palimpsest of Culture
Works Cited
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