THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

The Demon-Haunted World



The Demon-Haunted World

The Demon-Haunted World is a collection of twenty-five essays, several written with Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan. Tests broad scope of eloquent paeans to science to impassioned denunciations of bigotry, from humorous accounts of a variety of activities of pseudo-scientific efforts to understand the serious nature of Deception Alien Abduction. With intelligence and wit, rational and calm which is his trademark, Sagan takes a variety of topics, among them: alien abductions, astrology, Atlantis, the bell curve, to channel the crop circles, demons, electromagnetism, ESP, the face on Mars, fairies, faith healing, magic, miracles, prayer, religion, Roswell, satanic rituals, therapy, and, of course, one of his favorite themes, UFOs and extraterrestrials. Only Velikovsky be ignored this time. With each of his essays, he extols the virtues of skepticism, empirical evidence and studies of control, while embracing a multitude of errors and weaknesses of the positions of the occultists, paranormalist, supernatural and pseudoscientific. And he does it with extreme grace, gentleness and civility(Sagan, 2003).

In fact, if there is something I disagree with in the book of Sagan, he is probably skeptical of encouragement to be as civil as it faces what skeptics consider the black out candle.

I can not deny that there is a strong appeal to the appeal to compassion, to see occultists in the world after the skeptics are the same after, and acknowledge the skepticism of those who adhere to new concepts pseudo- Age or spiritual science. If the goal was to try to get the true believer to renounce his beliefs, then I agree that an aggressive campaign that arrogantly maintains that it is better to live according to the evidence that desires can not be the best tactic. But the aggressive, brutal, arrogant approach apparently would be better if the goal ...