chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, woo! woo!

So, while dicking around on the Facebooks early this morning, I came across a post on this crackpot, Dr. Masaru Emoto, who stuck some wet grains of rice in jars and had people say positive things to one and negative things to another. According to his “results,” the rice in the negative jar rotted faster, “proving” that human thought can manipulate the physical world. This led me down a rabbit hole of comments and into chambers of the internets that just might have made me dumber for visiting.

Credulous people have passed this “scientific proof” of the power of positive thinking around the internets as if it were actually science, justifying their already woo-woo belief that their brains have special powers that just need to be unlocked. Worse, this charlatan sells “enchanced water” and other related crap to poor, unsuspecting people who just want to feel better about themselves. Their money could be better spent in Colorado or Washington. Or, you know, over at Joe's apartment over in Lowry Hill. Just sayin'.

That more than two hundred years after the publication of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, people still cling to this kind of woo is just depressing. Of all human impulses, credulity is second maybe only to violence in its negative impact on our societies. People want to believe, so they do. And it holds back progress.

In the 1960s, the Hippies rebelled against the stuffy, Calvinist nature of American spirituality (ferchrissake, even the Catholics in this country are kind of Calvinist). This, on its face was a good thing. Calvinism sucks. However, rather than embracing skepticism and reason, they turned to other forms of “spirituality.”

Some turned to Native American religions and gave up their given names for the names of “spirit animals.” Some turned to Eastern religions and mysticism; others to neo-paganism, and still others to new-age crackpot stuff like Scientology and whatever that crystal energy baloney is that seems peculiar to the American Southwest. They passed these notions of “spirituality” on to the next generation, and 50 odd years later, skepticism and reason still suffer. Me and Tom Paine need a fucking drink.

All-in-all, they leapt from the frying pan and straight into the fire. I know it's difficult for humans to accept that we aren't special; that the universe is boundless, cold, and uncaring and that our souls are nothing more than a collection of electrochemical impulses in our nervous systems. But when you do accept this, it is enormously liberating. The universe becomes an even more wonderful and mysterious place. And you're less likely to fall prey to charlatans like Dr. Emoto.