Book Club: Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer

Our next meeting is Sunday, January 18, 4 p.m. at Standard Pizza, 755 Biltmore Avenue in Asheville.

Look for us inside, in the back room.

We will continue our discussion of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, by science writer Michael Shermer. We will focus on the first and last chapters of Part IV, History and Pseudohistory :Chapter 12, Doing Donohue, and Chapter 15, Pigeonholes and Continuums. (We'll read the other two chapters of Part IV, on Holocaust Denial, at the following meeting.)

From the forward: "Unless we regularly use human reason both to discover and acknowledge nature's factuality, and to follow the logical implications for efficacious human action that such knowledge entails, we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising "true" belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency."

Note: Each section stands alone and is prime for discussion, so newcomers are welcome!
We would like to keep each meeting to a max of 10 people. Please RSVP if you do plan to come.