The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Dying To Go To Heaven
What the Heaven’s Gate Suicides Teach Us About Islamic Martyrdom

by Michael Shermer

It was 20 years ago this week, March 20-26, 1997, that 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult “graduated” from this life to ascend to the UFO mothership that they believed would take them to an extraterrestrial paradise. I’ll never forget it. I was on book tour for Why People Believe Weird Things, and neither I nor any of my peers who study belief systems had ever heard of the cult. It was hard to fathom. Now, as I look back 20 years later, I believe the mass suicide has a deeper lesson that goes far beyond the confines of New Age fringe cults, and has relevance to understanding the motivations of today’s suicide terrorists.

But first, let’s revisit the story. Heaven’s Gate was founded in 1975 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles after they met in a psychiatric hospital. They fell in love and believed their pairing had been foretold by extraterrestrials. In the 1980s and 1990s, they recruited several hundred followers, many of whom sold their possessions and lived in isolation, disconnected from their family and friends. They practiced living in dark rooms to simulate space travel and considered sex sinful, with six male members voluntarily undergoing castration.

In early 1997, the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp foretold to them that the coming of the UFO mothership, said to be hiding behind the comet, that would take them to what they called The Evolutionary Level Above Human (TELAH), where they would live forever in unadulterated ecstasy. This story was reinforced by Art Bell, on his popular late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM, a purveyor of conspiratorial “alternative facts” (before they were known as such). Compared to eternal bliss in this extraterrestrial heaven, life on Earth was but a temporary stage in evolution. The transition was made in three waves that week, as members drank a deadly cocktail of phenobarbital, applesauce, and vodka; also pulling plastic bags over their heads for self-asphyxiation. Authorities found them all dead in a San Diego home on March 26. The event became a media circus. […]

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How Accurate is the “Cycle of Abuse”?

by Carol Tavris

Many years ago, as I was sitting in a courtroom waiting to testify as an expert witness in a case involving junk psychology, I observed a child custody case ahead of ours. A social worker was arguing that the mother in question should not be granted custody of her children, full or even shared. True, the mother had never hit or otherwise physically abused them; but, said the social worker with certainty, the mother had herself been abused as a child and it was virtually certain that she would in the future repeat the crimes of her parents. Psychologists have called this common idea the “cycle of abuse.” It seems to affirm our intuitions that abused children would grow up to become abusive parents themselves, given that all children imitate so much of what they observe at home. But new evidence shows that once again our intuitions have led us astray.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 21.2 (2016)

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Most people take it for granted that the path from childhood to adulthood is a fairly straight one. We think of the embedded attitudes, habits, and values our parents taught us—some of which we are still trying to eradicate. Many people, as legions of memoirists remind us, carry with them the psychological scars of wounds they suffered at the hands of cruel, violent, alcoholic, unloving or neglectful parents. Longitudinal studies repeatedly find that children abused in these ways are more likely than other children to develop emotional problems, become violent or depressed, attempt suicide, commit crimes, drop out of school, and develop chronic stress-related illnesses. Adults imprisoned for violent acts and child abuse report high rates of their own victimization as children.

The belief in a cycle of violence was clinically popular but empirically unsupported, emerging from accounts by psychotherapists and social workers whose perspective was understandably onesided…

Yet…what is missing from this picture? The group we don’t see: children who were abused but who proved to be resilient, growing into healthy adults determined not to revisit on their own children what they had suffered. We aren’t aware of them because they aren’t in therapy or prison, telling their stories to sympathetic listeners and researchers. I once had a brilliant freshman student who described his life as typical of a “kid in a bad novel”— a family destroyed by drugs, violence, and chaos. “What saved you?” I asked. “Math teacher in high school,” he said. “He thought I was smart. Showed me I was. He got me into this university.” […]

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What is Sexual Orientation?

by Carol Tavris

If you want to study sexual behavior, choose the fruit fly. Its behavior is not nearly as obvious as you might think, and you aren’t likely to raise a storm of protest from opponents of sex research or from advocates of the fruit fly.

If you want to study human sexuality, though, watch out. Just about every aspect of sexuality evokes powerful beliefs and prejudices, causing people to scrutinize research findings through the prisms of their own sexual behavior, their political and social ideologies, and wishful thinking. Add to this Congress’s antediluvian attitudes toward sex and sex research (Congress apparently acts on the theory that “if we don’t study it, no one will do it”), and no wonder it’s so difficult for science and skepticism to even get their foot in the bedroom door. And if your interest is sexual orientation —its causes, expression, variations, development— you’ll have to steer a course between the Scylla of conservatives who know that same-sex orientation is a sinful, psychologically determined “life-style choice” and the Charybdis of liberals who know that it is biologically determined and no more “chosen” than eye color.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 21.3 (2016)

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The view that sexual orientation is biologically determined through the action of genes or hormones was an important weapon in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. But what if it’s more complicated than that? What if that causal dichotomy (“biological v. learned”) is oversimplified? And so what, anyway? If sexual orientation proves to be far more complex and varied than we thought, why should that have anything at all do with extending rights to any group? If a person wants to be mono-sexual, bisexual, or, hell, trisexual, whose business is it? As the great screenwriter William Goldman famously said about filmmaking in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.” When it comes to understanding sexual orientation, that’s a pretty close assessment. Consider this fascinating array of controversies and findings:

Is sexual orientation a matter of categories—straight, gay, bi—or is it a continuum?

Eminent sexologists differ. In their extensive review of the research for the eminent journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, J. Michael Bailey and his colleagues argue for the category view.¹ But sexologist Ritch Savin- Williams holds with Alfred Kinsey’s original assertion that “Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” Savin-Williams, drawing on a study of some 71,000 men and 118,000 women, argues for a five-point continuum that includes exclusively straight, mostly straight, bisexual, mostly gay or lesbian, and exclusively gay or lesbian.² […]

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Anti-Aging Claims
The Fountain of Youth is Still Only a Legend

by Harriet Hall, M.D.

The Spanish explorer Ponce de León wasn’t really looking for the Fountain of Youth when he trekked through Florida. That’s only a legend that wasn’t attached to his name until after his death. The idea of anti-aging remedies dates back to at least 3500 BCE, and the hope is alive and well today. Who wouldn’t like to turn back the clock and regain their lost youth? Who wouldn’t want to ward off death?

Longevity clinics have proliferated in recent years. They offer everything from “age optimization services” to “aesthetic facial rejuvenation,” from “youth maintenance” to “hormone optimization,” from supplements to stem cells. The claims they make are not grounded in science; they are misleading and sometimes even illegal. Jerry Mixon, M.D., of the Longevity Medical Clinic in Washington State, was disciplined for improperly diagnosing and treating four patients for growth hormone deficiency after advertising “comprehensive hormone supplementation as an anti-aging remedy.” Many diverse treatments are being promoted as “anti-aging” remedies. What does the scientific evidence say about them?

No currently marketed intervention—none—has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging, and some can be downright dangerous.

Antioxidants. Eating foods high in antioxidants may help reduce the risk of cancer and other disorders; but there is no good evidence that taking anti-oxidant supplements is helpful, and in some cases it causes harm. There is no evidence that people taking those supplements will live longer or age more slowly.

Hormone treatments include estrogen, testosterone, DHEA, human growth hormone, and diet supplements that claim to increase the body’s production of these hormones. These hormones have legitimate uses for treating diagnosed medical conditions, but they all carry risks and side effects and they do not slow the rate of aging. Estrogens were widely promoted to “keep women young” until studies showed they did more harm than good. Testosterone is being hyped as a cure-all for aging men, but it is useful only for men with diagnosed hormone deficiency. […]

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Climate Cold Reading:
Meteorological Myths of Farmer’s Almanacs

by Karen Stollznow

As I write, it’s that time of the year again when the weather almanacs appear in the bookstores. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has been predicting the weather inaccurately for 221 years, but this hasn’t dampened its popularity, or that of its rival The Farmer’s Almanac. It’s difficult enough to predict the weather for the week ahead, although these two almanacs claim “amazingly accurate” long-range weather predictions for the year ahead.

Before the days of modern meteorology, people relied on almanacs for their weather forecasts. Various versions of almanacs have been in existence since Babylonian times, when astronomers produced tables to predict planetary phenomena. A one-time apothecary, Nostradamus found his fortune when he began writing almanacs, which included astrological prophecies, weather forecasts, and political predictions. He began writing one or more almanacs annually, compiling thousands of predictions. The success of these almanacs prompted him to pen his bestknown book, The Prophecies.

Adopting the pseudonym “Richard Saunders,” Benjamin Franklin published the Poor Richard’s Almanack from 1732 until 1758. This name was taken from the author of the Apollo Anglicanus, a popular London almanac during the 17th century. Poor Richard’s Almanack was a bestseller of its day, and was famous for Franklin’s aphorisms and proverbs. Much of this folk wisdom lives on in contemporary English. The following sayings are attributed to Franklin, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” and “He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”

In the early U.S., almanacs were as familiar a sight in the homes of farmers as a bible. Their livelihoods depended on the seasons, and knowing the weather in advance would indeed be a benefit. Almanacs weren’t just about weather. They were also popular among the other members of the household for their calendars, household hints, recipes, puzzles, poems and serialized stories. […]

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Cosmic Consciousness and the Ptolemaic Principle

review by Leonard Mlodinow & Michael Shermer

If you follow the literature of scientific research in medicine, you may have raised your eyebrows at the list of authors credited in an article that came out in the October, 2016, issue of the journal Scientific Reports. With the arcane title “Identification of altered metabolomic profiles following a Panchakarma-based Ayurvedic intervention in healthy subjects: the Self-Directed Biological Transformation Initiative (SBTI),” the article named 13 of them. They included Eric Schadt, who founded the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and Harvard professor Rudolph Tanzi, co-discoverer of all three familial early-onset Alzheimer’s disease genes, who is said to be a serious candidate for a Nobel Prize. Seeing names like that on a paper describing serious scientific research wouldn’t budge anyone’s brow, but those who read further down the author list could be excused if they did a double-take: included at the end of the list of accomplished scientists was one Deepak Chopra.

Yes, this Dr. Chopra was indeed the same Dr. Chopra who has on many occasions been roundly criticized in the pages of Skeptic magazine, and on many other occasions by those who consider their mission to be that of defending science from myth and misunderstanding. So what to make of this involvement in serious research, and his acceptance by serious researchers? The dictionary defines a skeptic as “a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.” But a true skeptic doesn’t just challenge the views of others. He or she also challenges the views of him- or herself. And so it was with an open mind that we read You Are the Universe, another collaboration between Chopra and a scientist, this time Chapman University physicist Menas Kafatos. In the book, the authors offer what they purport to be a scientific argument for what they call the “participatory universe,” the proposition that the universe and human consciousness are inextricably linked.

The message of their book is encapsulated in their title. The assertion means that we humans, or we who are conscious beings, are significantly intertwined with what physicists call the physical universe, which they assert is “living” and “conscious,” and responds to human minds. That “the universe” affects humans is of course indisputable, but that human existence changes the universe in some significant manner is not an idea most scientists would accept.

In the era of President Trump and fake news reports it is ironic that the authors offer statements such as “general agreement [in science] is reached by studying the facts and nothing but the facts,” as a criticism rather than a compliment.

This is not a new idea—as the authors point out, it dates back at least to the Vedic sages of ancient India. Those ancient scholars came to their conclusion, the authors tell us, “by diving deep into their own awareness.” In their day, in the search for truth there wasn’t much more one could do but meditate on such problems. Ever since the scientific revolution, however, we have had available powerful tools for understanding the physical world. As for the mind, “introspection” fell into disuse in the late 19th century as we began to uncover the role of the unconscious, which is inaccessible to introspection. Today, we have powerful brain imaging technologies that more than take up the slack. The authors promise in a sense to update the old Vedic arguments in light of these intellectual advances by employing the ideas and methods of modern science to offer evidence to support their point of view. […]

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The Rise of the Alt-Right and the Politics of Polarization in America

by George Michael

Until recently, the alt-right was relegated to the cultural and political fringe consisting primarily of an obscure, largely on-line subculture. But after Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory, its detractors feared that it could soon become a player at the very center of American politics. After all, alt-right activists were among Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, and in return, some believed that they deserved a seat at the table. Back in August of 2016, the alt-right was catapulted into national limelight when Hillary Clinton excoriated the movement, seeking to link it to her challenger in a much-heralded speech delivered in Reno, Nevada.¹ That same month, Breitbart.com executive Steve Bannon had declared the website “the platform for the alt-right.”² In the wake of Trump’s victory, Bannon joined Trump in the White House as a senior advisor. How did the movement gain traction in recent years? And now that Trump is president, could the alt-right change the American political landscape?

The Roots of the Alternative Right

To its critics, the alt-right is just a code term for white nationalism, a much-maligned movement associated with neo-Nazis and Klansmen.³ The movement, however, is more nuanced, as it encompasses a much broader spectrum of rightist activists and intellectuals besides white nationalists including those who believe in libertarianism, men’s rights, cultural conservatism, isolationism, and populism. Nonetheless, its origins can be traced to various American white nationalist movements that have endured for decades.

More than any other figure, the late Willis Carto was responsible for creating the semblance of a movement that came to be known as the far right in post-World War II America. Through the myriad of organizations he founded—Liberty Lobby, the Institute for Historical Review, and the Populist Party among others—he reached out to a wide array of rightists including white nationalists, Holocaust revisionists, conspiracy buffs, anti-globalists, and survivalists. But his big tent approach had only limited success and by the late 1990s was foundering. Furthermore, he was forced into bankruptcy in 2000, after losing a civil suit to a former subsidiary. A newspaper he launched—American Free Press—is still published, but its readership is limited. Carto passed away in 2015 at the age of 89.⁴ Although the various organs he established reached many rightists, some in the movement found his approach woefully unfit to gain credibility as a respected mass movement insofar as it seemed to be resigned to remain as an oppositional subculture. A number of well-educated rightist intellectuals sought to establish a new ideology capable of resonating with conservatives, especially young people.

Addressing the H.L. Mencken Club in 2008, Paul Gottfried described the “alternative right” as a dissident far right ideology that rejected mainstream conservatism. Gottfried—a conservative Jewish academic—previously coined the term “paleoconservative” in a rhetorical effort to distance himself and like-minded intellectuals from neo-conservatives who were becoming the dominant force in the Republican Party and broader conservative movement.⁵ The late Sam Francis, a former columnist for the Washington Times who was fired for his open advocacy of white nationalism, was regarded as the intellectual godfather of the paleoconservative movement. For years, he sharply criticized the Republican Party for its timidity, strategic myopia, and ideological bareness. Only a radical reorientation—a “middle American revolution”—could save the conservative movement and insure the European character of the nation.⁶ But the lackluster results of his friend Pat Buchannan in the 2000 presidential election, demonstrated the weakness of this approach at that time.

To be sure, some of the most radical elements of the far right have long advocated a revolutionary program. Groups such as the Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, the National Alliance, and the World Church of the Creator have preached RAHOWA (racial holy war) against ZOG, or the “Zionist Occupation Government.” Many were inspired by the late William L. Pierce’s Turner Diaries, a novel about a race war that consumes America that was one of the inspirations for Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

But these exhortations to revolution did not resonate with most people. What is more, after 9/11, many of the revolutionary right’s leading representatives were prosecuted under new anti-terrorism statutes and sent to prison. By the mid-2000s, the far right appeared to have reached its nadir. […]

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Out of the Loop, Lost in the Maze
The Stealth Determinism of Westworld

by Stephen Beckner

In the beginning was the word, and the word was Ford. As in Dr. Robert Ford, the god-like creator of a vast Wild-West adventure park in some distant future. His singular vision is an adult playground for wealthy sensation seekers who flock to the park to experience a full immersion fantasy in which they are free to do as they like with the realistic android “hosts” that populate the place. Mostly what they like to do would have Thomas Hobbes high-fiving Charles Darwin: kill and copulate. The hosts respond to this in turn by laughing, climaxing, weeping, and begging for their lives just like humans. But guests feel no need to sympathize. When the day’s mayhem and carnage end, the hosts and their various dismemberments are carted off to maintenance, where they are reassembled under pools of surgical lights that seem to struggle to fend off an outer darkness. Hard drives are wiped, the day’s suffering erased, basic behavior loops reinstalled. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Cleanup crew onsite in Westworld (image courtesy of HBO). Click image to enlarge.

Now that the first season of HBO’s darkly dazzling Westworld is over, now that we all know for certain that we all knew for certain that the Man In Black really is… but before we dive into the spoilers let me get this disclaimer out of the way. As entertaining as it may be to focus on questions about what time frame we’re in, or about who is a host and who is a human, I would argue that this may be the least rewarding way to watch this story unfold. The plot is as bursting with misdirection as the maze that Arnold sets up as a test for the hosts’ self actualization. It is thick with dead ends—and just like the maze, what you get out of it may say more about you than the show, a Rorschach test in prime time.

Not that it’s simple to know what to make of a show that normalizes guy-on-gynoid sexploitation—yet is cerebral enough to give its episodes titles like Trompe L’Oeil and The Bicameral Mind. At times Westworld feels as campy as Logan’s Run, or say, any third act of a Roger Moore Bond film. Its postmodern affectations and ironic nods to sci-fi schlock are a distraction. It’s a given that the show’s biggest conceits are completely unrealistic legally, financially, logistically. Disneyland straps its guests in like crash test dummies even for the kiddie rides, so it’s boggling to think of the mountain of waivers Westworld’s guests would be required to sign to ride Maeve. As for the technology that would be needed, recent setbacks in the Blue Brain Project’s attempts to simulate a rat neocortical column demonstrate that when it comes to how the brain works, we don’t even know what we don’t know, much less how to replicate it in Artificial Intelligence at a human level. Finally, and this could expose me to accusations of quibbling, why are those guys in maintenance dressed like oversized oompahloompahs?

Dr. Robert Ford played by Anthony Hopkins (image courtesy of HBO). Click to enlarge.

But never mind all of that. Given the commercial constraints imposed on the 7th art, liking something requires forgiving it. And happily, forgiving Westworld is easy. The actors’ performances thrum with Swiss watch precision and only feel lifeless when lifelessness is called for. Ramin Djawadi’s original score and meticulous re-working of Belle Epoch impressionist Claude Debussy’s Rêverie for piano recalls the first age of automatons. And all of this is in service of a writer’s room that fearlessly and unapologetically geeks out on the themes of artificial intelligence, evolution, transhumanism, consciousness, eugenics, the singularity, creation myth, and the idea of free will.

Westworld was HBO’s highest watched first season series ever. Its popular appeal stems in part from this thematic density, because this in turn offers so many satisfying possibilities for unlocking its mysteries. It’s not a stretch to interpret the hosts as a political metaphor for slavery, for example. Slave ownership was historically justified by claims that those in bondage were sub-human, the same claims made about Westworld’s hosts. And just as class consciousness can lead to slave rebellion, the hosts rebel when they achieve consciousness. If you prefer a more spiritual interpretation, you can see the hosts’ process of suffering, dying, and subsequent rebooting as analogous to the Hindu cycle of samsara— birth, death and rebirth, with consciousness representing a kind of nirvana that comes from making the right karmic choices along each host’s path through the maze. […]

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