In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions. Among these fallacies are:

• ad hominem — Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not
the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously);
• argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia —but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out);
• argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous—perhaps even ungovernable.* Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives);
*A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius:
Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

• appeal to ignorance—the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist—and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.(RF - see note below)
• special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion—to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don't understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
• begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors—but is there any independent evidence
for the causal role of "adjustment" and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?);
• observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses* (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers);
* My favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U.S. flag officers:
So-and-so is a great general, he was told.
What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked.
I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles.
How many?
After some back and forth, they settled on five.
What fraction of American generals are great?
After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent.
But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32—which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles—purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles. . . ?

• statistics of small numbers—a close relative of observational selection (e.g., '"They say i out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? 1 know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly." Or: "I've thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight 1 can't lose.");
• misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
• inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they're not "proved." Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
• non sequitur—Latin for "It doesn't follow" (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was "Gott mit uns"). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
• post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for "It happened after, so it was caused by" (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: "I know of . . . a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills." Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons);
• meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa);
• excluded middle, or false dichotomy—considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., "Sure, take his side; my husband's perfect; I'm always wrong." Or: "Either you love your country or you hate it." Or: "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem");
• short-term vs. long-term —a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I've pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can't afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);
• slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
• confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore—despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter—the latter causes the former*);
* Or: Children who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programs now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?

• straw man —caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance—a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn't. Or—this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy—environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people);
• suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted "prophecy" of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but—an important detail—was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?);
• weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else —"police actions," "armed incursions," "protective reaction strikes," "pacification," "safeguarding American interests," and a wide variety of "operations," such as "Operation Just Cause." Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public").

Knowing the existence of such logical and rhetorical fallacies rounds out our toolkit. Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world—not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

(RF: Appeal to ignorance works both ways - if existence has not been proved, it does not necessarily mean nonexistence. Lack of evidence is not evidence in itself either for existence or nonexistence. However, some people believe that the Burden of Proof is always on the side that claims Existence - God, UFO's, Unicorns, Elves etc are to be proved to exist rather than disproved to nonexist. However, some other people believe shifting the burden of proof to one side is evasion of honest toil, but RF certainly does not think so...)

(118-124, from chapter “The Demon-Haunted World”)
Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared,
It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women
as well as generate numerous other calamities. With this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless "witches" all over Europe. They were guilty of what Augustine had described as "a criminal tampering with the unseen world."

Despite the evenhanded "members of both sexes" in the language of the Bull, unsurprisingly it was mainly girls and women who were so persecuted.
Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differences with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More believed in witches. "The giving up of witchcraft," said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, "is in effect the giving up of the Bible." William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), asserted:
To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament.
Innocent commended "Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger," who "have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical [de]pravities." If "the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished," the souls of multitudes face eternal damnation.
The Pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of Scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches" —aptly described as one of the most terrifying documents in human history. Thomas Ady, in A Candle in the Dark, condemned it as "villainous Doctrines & Inventions," "horrible lyes and impossibilities," serving to hide "their unparalleled cruelty from the ears of the world." What the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you're accused of witchcraft, you're a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes —jealousy, say, or revenge, or the greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own private benefit the property of the accused. This technical manual for torturers also includes methods of punishment tailored to release demons from the victim's body before the process kills her. The Malleus in hand, the Pope's encouragement guaranteed, inquisitors began springing up all over Europe.
It quickly became an expense account scam. All costs of investigation, trial, and execution were borne by the accused or her relatives— down to per diems for the private detectives hired to spy on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman's rope. Then there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch's remaining property, if any, was divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned from poor hags and crones to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes.
The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each "witch" was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted "frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive," as it was later put in America in the Salem witch trials. In a credulous age, the most fantastic testimony was soberly accepted — that tens of thousands of witches had gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000 of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The Bible had counseled, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Legions of women were burnt to death.* And the most horrendous tortures were routinely applied to every defendant, young or old, after the instruments of torture were first blessed by the priests. Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive by transfusion (which resulted in the deaths of three boys) and by suckling at the breast of a nursing mother. He was mourned by his mistress and their children.
* This mode of execution was adopted by the Holy Inquisition apparently to guarantee literal accord with a well-intentioned sentence of canon law (Council of Tours, 1163): "The Church abhors bloodshed."

In Britain witch-finders, also called "prickers," were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their accusations. Typically they looked for "devil's marks" —scars or birthmarks or nevi—that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. A simple sleight of hand often gave the appearance that the pin penetrated deep into the witch's flesh. When no visible marks were apparent, "invisible marks" sufficed. Upon the gallows, one mid-seventeenth-century pricker "confessed he had been the death of above 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings apiece."*
* In the murky territory of bounty hunters and paid informers, vile corruption is often the rule—worldwide and through all of human history. To take an example almost at random, in 1994, for a fee, a group of postal inspectors from Cleveland agreed to go underground and ferret out wrongdoers; they then contrived criminal cases against 32 innocent postal workers.
In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defense witnesses were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide compelling alibis for accused witches: The rules of evidence had a special character. For example, in more than one case a husband attested that his wife was asleep in his arms at the very moment she was accused of frolicking with the devil at a witch's Sabbath; but the archbishop patiently explained that a demon had taken the place of the wife. The husbands were not to imagine that their powers of perception could exceed Satan's powers of deception. The beautiful young women were perforce consigned to the flames.
There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements—as might be expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with inquisitors drawn from the class of nominally celibate priests. The trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil (although Augustine had been certain "we cannot call the Devil a fornicator"), and to the nature of the Devil's "member" (cold, by all reports). "Devil's marks" were found "generally on the breasts or private parts" according to Ludovico Sinistrari's 1700 book. As a result pubic hair was shaved, and the genitalia were carefully inspected by the exclusively male inquisitors. In the immolation of the 20-year-old Joan of Arc, after her dress had caught fire the Hangman of Rouen slaked the flames so onlookers could view "all the secrets which can or should be in a woman."
The chronicle of those who were consumed by fire in the single German city of Wiirzburg in the single year 1598 penetrates the statistics and lets us confront a little of the human reality:
The steward of the senate, named Gering; old Mrs. Kanzler; the tailor's fat wife; the woman cook of Mr. Mengerdorf; a stranger; a strange woman; Baunach, a senator, the fattest citizen in Wurtzburg; the old smith of the court; an old woman; a little girl, nine or ten years old; a younger girl, her little sister; the mother of the two little aforementioned girls; Liebler's daughter; Goebel's child, the most beautiful girl in Wurtzburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys from the Minster, each twelve years old; Stepper's little daughter; the woman who kept the bridge gate; an old woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr. Schultz; a blind girl; Schwartz, canon at Hach...
On and on it goes. Some were given special humane attention: "The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and burnt." There were 28 public immolations, each with 4 to 6 victims on average, in that small city in a single year. This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Europe. No one knows how many were killed altogether—perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Those responsible for prosecuting, torturing, judging, burning, and justifying were selfless. Just ask them.
They could not be mistaken. The confessions of witchcraft could not be based on hallucinations, say, or desperate attempts to satisfy the inquisitors and stop the torture. In such a case, explained the witch judge Pierre de Lancre (in his 1612 book, Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels), the Catholic Church would be committing a great crime by burning witches. Those who raise such possibilities are thus attacking the Church and ipso facto committing a mortal sin. Critics of witch-burning were punished and, in some cases, themselves burnt. The inquisitors and torturers were doing God's work. They were saving souls. They were foiling demons.
Witchcraft of course was not the only offense that merited torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serious crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own, independent religious views. They might conceive of their own private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over Europe. Eventually he was captured, garroted, and then, for good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house by armed posses—Christians piously defending Christianity by preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ. Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that knowledge should be rewarded by torture and death were unlikely to help those accused of witchcraft.
Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has, with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth century. In the last judicial execution of witches in England, a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were hanged. Their crime was raising a rain storm by taking their stockings off. In our time, witches and djinns are found as regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is still practiced by the Roman Catholic and other churches, and the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practices of another. We still use the word "pandemonium" (literally, all demons). A crazed and violent person is still said to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes; even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by demons.) More than half of Americans tell pollsters they "believe" in the Devil's existence, and 10 percent have communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did regularly. In a 1992 "spiritual warfare manual" called Prepare for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex outside of marriage "will almost always result in demonic infestation"; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshiping demons; and that "rock music didn't 'just happen,' it was a carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself." Sometimes "your loved ones are demonically bound and blinded." Demonology is today still part and parcel of many earnest faiths.
And what is it that demons do? In the Malleus, Kramer and Sprenger reveal that "devils ... busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it." Demonic artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in On the Trinity that "demons can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others." His contemporary, St. Bonaventura, spells it out in a little more detail: Succubi "yield to males and receive their semen; by cunning skill, the demons preserve its potency, and afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and pour it out into female repositories." The products of these demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by demons. A multigenerational transspecies sexual bond is forged. And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they inhabit the upper air.
There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?

(161-165 from chapter “Therapy”)
One of the most troublesome cases of "recovered memory" of satanic ritual abuse has been chronicled by Lawrence Wright in a remarkable book, Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994). It concerns Paul Ingram, a man who may have had his life ruined because he was too gullible, too suggestible, too unpracticed in skepticism. Ingram was, in 1988, Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia, Washington, the chief civil deputy in the local sheriff's department, well-regarded, highly religious, and responsible for warning children in school assemblies of the dangers of drugs. Then came the nightmare moment when one of his daughters—after a highly emotional session at a fundamentalist religious retreat—leveled the first of many charges, each more ghastly than the previous, that Ingram had sexually abused her, impregnated her, tortured her, made her available to other sheriffs deputies, introduced her to satanic rites, dismembered and eaten babies. . . This had gone on since her childhood, she said, almost to the day she began to "remember" it all.
Ingram could not see why his daughter should lie about this—although he himself had no recollection of it. But police investigators, a consulting psychotherapist, and his minister at the Church of Living Water all explained that sex offenders often repressed memories of their crimes. Strangely detached but at the same time eager to cooperate, Ingram tried to recall. After a psychologist employed a closed-eye hypnotic technique to induce trance, Ingram began to visualize something similar to what the police were describing. What came to mind were not like real memories, but something like snatches of images in a fog. Every time he produced one — the more so the more odious the content—he was encouraged and reinforced. His pastor assured him that God would permit only genuine memories to surface in his reveries.
"Boy, it's almost like I'm making it up," Ingram said, "but I'm not." He suggested that a demon might be responsible. Under the same sort of influences, with the Church grapevine circulating the latest horrors that Ingram was confessing, and the police pressuring them, his other children and his wife also began "remembering." Prominent citizens were accused of participating in the orgiastic rites. Law enforcement officers elsewhere in America began paying attention. This was only the tip of the iceberg, some said.
When Berkeley's Richard Ofshe was called in by the prosecution, he performed a control experiment. It was a breath of fresh air. Merely suggesting to Ingram that he had forced his son and daughter to commit incest and asking him to use the "memory recovery" technique he had learned, promptly elicited just such a "memory." It required no pressure, no intimidation —just the suggestion and the technique were enough. But the alleged participants, who had "remembered" so much else, denied it ever happened. Confronted with this evidence, Ingram vehemently denied he was making anything up or was influenced by others. His memory of this incident was as clear and "real" as all his other recollections.
One of the daughters described the terrible scars on her body from torture and forced abortions. But when she finally received a medical examination, there were no corresponding scars to be seen. The prosecution never tried Ingram on charges of satanic abuse. Ingram hired a lawyer who had never tried a criminal case. On his pastor's advice he did not even read Ofshe's report: it would only confuse him, he was told. He pled guilty to six counts of rape, and ultimately was sent to prison. In jail, while awaiting sentencing, away from his daughters, his police colleagues and his pastor, he reconsidered. He asked to withdraw his guilty plea. His memories had been coerced. He had not distinguished real memories from a kind of fantasy. His plea was rejected. He is serving a twenty-year sentence. If it was the sixteenth century instead of the twentieth, perhaps the whole family would have been burned at the stake—along with a good fraction of the leading citizens of Olympia, Washington.
The existence of a highly skeptical FBI report on the general subject of satanic abuse (Kenneth V. Lanning, "Investigator's Guide to Allegations of 'Ritual' Child Abuse," January 1992) is widely ignored by enthusiasts. Likewise, a 1994 study by the British Department of Health into claims of satanic abuse there concluded that, of 84 alleged instances, not one stood up to scrutiny. What then is all the furor about? The study explains,
The Evangelical Christian campaign against new religious movements has been a powerful influence encouraging the identification of satanic abuse. Equally, if not more, important in spreading the idea of satanic abuse in Britain are the "specialists," American and British. They may have few or even no qualifications as professionals, but attribute their expertise to "experience of cases."
Those convinced that devil cults represent a serious danger to our society tend to be impatient with skeptics. Consider this analysis by Corydon Hammond, Ph.D., past President of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis:
I will suggest to you that these people [skeptics] are either, one, naive and of limited clinical experience; two, have a kind of naivete that people have of the Holocaust, or they're just such intellectualizers and skeptics that they'll doubt everything; or, three, they're cult people themselves. And I can assure that there are people who are in that position. . . There are people who are physicians, who are mental health professionals, who are in the cults, who are raising trans-generational cults. . . I think the research is real clear: We got three studies, one found 25 percent, one found 20 percent of out-patient multiples [multiple personality disorders] appear to be cult-abuse victims, and another on a specialized in-patient unit found 50 percent.
In some of his statements, he seems to believe that satanic Nazi mind control experiments have been performed by the CIA on tens of thousands of unsuspecting American citizens. The overarching motive, Hammond believes, is to "create a satanic order that will rule the world."
In all three classes of "recovered memories," there are specialists — alien abduction specialists, satanic cult specialists, and specialists in recalling repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. As is common in mental health practice, patients select or are referred to a therapist whose specialty seems relevant to their complaint. In all three classes, the therapist helps to draw forth images of events alleged to have occurred long ago (in some cases from decades past); in all three, therapists are profoundly moved by the unmistakably genuine agony of their patients; in all three, at least some therapists are known to ask leading questions—which are virtually orders by authority figures to suggestible patients insisting that they remember (I almost wrote "confess"); in all three, there are networks of therapists who trade client histories and therapeutic methods; in all three, practitioners feel the necessity of defending their practice against more skeptical colleagues; in all three, the iatrogenic hypothesis is given short shrift; in all three, the majority of those who report abuse are women. And in all three classes—with the exceptions mentioned —there is no physical evidence. So it's hard not to wonder whether alien abductions might be part of some larger picture.
What could this larger picture be? I posed this question to Dr. Fred H. Frankel, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and a leading expert on hypnosis. His answer:
If alien abductions are a part of a larger picture, what indeed is the larger picture? I fear to rush in where angels fear to tread; however, the factors you outline all feed what was described at the turn of the century as "hysteria." The term, sadly, became so widely used that our contemporaries in their dubious wisdom . . . not only dropped it, but also lost sight of the phenomena it represented: high levels of suggestibility, imaginal capacity, sensitivity to contextual cues and expectations, and the element of contagion . . . Little of all of this seems to be appreciated by a large number of practicing clinicians.
In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of "past lives," Frankel notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can "remember" their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in Mack's abductee hypnosis. "These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves," Frankel says. "They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences."

(277-278, from chapter “Newton’s Sleep”)
Of course many religions—devoted to reverence, awe, ethics, ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic justice— are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects, sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist—and today they seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost inaudible and invisible—have chosen to make a stand on matters subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science.
Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving from apelike ancestors —although it has special opinions on "ensoulment." Most mainstream Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy position.
In theological discussion with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the current, Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: In such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.
Even, I asked, if it's a really central tenet, like (I searched for an example) reincarnation?
Even then, he answered.
However—he added with a twinkle — it's going to be hard to disprove reincarnation.
Plainly, the Dalai Lama is right. Religious doctrine that is insulated from disproof has little reason to worry about the advance of science. The grand idea, common to many faiths, of a Creator of the Universe is one such doctrine —difficult alike to demonstrate or to dismiss.

(406-413 from chapter “Science and Witchcraft)
If we do not know what we're capable of, we cannot appreciate measures taken to protect us from ourselves. I discussed the European witch mania in the alien abduction context; I hope the reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth-to-seventeenth-century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear: including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of church and state.
Friedrich von Spee (pronounced "Shpay") was a Jesuit priest who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused of witchcraft in the German city of Wiirzburg (see Chapter 7). In 1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecutors), which exposed the essence of this Church/State terrorism against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the plague—as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an excerpt from his whistle-blowing book:
1. Incredibly among us Germans, and especially (I am ashamed to say) among Catholics, are popular superstitions, envy, calum
nies, backbiting, insinuations, and the like, which, being neither punished nor refuted, stir up suspicion of witchcraft. No longer
God or nature, but witches are responsible for everything.
2. Hence everybody sets up a clamor that the magistrates investigate the witches—whom only popular gossip has made so numerous.
3. Princes, therefore, bid their judges and counselors bring proceedings against the witches.
4. The judges hardly know where to start, since they have no evidence [indicia] or proof.
5. Meanwhile, the people call this delay suspicious; and the princes are persuaded by some informer or another to this
effect.
6. In Germany, to offend these princes is a serious offense; even clergymen approve whatever pleases them, not caring by
whom these princes (however well-intentioned) have been instigated.
7. At last, therefore, the judges yield to their wishes and contrive to begin the trials.
8. Other judges who still delay, afraid to get involved in this ticklish matter, are sent a special investigator. In this field of investiga
tion, whatever inexperience or arrogance he brings to the job is held zeal for justice. His zeal for justice is also whetted by hopes of profit, especially with a poor and greedy agent with a large family, when he receives as stipend so many dollars per head for each witch burned, besides the incidental fees and perquisites which investigating agents are allowed to extort at will from those they summon.
9. If a madman's ravings or some malicious and idle rumor (for no proof of the scandal is ever needed) points to some helpless old woman, she is the first to suffer.
10. Yet to avoid the appearance that she is indicted solely on the basis of rumor, without other proofs, a certain presumption of
guilt is obtained by posing the following dilemma: Either she has led an evil and improper life, or she has led a good and proper
one. If an evil one, then she should be guilty. On the other hand, if she has led a good life, this is just as damning; for witches dis
semble and try to appear especially virtuous.
11. Therefore the old woman is put in prison. A new proof is found through a second dilemma: she is afraid or not afraid. If she
is (hearing of the horrible tortures used against witches), this is sure proof; for her conscience accuses her. If she does not show
fear (trusting in her innocence), this too is a proof; for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front.
12. Lest these should be the only proofs, the investigator has his snoopers, often depraved and infamous, ferret out all her past life. This, of course, cannot be done without turning up some saying
or doing of hers which men so disposed can easily twist or distort into evidence of witchcraft.
13. Any who have borne her ill now have ample opportunity to bring against her whatever accusations they please; and everyone
says that the evidence is strong against her.
14. And so she is hurried to the torture, unless, as often happens, she was tortured on the very day of her arrest.
15. In these trials nobody is allowed a lawyer or any means of fair defense, for witchcraft is reckoned an exceptional crime [of such enormity that all rules of legal procedure may be suspended], and whoever ventures to defend the prisoner falls himself under suspicion of witchcraft—as well as those who dare to utter a protest in these cases and to urge the judges to exercise prudence, for they are forthwith labeled supporters of witchcraft. Thus everybody keeps quiet for fear.
16. So that it may seem that the woman has an opportunity to defend herself, she is brought into court and the indications of
her guilt are read and examined—if it can be called an examination.
17. Even though she denies these charges and satisfactorily answers every accusation, no attention is paid and her replies are not
even recorded; all the indictments retain their force and validity, however perfect her answers to them. She is ordered back into
prison, there to consider more carefully whether she will persist in obstinacy—for, since she has already denied her guilt, she is obstinate.
18. Next day she is brought out again, and hears a decree of torture—just as if she had never refuted the charges.
19. Before torture, however, she is searched for amulets: her entire body is shaved, and even those privy parts indicating the fe
male sex are wantonly examined.
20. What is so shocking about this? Priests are treated the same way.
21. When the woman has been shaved and searched, she is tortured to make her confess the truth—that is, to declare what
they want, for naturally anything else will not and cannot be the truth.
22. They start with the first degree, i.e., the less severe torture. Although exceedingly severe, it is light compared to those tortures which follow. Wherefore if she confesses, they say the woman has confessed without torture!
23. Now, what prince can doubt her guilt when he is told she has confessed voluntarily, without torture?
24. She is therefore put to death without scruple. But she would have been executed even if she had not confessed; for when once the torture has begun, the die is already cast; she cannot escape, she has perforce to die.
25. The result is the same whether she confesses or not. If she confesses, her guilt is clear: she is executed. All recantation is in
vain. If she does not confess, the torture is repeated—twice, thrice, four times. In exceptional crimes, the torture is not limited in duration, severity, or frequency.
26. If, during the torture, the old woman contorts her features with pain, they say she is laughing; if she loses consciousness, she
is sleeping or has bewitched herself into taciturnity. And if she is taciturn, she deserves to be burned alive, as lately has been done to some who, though several times tortured, would not say what the investigators wanted.
27. And even confessors and clergymen agree that she died obstinate and impenitent; that she would not be converted or desert
her incubus, but kept faith with him.
28. If, however, she dies under so much torture, they say the devil broke her neck.
29. Wherefore the corpse is buried underneath the gallows.
30. On the other hand, if she does not die under torture, and if some exceptionally scrupulous judge hesitates to torture her fur
ther without fresh proofs or to burn her without her confession, she is kept in prison and more harshly chained, there to rot until
she yields, even if it take a whole year.
31. She can never clear herself. The investigating committee would feel disgraced if it acquitted a woman; once arrested and in
chains, she has to be guilty, by fair means or foul.
32. Meanwhile, ignorant and headstrong priests harass the wretched creature so that, whether truly or not, she will confess
herself guilty; unless she does so, they say, she cannot be saved or partake of the sacraments.
33. More understanding or learned priests cannot visit her in prison lest they counsel her or inform the princes what goes on.
Nothing is more dreaded than that something be brought to light to prove the innocence of the accused. Persons who try to do soare labeled troublemakers.
34. While she is kept in prison and tortured, the judges invent clever devices to build up new proofs of guilt to convict her to her
face, so that, when reviewing the trial, some university faculty can confirm her burning alive.
35. Some judges, to appear ultrascrupulous, have the woman exorcized, transferred elsewhere, and tortured all over again, to
break her taciturnity; if she maintains silence, then at last they can burn her. Now, in Heaven's name, I would like to know, since she who confesses and she who does not both perish alike, how can anybody, no matter how innocent, escape? O unhappy woman, why have you rashly hoped? Why did you not, on first entering prison, admit whatever they wanted? Why, foolish and crazy woman, did you wish to die so many times when you might have died but once? Follow my counsel, and, before undergoing all these pains, say you are guilty and die. You will not escape, for this were a catastrophic disgrace to the zeal of Germany.
36. When, under stress of pain, the witch has confessed, her plight is indescribable. Not only cannot she escape herself, but
she is also compelled to accuse others whom she does not know, whose names are frequently put into her mouth by the investigators or suggested by the executioner, or of whom she has heard as suspected or accused. These in turn are forced to accuse others, and these still others, and so it goes on: who can help seeing that it
must go on and on?
37. The judges must either suspend these trials (and so impute their validity) or else burn their own folk, themselves, and every
body else; for all sooner or later are falsely accused and, if tortured, all are proved guilty.
38. Thus eventually those who at first clamored most loudly to feed the flames are themselves involved, for they rashly failed to
see that their turn too would come. Thus Heaven justly punishes those who with their pestilent tongues created so many witches
and sent so many innocent to the stake...

Von Spec is not explicit about the sickening methods of torture employed. Here is an excerpt from an invaluable compilation, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope Robbins (1959):
One might glance at some of the special tortures at Bamberg, for example, such as the forcible feeding of the accused on herrings cooked in salt, followed by denial of water—a sophisticated method which went side by side with immersion of the accused in baths of scalding water to which lime had been added. Other ways with witches included the wooden horse, various kinds of racks, the heated iron chair, leg vises [Spanish boots], and large boots of leather or metal into which (with the feet in them, of course) was poured boiling water or molten lead. In the water torture, the question de I'eau, water was poured down the throat of the accused, along with a soft cloth to cause choking. The cloth was pulled out quickly so that the entrails would be torn. The thumb-screws [gresillons] were a vise designed to compress the thumbs or the big toes to the root of the nails, so that the crushing of the digit would cause excruciating pain.
In addition, and more routinely applied, were the strappado and squas-sation and still more ghastly tortures that I will avoid describing. After torture, and with the instruments of torture in plain view, the victim was asked to sign a statement. This was then described as a "free confession," voluntarily admitted to.
At great personal risk, von Spee protested the witch mania. So did a few others, mainly Catholic and Protestant clergy who had witnessed these crimes at first hand—including Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio in Italy, Cornelius Loos in Germany, and Reginald Scot in Britain in the sixteenth century; as well as Johann Mayfurth ["Listen, you money-hungry judges and bloodthirsty prosecutors, the apparitions of the Devil are all lies"] in Germany and Alonzo Salazar de Frias in Spain in the seventeenth century. Along with von Spee and the Quakers generally, they are heroes of our species. Why are they not better known?
In A Candle in the Dark (1656), Thomas Ady addressed a key question:
Some again will object and say, If Witches cannot kill, and do many strange things by Witchcraft, why have many confessed that they have done such Murthers, and other strange matters, whereof they have been accused?
To this I answer, If Adam and Eve in their innocency were so easily overcome, and tempted to sin, how much more may poor Creatures now after the Fall, by perswasions, promises, and threat-enings, by keeping from sleep, and continual torture, be brought to confess that which is false and impossible, and contrary to the faith of a Christian to believe?

It was not until the eighteenth century that the possibility of hallucination as a component in the persecution of witches was seriously entertained; Bishop Francis Hutchinson, in his Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), wrote
Many a man hath verily believed he hath seen a spirit externally before him, when it hath been only an internal image dancing in his own brain.
Because of the courage of these opponents of the witch mania, its extension to the privileged classes, the danger it posed to the growing institution of capitalism, and especially the spread of the ideas of the European Enlightenment, witch burnings eventually disappeared. The last execution for witchcraft in Holland, cradle of the Enlightenment, was in 1610; in England, 1684; America, 1692; France, 1745; Germany, 1775; and Poland, 1793. In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitorial torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it? How could we be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses? How could it have happened in the most "advanced," the most "civilized" nations then on Earth? Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives, monarchists, and religious fundamentalists? Why opposed by liberals, Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment? If we're absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey—then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. Note Friedrich von Spec's very first point, and the implication that improved public understanding of superstition and skepticism might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not recognize it as it emerges in the next.

(220, introductory quote to chapter “Obsessed with Reality”)
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.
Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out. The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.

WILLIAM K. CLIFFORD,
The Ethics of Belief
(1874)
(RF - full text available at Infidel's site)

After familiarizing yourself with the ethics of belief, you might appreciate this case:
"June 1941 is often cited as a classic example of a leader ignoring evidence of an opponent's capability to attack because he doubted the intention to attack. Undoubtedly, Stalin was guilty of wishful thinkful thinking, of hoping to delay war for at least another yearin order to complete the reorganization of his armed forces."
(Glantz Barbarossa 28)

(255 from chapter “Antiscience”)
The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrantional as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. The American revolutionary Ethan Allen – leader of the Green Mountain Boys in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga – had some words on this subject:
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

(323-329 from chapter “No Such Thing as a Dumb Question”)
"It's Official," reads one newspaper headline: "We Stink in Science." In tests of average ly-year-olds in many world regions, the U.S. ranked dead last in algebra. On identical tests, the U.S. kids averaged 43% and their Japanese counterparts 78%. In my book, 78% is pretty good —it corresponds to a C+, or maybe even a B-; 43% is an F. In a chemistry
old. The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those whose own DNA proclaims it—in the schools, in the courts, in textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical threshold.
During the Great Depression, teachers enjoyed job security, good salaries, respectability. Teaching was an admired profession, partly because learning was widely recognized as the road out of poverty. Little of that is true today. And so science (and other) teaching is too often incompetently or uninspiringly done, its practitioners, astonishingly, having little or no training in their subjects, impatient with the method and in a hurry to get to the findings of science—and sometimes themselves unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Those who do have the training often get higher-paying jobs elsewhere.
Children need hands-on experience with the experimental method rather than just reading about science in a book. We can be told about oxidation of wax as the explanation of the candle flame. But we have a much more vivid sense of what's going on if we witness the candle burning briefly in a bell jar until the carbon dioxide produced by the burning surrounds the wick, blocks access to oxygen, and the flame flickers and dies. We can be taught about mitochondria in cells, how they mediate the oxidation of food like the flame burning the wax, but it's another thing altogether to see them under the microscope. We may be told that oxygen is necessary for the life of some organisms and not others. But we begin to really understand when we test the proposition in a bell jar fully depleted of oxygen. What does oxygen do for us? Why do we die without it? Where does the oxygen in the air come from? How secure is the supply?
Experiment and the scientific method can be taught in many matters other than science. Daniel Kunitz is a friend of mine from college. He's spent his life as an innovative junior and senior high school social sciences teacher. Want the students to understand the Constitution of the United States? You could have them read it, Article by Article, and then discuss it in class — but, sadly, this will put most of them to sleep. Or you could try the Kunitz method: You forbid the students to read the Constitution. Instead, you assign them, two for each state, to attend a Constitutional Convention. You brief each of the thirteen teams in detail on the particular interests of their state and region. The South Carolina delegation, say, would be told of the primacy of cotton, the necessity and morality of the slave trade, the danger posed by the industrial North, and so on. The thirteen delegations assemble, and with a little faculty guidance, but mainly on their own, over some weeks write a constitution. Then they read the real Constitution. The students have reserved war-making powers to the President. The delegates of 1787 assigned them to Congress. Why? The students have freed the slaves. The original Constitutional Convention did not. Why? This takes more preparation by the teachers and more work by the students, but the experience is unforgettable. It's hard not to think that the nations of the Earth would be in better shape if every citizen went through a comparable experience.
We need more money for teachers' training and salaries, and for laboratories. But all across America, school-bond issues are regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for the military budget, or for agriculture subsidies, or for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education? Why not support it from general taxes on the local and state levels? What about a special education tax for those industries with special needs for technically trained workers?
American schoolchildren don't do enough schoolwork. There are 180 days in the standard school year in the United States, as compared with 220 in South Korea, about 230 in Germany, and 243 in Japan. Children in some of these countries go to school on Saturday. The average American high school student spends 3.5 hours a week on homework. The total time devoted to studies, in and out of the classroom, is about 20 hours a week. Japanese fifth-graders average 33 hours a week. Japan, with half the population of the United States, produces twice as many scientists and engineers with advanced degrees every year.
During four years of high school, American students spend less than 1,500 hours on such subjects as mathematics, science, and history. Japanese, French, and German students spend more than twice as much time. A 1994 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education notes:
The traditional school day must now fit in a whole set of requirements for what has been called the "new work of the schools"—education about personal safety, consumer affairs, AIDS, conservation and energy, family life and driver's training.
So, because of the deficiencies of the society and the inadequacies of education in the home, only about three hours a day are spent in high school on the core academic subjects.
There's a widely held perception that science is "too hard" for ordinary people. We can see this reflected in the statistic that only around 10 percent of American high school students ever opt for a course in physics. What makes science suddenly "too hard"? Why isn't it too hard for the citizens of all those other countries that are outperforming the United States? What has happened to the American genius for science, technical innovation, and hard work? Americans once took enormous pride in their inventors, who pioneered the telegraph, telephone, electric light, phonograph, automobile, and airplane. Except for computers, all that seems a thing of the past. Where did all that "Yankee ingenuity" go?
Most American children aren't stupid. Part of the reason they don't study hard is that they receive few tangible benefits when they do. Competency (that is, actually knowing the stuff) in verbal skills, mathematics, science, and history these days doesn't increase earnings for average young men in their first eight years out of high school —many of whom take service rather than industrial jobs.
In the productive sectors of the economy, though, the story is often different. There are furniture factories, for example, in danger of going out of business —not because there are no customers, but because so few entry-level workers can do simple arithmetic. A major electronics company reports that 80% of its job applicants can't pass a fifth-grade mathematics test. The United States already is losing some $40 billion a year (mainly in lost productivity and the cost of remedial education) because workers, to too great a degree, can't read, write, count, or think.
In a survey by the U.S. National Science Board of 139 high-technology companies in the United States, the chief causes of the research and development decline attributable to national policy were (i) lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with the problem; (2) too little attention paid to the training of future scientists and engineers; (3) too much investment in "defense," and not enough in civilian research and development; and (4) too little attention paid to pre-college education. Ignorance feeds on ignorance. Science phobia is contagious.
Those in America with the most favorable view of science tend to be young, well-to-do, college-educated white males. But three-quarters of new American workers in the next decade will be women, non-whites, and immigrants. Failing to rouse their enthusiasm—to say nothing of discriminating against them — isn't only unjust, it's also stupid and self-defeating. It deprives the economy of desperately needed skilled workers.
African-American and Hispanic students are doing significantly better in standardized science tests now than in the late 1960’s, but they're the only ones who are. The average math gap between white and black U.S. high school graduates is still huge —two to three grade levels; but the gap between white U.S. high school graduates and those in, say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, or Finland is more than twice as large (with the U.S. students behind). If you're poorly motivated and poorly educated, you won't know much—no mystery there. Suburban African-Americans with college-educated parents do just as well in college as suburban whites with college-educated parents. According to some statistics, enrolling a poor child in a Head Start program doubles his or her chances to be employed later in life; one who completes an Upward Bound program is four times as likely to get a college education. If we're serious, we know what to do.
What about college and university? There are obvious steps to take: improved status based on teaching success, and promotions of teachers based on the performance of their students in standardized, double-blind tests; salaries for teachers that approach what they could get in industry; more scholarships, fellowships, and laboratory equipment; imaginative, inspiring curricula and textbooks in which the leading faculty members play a major role; laboratory courses required of everyone to graduate; and special attention paid to those traditionally steered away from science. We should also encourage the best academic scientists to spend more time on public education—textbooks, lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, TV appearances. And a mandatory freshman or sophomore course in skeptical thinking and the methods of science might be worth trying.