Woo! Woo! Woo!

Is your dog psychic? Does your dog jump around like an idiot right before you get home, and seem to "know", you know, telepathically, when you're coming home? Ours seem to. We have two ginormous English Mastiffs who hop around like morons whenever someone comes to the door - sometimes they start even before we realize that there is someone at the door! Amazing! They love meeting new people, and it's almost like they have a keener sense of smell and hearing than we do! But of course, it's probably because they're psychic. Yeah. That's the ticket.

If your dogs do this too, then Dr. Rupert Sheldrake wants to pay you a thousand bucks to perform totally scientifical-sounding experiments on your dog. And he would too...

...except for those darned skeptics and atheists! Those guys are always hanging around, whining about "evidence" and whatnot. *shaking fist at the dirty unbelieving atheist skeptics*

From his interview at Alex Tsakiris' breathtakingly credulous woo-factory, Skeptiko.com (That's SkeptiKo.com, NOT NOT NOT our good friend SkeptiCo.com folks!):

[link] Dr. Sheldrake: Well, I mean, I’ve had to think long and hard about this because, of course, I often have encountered some skeptics and… I think that, for many of them, it…they’ve made science, not into a method of inquiry, but into a kind of ideology. Michael Shermer likes to say, “Skepticism is a method not a position.” But, actually, for him, it is a position. And, so it is for most skeptics.

I think, what lies behind it for many of them is that they’ve…many of them are atheists, dogmatic and often militant atheists.

Alex: Right.

More below the fold...

Stupid atheists! Always living in the real world and crazy stuff like that! Man! Whay can't they simply accept my unsupported assertions about psychic dogs like all the rest of the rubes?

Dr. Sheldrake: For them, they’ve rejected religion and, instead, they’ve put all their faith in science. So, they’ve got a kind of evangelical attitude to science and there’s no better example of this than Richard Dawkins who…

Alex: Right.

Dr. Sheldrake: …is both a militant atheist and a militant skeptic. He’s a Fellow of PsyCOP, now CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as is Daniel Dennett and as, indeed, is Richard Wiseman. He’s a Research Fellow of CSI. And, these are mainly people who are committed to a kind of militant/atheist worldview and, as far as they are concerned, if you allow any psychic phenomena to occur, you are leaving a door open a crack and, you know, who knows, within seconds you could have God back again and, even worse, the Pope. So, I think, for them, it’s a kind of…it’s almost like a kind of religious struggle. It’s like a crusade.

Alex: I agree. And I think that also explains some of the belligerence, especially here in the United States, but in other parts of the Western world as well. Atheists feel under attack. I mean, they feel like they are in the minority position and that, therefore, if we get down to this win at all cost kind of thing, I’m under attack so I have to kind of attack back and…that’s the only…the only way I can really understand it is, as you put it, in this kind of evangelical fundamentalist kind of battle that we have somehow found ourselves in.

Ah, so it's really the absence of belief in a god that causes all of this wacky, un-American "skepticism". Gotcha.

Let's strive to be more sciency-sounding, and less critical and skeptical, folks. After all, we wouldn't want to discourage the brave scientists like Dr. Sheldrake who continue tilting at that windmill despite the utter lack of evidence.

Do it for the all the psychic puppies in the world. Who will speak for the psychic puppies? Heh. :)

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