Aliens Removing Human Brains?
SOME 3.7 million people claim to have been abducted by aliens. Only 11 per cent of Americans believe in evolution. Type "Flat Earth Society" into the Google search engine on the internet and you will have a choice of 466,000 sites. How did we get this stupid?
One explanation is that the aliens doing all that abducting have been removing people’s brains. Perhaps there is a UFO pathology laboratory hovering somewhere over Bonnybridge with the sum of our collective senses pickled in jars.
[…]
Previous generations had their superstitions, but they had a fundamental belief in the ability of science to improve their quality of life. They were proved right. Within three generations, life expectancy in Britain rose by 30 years. In the half century after the Second World War, infant mortality fell from 50 deaths per 1,000 births to fewer than six. For good measure, science threw in the internet, talking pictures and the self-cleaning oven.Science equalled progress and was seen as an almost universally good thing. Our grandparents may have balked at seating 13 at the dinner table, but they would never have argued that teaching children about feng shui was as important as teaching them the second law of thermodynamics.
Now, in our age of unreason and anti-science, life expectancy is set to fall for the first time, the fate of tissue samples and diseased organs has become more important than the welfare of the living, and the government has announced that alternative treatments such as Indian ayurvedic medicine could be granted the same status as conventional medicine on the NHS. According to Francis Wheen’s brilliant new book, How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, the 36,000 general practitioners in this country [i.e., Great Britain] are now outnumbered by the 50,000 purveyors of complementary and alternative medicine.
[Gillian Bowditch, "Stupidity in the new age of anti-science", The Scotsman, 10 February 2004.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Speaking of Science