Believing in Ghosts

A Halloween-flavored article by the Associated Press last week disclosed that some 34% of Americans believe in ghosts.

As it happens, that was almost the same percentage of people in recent polls who think President Bush is doing a good job.

It’s tempting to think that those who believe in ghosts are the same people who believe that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attack. However, the article said, almost twice as many liberals as conservatives report "seeing" ghosts. So maybe they are the same folks who swear that 9/11 was generated by the Bush administration so that the President could go to war and deprive us of our civil literties.

The same Halloween survey reported that almost half of Americans—some 48%—believe in extra-sensory perception—and college graduates are more likely to believe in it than people with a high school diploma or less.

An (unpublished) letter to The Herald last week "reported" that the terrible fires in San Diego was a "massive PLANNED uncontrolled holocaust." Planned by the U. S. Forest service no less.

At about the turn of the millenium, we wrote in this space that the greatest single challenge for our society in the 21st century will be to regain some realistic, enlightened, rational sense of what is truth and what is nonsense.

That work is not well begun.