Brian’s Column: The SAILE Fallacy

Sacred-Authority Abstraction Impervious to Logic or Evidence
(Okay, it’s technically SAAILE… also more an addiction, syndrome, or disease)

VAQSo where did I come up with this line of thought? From near the front lines of the Vaccine Culture Wars… a college-educated lady friend recently reacts poorly to my communication of a succinct scientific analysis of so-called herd immunity with comments:

“Since the beginning of vaccination, there is little [i.e. no] proof [and no reason to believe] that vaccines are responsible for eradicating disease even when herd immunity vaccination levels (95%) have been reached. [Quite the contrary: ‘By the end of 1868, more than 95 percent of the inhabitants of Chicago had been vaccinated. After the Great Fire of 1871 that leveled the city, vaccination was made a condition of receiving relief supplies. Despite the passing of strict vaccination laws, Chicago was hit with a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1872. … vaccinating most of the population (which would later be termed herd immunity) did not protect the population from the scourge of smallpox.‘–Suzanne Humphries, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, vaccines, and the forgotten history. Innumerable instances of other mass vaccination failures exist, and for other diseases.] — parenthetical comments mine, bw

Note: virtually the entire range of fundamental logic that applies to the safety and efficacy of today’s vaccines is located in this essential column from investigative journalist Jon Rappoport. The knowledge in Jon’s column enables you to slice & dice provaccine shills. 

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Book Review: The God Delusion (2006)

by Richard Dawkins
2006, Houghton Mifflin Co., 374 pgs.

DawkinsDawkins is a celebrated evolutionary biologist who, along with Sam Harris (The End of Faith), has emerged as one of the better known proponents of atheism in contemporary literature.  Both books have been New York Times best sellers.

In my own work, New Pilgrim Chronicles, I have likewise argued for the critical need of the species to evolve from faith to reason:

“Faith, as the antithesis of reason, is a barbarous relic that must be discarded if civilization, much less any prospect for freedom, is to emerge.”— from Chapter 5

Dawkins’ main thesis is the natural world and even sentient beings such as ourselves are accounted for by natural explanations. Thus, God is not a requirement for and has a vanishingly small probability of existence. Continue reading

Book Review: The End of Faith (2004)

Religion, terror, and the future of reason
by Sam Harris
Reviewed by Brian Wright

FaithThe End of Faith is the watershed book for uniting rational, spiritual—and yes, libertarian—humanists in an unprecedented worldwide exercise in the elevation of consciousness.  Several books recently have taken up the cause of releasing our minds from specters of the past, particularly any sorts of deities that insist upon abandonment of natural reason for salvation.

All published in 2006, we have Harris’s own Letter to a Christian Nation, which cleverly skewers the most extreme faith-based positions of too many of our neighbors; UK scientist and author Richard Dawkins gave us The God Delusion, a more academic dance around the escape hatches from reality; and on the lighter side we got The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) by the one and only Bobby Henderson. Continue reading