What I Stand For

I have dedicated my life to fighting ignorance and superstition. Everywhere I go, I find people who believe in things which cannot be proven by science or reason. I would not find this so wrong were it not for the fact that the side of ignorance fights aggressively to promote its vision of the world. In this country such ignorance is propounded by religious Christians who deny the truth of evolution and promote nonsense like Creationism and its bastard brother, Intelligent Design. In foreign countries one finds militant Islam which refuses to allow women even to attend school and which attacks and tortures women who seek merely to learn.

I have fought against the myths of religion. I believe that the chief problem with religion is that it is totally wrong. There is no such thing as God, yet billions of people all over the world go on worshipping him and praying to him, oblivious to his nonexistence. To me it is offensive that human beings, born with brains and the capacity to think, need to surrender the powers of reason in order to give meaning to their lives.

Ignorance is not a benign negativity. It is a powerful moving force that hates reason and the scepticism of rationalists. You will find that ignorant people are very angry when you show disbelief in one of their favorite irrationalities such as UFOs, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, Crop Circles, fortune tellers, extra sensory perception, ghosts, witches, signs of the Zodiac, mediums who speak to the dead, goblins, fairies, elves, and the thousands of religious myths like faith healing, stigmata, exorcism, holy water, and many others.

I have tried to fight against the plethora of conspiracy theories that abound in the world because I believe that the basis of most conspiracy theories is a religious need to find meaning in the many bad things that happen to us. For this reason I wrote the following which will appear in one of my columns in the future:

CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND OCCAM’S RAZOR

Some people are going to be bothered by the following statement, but it is correct. There was no conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. The assassination on November 22, 1963, was the work of only one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. If that statement makes some uncomfortable, it is a sign that they are persons who prefer conspiracy theories to rational, sharp, scientific evidence.

Unfortunately for fuzzy conspiracy theories, there has long been plenty of evidence demonstrating the fact that Oswald acted alone. I recently saw two television documentaries that chronicle the facts about Kennedy’s death. The first was entitled “The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy,” a 2003 made-for-television documentary narrated by the late Peter Jennings. The documentary recreates the assassination using modern computer technology to rotate the scene of the assassination so that it can be viewed from any angle .The resulting digital animation recreated the exact view point from any perspective within the plaza at the moment, and provided concrete evidence that the shot that killed Kennedy came from the gun fired by Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin.

The documentary also looked deeply into the sad life of Oswald. He fancied himself a dedicated communist and traveled to the Soviet Union and Cuba in order to achieve some recognition. Nobody paid any attention to him. He decided to do something that would make his life meaningful and make him famous. He bought the rifle with which he shot Kennedy and which was found in the Texas School Book Depositary with Oswald’s finger prints on it.

Another documentary entitled: “Autopsy: Postmortem with Dr. Michael Baden,” told the story of the renowned forensic physician who has worked on numerous high-profile cases, including the Kennedy assassination. Baden was asked by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to study the autopsy and other documents dealing with the death of Kennedy. Dr. Baden found that the autopsy in Dallas was badly botched and that the conspiracy theories arose out of this careless postmortem. If the autopsy had been properly done, it would have depicted the way in which the bullet entered Kennedy’s back and exited his throat. Baden concluded that there was no conspiracy and only one shooter, Oswald.

There are many conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some are simply unproven and others are patently idiotic. When the Warren Commission Report first came out, I read it over several times and became thoroughly convinced of the one-shooter conclusion. I have therefore always been perplexed by the stupidity of the books and theories claiming a conspiracy. I found the Oliver Stone movie “JFK” absurd.

The murder of Kennedy profoundly influenced my philosophy of life. I was deeply shocked to realize that our bright future could be obliterated in one devastating moment of insanity. I also came to realize that much in life is the result of arbitrary forces for which there is no reason, no explanation. Things just happen. I developed a lawyer’s method of reasoning based on “Occam’s Razor.”

Occam's Razor is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. In other words, the simplest explanation is almost always the best. The simplest explanation for Kennedy’s assassination is that Oswald acted alone.

Why do people continue to have faith in conspiracy theories? I believe that the motivation is akin to religion. People do not want to believe that the bad things that happen to us are arbitrary and have no real meaning. They want to believe that there is an explanation for everything, and that even if it requires a cockamamie conspiracy theory, that is better than saying something bad just happened without any explanation.

The fact is that most bad things, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, diseases, and thousands of unwanted occurrences, are not the fault of any person. They just happen.