Maybe this is a sign of the coming apocalypse.
I recently wrote a short piece on Zecharia Sitchin for a friend’s e-newsletter. I later blogged about it over at PaleoBabble and my personal blog. That piece, entitled “Zecharia Sitchin: Why You Can Safely Ignore Him,” was picked up and published today by UFO Digest. Here’s the link.
I think what UFO Digest has done here is very noteworthy. To me (and I could be wrong) it suggests a few things: (1) There really are UFO researchers out there who are open to the “movement’s” self-critique (it’s called objectivity); (2) There are UFO researchers out there who would not agree with me who understand I’m not the boogey-man or a mindless debunker; (3) There is a portion of the UFO community that understands one can separate nonsense like Sitchin and other New Age compatriots who are in the UFO community from the UFO / alien contact idea itself. You don’t need to buy in to ancient astronaut nuttiness to consider the UFO issue a serious one deserving of attention. Ditto for the question of extraterrestrial life and possible ET contact.
I hope some of you tell UFO Digest you appreciate their courage in publishing something of a contrarian nature. Now I’ll wait for the hate mail, which will invariably illustrate the kind of unreasoned religious fervor of which many serious Christians and Jews get unjustly accused with respect to their religion. Maybe I’ll even blog some of that (what fun).
Yep. You were right. Two of the commenters after the article were quick to paint you as bias “in your own way” after they did at least acknowledge your argument against the work of Sitchin.
Still, and I think I may attempt to ramble a blog post on this one day, it is a fascinating and frustrating thing to ponder, that mysterious and illusive position of being unbiased. How do you attain that position of being respected in terms of your thought processes without being categorized in any way? It seems 2 options are available: 1, talking out of both sides of your mouth, like many politicians, and 2, to simply be critical of all stances on a given subject. In case #2, I think you might have some appeal because then you come across as the ‘rebel’, but in case #1, the double-speak will eventually catch up to you, like it tends to do with politicians.
Apparently though, in the wash and mix of the various groups and their opinions, relativity still reigns over the majority as opposed to that boring notion of critical thinking which might lead to truth no matter in what odd places you may find it. I know it’s not surprising though, competition just seems to dominate our nature too often, whether it’s politics or which music style is to be considered “worshipful”, etc, etc.
It’s a shame that particularly in the paranormal community, Christians would be thrown into the age-old stereotypes and assumed to be ‘scared’ to deal with the possibility of aliens or the like, but I know that sort of perception is due to who the larger ‘voices’ are in any given community.
Again the ‘war for tolerance’ just comes off as a front for the acceptance of one group’s opinion as opposed to an over-reaching aim that might cause people to really consider what ‘even a Christian’ might believe, and especially ‘why’ they believe.
There! My blog just needs to be copied and pasted. 🙂 Anyway, as you know, those of us that just lurk in the shadows around strange subjects and otherwise are incredibly grateful for scholars such as yourself that show what ‘healthy skepticism’ and true integrity can look like in one person.
@stringbox: Thanks – what these commenters miss is that it isn’t an issue of bias — it’s an issue of whether he does anything to the contrary of what I said — he either has credentials or not; he’s either offered his work to peer review or not; he either creates translations that would not show up in a Mesopotamian lexical list or not; etc. It has nothing to do with bias. It should be easy to produce data to the contrary of what I’m saying if it existed, but it doesn’t.
True. Very true. It was nice to see them acknowledge you being correct on Sitchin’s mistakes, but just extremely disappointing to see them immediately switch to the whole ‘oh this guy’s a Christian though’. I realize I rambled over a seemingly small thing, 2 comments on a webpage, but it’s part of a bigger problem which is why I mentioned politics. It’s just discouraging. I mean, it’s patriotic to question my government’s role in something like healthcare, but if I turned out to be conservative, suddenly I must be astroturf? Whatever! Now, I haven’t been to any town hall meetings and am really rather quiet but my heart is with the ones out in the world that really do want to figure things out and not play my team vs your team. That’s what I have xbox live for. lol.
You know what though, ironically, someone like bho can become president by coming across as non-confrontational. No real qualification, no past, that’s been sealed, but because he sounded like he fit everyone’s mold, in their minds, he did. Maybe you should compare Sitchin and BHO one day in a post… hmm. Both have no credibility, but swear they have the answer, and great numbers of people take up their cry, “Yes we can….fly away with the annunaki!” or whatever, back to xbox!
@stringbox: it’s typical