Protected socially like an endangered religion, a science cult works at making your life seem smaller and less meaningful. If you knock religion, you’re in trouble with a lot of people. But it’s true of science, too. Built on artificial stilts of unproven beliefs, science assumes authority beyond its insights, as religions do, creating cults as matters of faith.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

By David Stone

Assorted Ideas, Large & Small

The Science Cult

The annoyance sparking interest was a New York Times column by David Brooks: You Are Not Who You Think You Are. I stopped reading Brooks’s writing years ago because I found it dull, but the headline got me. Although the headline writer misrepresented the content, what I found inside was a digest of the science cult’s current mumbo jumbo. Brooks seemed a little suspicious, in fact, but he fell in line anyway. Because that’s what you do when committed to a cult.

The game’s a kind of “We know you better than you do because we’re scientists” power grab, and it doesn’t serve science well. Insisting on something so easily proven false undermines everything else connected with it. If they waive truth-telling in one thing, why not anything and everything else. Where’s the line?

“Your brain is locked in the pitch-black bony vault of your skull,” Brooks writes, “trying to use scraps of information to piece together the world,” as if that’s true. But it’s not.

There are no scraps; there’s instead a seamless flow of information coalesced into your mind’s eye. It’s all personal. And “the world” is already together, but not in pieces.

For symbolism, his “pitch-black bony vault” is the worst of it. So is your pelvis where it protects all that digestion while assisting in locomotion. What area inside you, Mr. Brooks, is lit up like a kitchen before dinner? He’s just playing games, echoing drivel that’s been circulating for a while.

In deconstructing reality, the researchers he leans on mistake the tools and building blocks of reality for reality itself. It’s an error, but not without consequences.

Just because a science cult says you don’t know yourself, you’re under no obligation to accept the utterly foolish. Yet, that’s what’s being pushed by a cult already committed to a doctrine that says free will is a myth. After all, if you have free will, you’re a thinking, autonomous individual. The science cult can’t handle that or, more importantly, control it.

There is no theory, for instance, proving or even indicating that thinking or any other mental activity takes place in your skull. All they really have are foggy scans showing what areas in your brain activate in certain situations, but they make much more of it.

Some researchers, though, consider the brain little more than a refined, high quality tuner collecting and sorting sensory data used for creating a broader, deeply connected consciousness. And there’s clear evidence that some, in not all of what we recognize as “mind” or “mental activity” is not locked into anything physical. (See info on remote viewing.) And since thoughts, ideas and feelings are nonphysical, how could a physical structure fence them in, anyway?

Countless near death experiences show coherent mental activity after brains go out of service. People declared dead, all vital signs ceased, report hanging around nearby, recording everything, before returning to their bodies. Moreover, they’ve proven it by accurately describing what happened after they died, sending the science cult into a mad scramble to explain it away.

It can’t be and all the NDE reports must be wrong because it undermines the cult’s faith.

Some of the fuzzy, belief system based claims border on hilarious, although rendered with grave assurance. Chew on this one:

A rough calculation by Paul Reber, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University suggests that the brain can store 2.5 PETABYTES of data – that’s 2,500,000 Gigabytes, or 300 years worth of TV.

Top 10 Surprising Memory Facts

Your life is “TV…?”

Backing up this ridiculous claim, the science cult wedges your memories down a fiber optic tube, reducing them to some mythical factor called “TV.” Really?

Setting aside the fact that there is no such quantifiable thing as “TV,” making the entire claim goofy in the first place, do they really think your life relates favorably to reruns of Zombies from Mars or Ozzie and Harriet?

In fact, there is no measurement for memory. It’s a free-floating, unstoppable stream not dependent on paying a monthly bill. Moreover, no evidence proves memory as material at all. So, ipso facto, no material, no volume or weight.