Remember Flim-Flam

[Tony]

http://www.slate.com/id/2121239/ ...full article

In line to get my badge for this year's skeptics conference in Pasadena, Calif., I recognized the little man standing behind me. He was bald, with a full, white beard, and he looked older than I would have imagined. "Excuse me," he said, "is this the line for the skeptics meeting?" When I nodded, he looked me up and down and replied, "Oh, I doubt that."

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the worlds' most famous skeptic, the Amazing Randi.

I was in the seventh grade when I first came across Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, Randi's 1980 classic of the early skeptics movement. When I got on board—as a fan, if not a true believer—the group was entrenched in a slugfest with the flourishing occult business. The skeptics were a feisty group of scientists, philosophers, magicians, and atheists, united by their dedication to rational thought and their intolerance of credulity. Randi, a professional magician and escape artist who once dangled upside down in a straitjacket over Niagara Falls, joined up with Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor in upstate New York, who had himself taken on newspaper astrologers. In 1976, Kurtz formed the Committee for the Scientific Inquiry Into Claims of the Paranormal to explain, expose, dispel, and debunk the supernatural and all its practitioners.

 

[Red Siegfried]

I first read this book in 1992 when I was disillusioned with the group think and PC mentality of college at the Berkeley of the Midwest. I decided to skip school entirely for a few days and go to the (off-campus) library and begin to get an education for a change, as opposed to an indoctrination.

The books I was fortunate enough to read during those few days, Flim-Flam! included, started me down the path to skepticism, where I learned that I had the freedom to reevaluate higher education, religion, the paranormal, the mass media, multiculturalism and how I was going to spend the rest of my life.

I don't look back much.

Thank you, The Amazing!!

 

[c4ts]

I must have been about nine years old when I read that book. I barely remember any of what was in it, other than it got me interested in skepticism.