![hale bopp comet hale bopp comet](http://petersalvisberg.ch/photos/uploads/184-Img234-1.jpg)
Last week, Tom Bopp and I had the illustrious honour of being "people of the week" on ABC's World News Tonight. A victory for ignorance and superstition. If I remember the numbers correctly, 168 people, including a lot of innocent children, were killed. Two years ago, what was apparently a group of Christian extremists bombed a building in Oklahoma City.
![hale bopp comet hale bopp comet](https://jonathanadamsphotography.com/inspire/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/comet-hale-bopp-poster.jpg)
Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purposes, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. To begin, I'd like to read an excerpt from the last book Carl Sagan wrote before he died, entitled The Demon-Haunted World and subtitled "Science as a Candle in the Dark." He quotes from a pamphlet entitled "A Candle in the Dark," written about 350 years ago: ".the Nations perish for lack of knowledge" and then goes on to say:Īvoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. It is reprinted from The Torch, newsletter of the Arizona Secular Humanists, April 1997. This is the text of a press conference in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, March 28, 1997, giving the reaction of Alan Hale, co-discoverer of the Hale-Bopp comet, to the mass-suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California.