The alleged dangers in the belief in Spirits

Some time ago, in an interview delivered to the magazine Veja, the American psychologist Michael Shermer reassured the stance he has taken, over the last fifteen years, his fight against myths, superstitions and common beliefs.

For Shermer, to believe in Spirits or telepathy is not, as many think, something “silly”. It is, according to him, a behavior of risk, because – we reproduce here his words – “those who believe in things that have no clear evidence can believe in everything”.

Just the fact of mixing telepathy and the existence of Spirits with myths and superstitions reveals that Michael Shermer talks about subjects he has not studied thoroughly and, therefore, does not know. Telepathy is, for example, one of the phenomena accepted peacefully by parapsychologists all over.

The existence of Spirits and their manifestations among us have been object of studies and researches not only by religious people, like the priest François Brune, author of the book “The Dead Talk To Us” (Edicel, 1991), but of researchers with a college degree just like Mr. Shermer.

In his book “Transcommunication – Technological Communications with the World of the Dead”, Clovis S. Nunes (Edicel, 1990) shows a detailed study about researches that have been done in this area over the last fifty years.

It is clear that, toward someone who does not believe in the existence of Spirits, we could say names of famous scientists who also denied them and, however, gave in to the facts they had studied, and declared loud and clear their Spiritist conviction. William Crookes, Nobel Prize of Chemistry, was one of them. Lombroso, Bozzano, Aksakof and many others lived similar experience.

Michael Shermer has all the rights to believe or not in Spirits, but he should be more controlled in giving his opinions, respecting those who do not think like him and avoid nonsense called scientific just like some of his statements made to the aforementioned magazine, for instance: “There is no evidence that there is in fact life after death”.