Not my kind of thing. Skeptics are like Republicans to me. Shermer writes well but I'm no scientist and couldn't get my arms around his ideals. ( )

Interesting that the edition I read had a different subtitle: 'From Spiritual Faiths to Political Convictions - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths'
I have to guess it's to do with being a UK printed edition.
I prefer the cover design of my edition as well. see here: http://www.constablerobinson.com/images/book/large/9781780335292.jpg

All that aside, I really enjoyed this book. Shermer takes the reader step by step through thinking about belief without judgement of those who hold beliefs he doesn't.
A must read for people interested in thinking about where their beliefs come from. Also a handy primer for understanding why people are so adamant about holding onto their beliefs.
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Interesting, thought-provoking.

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This is a book that would have benefited from just slightly tighter editing. The book opens really strong, and it ends pretty strong. In the middle Shermer goes on tangents that detract from the tone, voice, and focus of the book. For example, he does a step-by-step walkthrough breaking down 9/11 conspiracies. It wasn't bad. But it felt deeply out of place - we're looking at why people believe it, not debunking one of a million conspiracy theories (especially one that had gotten so much debunking attention as this). There's also a libertarian screed thrown in there after bitching about how most scientists are democrats. It really comes off as he's the only smart one in the room, he's the one that's got it all figured out, you guys. Libertarian talking points are just sort of thrown in there and not backed up. For example, he carefully, subtlety implies that welfare programs are just helping the lazy mooch and are otherwise worthless. (Which is not borne out in data at all, but since liberals have apparently biased science, it makes it difficult to provide acceptable evidence to the contrary - see what he does there?)

When he swerves back to the good stuff and talks about biases towards the end, it almost feels like a professor that got distracted in class and is rushing through those final few slides. Some biases he just labels, defines, and moves on, when I really wanted to get into the meat of them. ( )

With this book, the author delves into what makes people believe things, even things that might be fallacious or ridiculous to any other person. The human brain is remarkably capable of creating scenarios that explain almost anything one could wish to describe. Mr. Michael Shermer has enough experience on the side of belief to possess some authority on the subject and discusses his personal experiences with his own faith as well as that of a number of others. Mr. Shermer has spoken to the outspoken born-again Dr. Francis Collins, a man whose academic chops are first-rate. Shermer also spoke to a retired brick-layer that thought a voice told him to speak to then-President Richard Nixon on an urgent matter. He was institutionalized, which is pretty much what one would expect in this situation.

Shermer covers a wide swath of things that people believe in and talks about all of it in a frank manner. Shermer is reductionist in his beliefs, so all there is is pretty much in your own skull. This is an idea that I can accept pretty well since I don’t particularly believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God that cares for us and loves us on a personal level. Since there is no personal God, there is no afterlife; and if there is no afterlife, there is nothing to go to an afterlife, therefore, there is no such thing as a Soul. Now a lot of people might disagree with me, and this is fine. I just like to have total and complete evidence of something, since “magical thinking” is precisely the thing that is dangerous.

Such thinking is easily capable of killing people. Shermer gives plenty of examples of magical thinking and how the reasoning was taken step-by-step. Take Christian Science for instance. I don’t know for sure, but I know my great-grandfather was a Christian Scientist and they believed in the Power of Prayer. Prayer for everything. God has a plan and his plan is that either you get better or you die. Well, my great-grandfather had some kind of heart failure and his wife, my great-grandmother told him to go to see a doctor or else she would leave him since she didn’t want to watch him die. So he went to a doctor and they removed a huge amount of fluid from him and saved his life. That story isn’t in the book, but I can relate to it because of that.

The book mostly takes a point of view that not all things can be explained by our current level of science, but insists that this is no reason to go and invent things to explain them. Take Dark Energy and Dark Matter for example. At the moment, they are considered placeholders for an idea that does not yet have an explanation. Science changes over time; religion really doesn’t. Sure there were Schisms and various factions were created, but Christianity is still basically the same for all that regardless of the flavor you choose. Certainly, there are disagreements among scientists about some details, but once evidence comes out, everyone agrees on it. We do not still have people arguing over the Theory of Gravitation.

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading this book. It didn’t really give me a new perspective or explain anything new to me, but it was quite illustrative of what it said and in the stories it told. ( )