Stupidity and Ignorance

This is just something that has bothered me personally, and I will hope to broaden the scope of it. There are grown, educated, professional people in the world who believe that scientists are close-minded people who dogmatically stick to current opinion and won't even consider viable alternatives. One viable alternative suggested to me recently was the paranormal, that the anecdotal evidence for the afterlife and other paranormal events is so high that scientists should be putting their time and efforts into extensive research in the area. The guy says that for him the evidence is convincing enough that it is his opinion that there is an afterlife. The evidence he gave was from here and I urge you to take just a little time to look around.

The author of the site in question is a retired worker's compensation lawyer from Australia. Those are his qualifications. Some of the stuff is mind-bogglingly stupid and yet a number of people who can read, write, hold down jobs, engage in theological and philosophical debate, feel that his position is stronger than scientists who dismiss his claims. Here's an example of why this is stupid and ignorant,

They argue that Einstein's formula E=mc² — energy equals mass to the speed of light, shows that mass 'm' is equivalent to energy 'E'.

This explains how materialization and dematerialization operate by matter being transformed into energy. When people try to argue that this equation is all theory but cannot be demonstrated they should be reminded that less than one ounce of matter was transformed into energy to destroy Hiroshima.

The vortex is the actual swirling of the atoms and molecules. Ash and Hewitt argue from Einstein's equation that since matter and light share a common movement, the actual speed of the swirling of the vortex, must be the speed of light. They claim that this is the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation and that it is because of the vortex swirling at the speed of light that you can read this page or see another person the trees and the sky and see everything else with physical eyes.

So, people, and dead people in particular, materialize and de-materalize by converting their matter into energy, moving that energy at beyond the speed of light, and then slowing down the movement and converting back to energy moving at the speed of light which converts into matter. This is said to be the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation. The thing is that Einstein's theories require all their assertions to be false. If all the mass in a person's body became energy it would destroy the earth. Energy cannot move faster than the speed of light. If matter was moving at the speed of light it would be hotter than the core of the sun. From my perspective, anyone with a basic high school physics class should know all that. That is that to believe this stuff you need to be ignorant about science at a really deep level.

The reason that scientists don't put much effort into finding out about paranormal activity is that if paranormal activity is true, basically all of physics (laws of conservation of mass and energy, momentum, laws of thermodynamics and so on) would all have to be false, and they have been tested to an incredible level. On the other hand people seeing things that aren't there, being mistaken about phenomena, being hoodwinked by charlatans, having odd sensations caused by events in the brain are all proven facts, replicated time and again. There are scientific explanations for these events that fit with tested science. While scientists are enormously motivated by finding out new things they are not motivated by proving stuff that seems nonsense according to accepted fact is nonsense.

So why do people believe this stuff? It's a combination of enormous ignorance, personal arrogance, and selfish desire.
Science is simply not taught in the USA to most people at any reasonable level at all. I have had a number of conversations with people who believe in evolution who don't know how it works. I've had conversations with adults who don't believe in evolution because no-one has ever seen a dog give birth to a cat. People don't know what dimensions are or how equations work. I would say that the overwhelming majority of Americans simply don't know even the basics of what science has worked out about their world.
Personal arrogance comes through in the belief that what an individual has felt or seen is more likely to be true than all the controlled experiments in the world. A particular experience that a person has, that they feel that they prayed for their friends and their friends got better, is more true than the repeated double-blind experiments that show that prayer doesn't heal to that person. People think that if they saw something their perception of that event is more correct than all the work of all the scientists throughout time. In the USA it is common to find people who think that scientists are a world-wide cabal bent on defeating God, and who lie, cheat and steal, and can't be trusted. These people tend to write this stuff on computers and go to their doctors.
Selfish desire is really the crux of the matter. People don't believe in non-scientific things that make their lives, hopes and dreams worse off. People don't believe that the afterlife is where they will go to live lives of drudgery under Hitler's lash. They don't believe that we are simply pawns of demons, or that the Universe is pointless, random and arbitrary. People believe that they will live eternally, that those who they loved and have died are still around, that they might have special magic powers of prophecy and insight.

Mostly I'm just sick of having conversations with people who have no idea of what is going on and describe my position (that what science has established to be true is our best guess as to what is actually true) as a close-minded, dogmatic religion.