Premonitions
As a born-again skeptic, I find it hard to write about an experience which challenges my entire values system; dead men don’t talk, dreams and premonitions tell you nothing except, perhaps, something about your body chemistry, the whole body of scientific knowledge in all the different fields of hard science hangs together, so if crap like creationism and flat-Earth geography are true, then everything else we’ve discovered in the last 500 years must be wrong… Still, I must be brutally honest.
Skeptic editor Annette Taylor was offered a chopper ride today, and she had forebodings about it. I have ridden in helicopters many times without mishap, and I talked her into going, as it’s an exhilarating experience and quite safe. Nevertheless, a few hours later I rang to confirm that she’d returned in one piece. Alas! Premonitions may well foretell the future. One of her fellow passengers was airsick. Reductionists and doubters like myself oversimplify this mysterious universe if we ignore them.
Well, I’m going to relax and read some New Ideas and Thats Lifes I borrowed.
Pete Fowler
[Not only did Pete encourage me into a hair-raising, stomach churning chopper ride across Fiordland, more importantly he makes home-made chocolate croissants which he happily shares. It’s good to see Tuatapere has its own skeptical population – Ed]
