"We are becoming a nation of fruitcakes"

Christians, for example, do not believe in reincarnation. At least not according to theology classes in the seminaries. But the population likes the idea. And people like the idea of being Christians too. So they just choose to believe in both. It is a kind of democratization. People feel entitled to make choices about things that used to be within the exclusive purview of the priestly class. That’s fine, I suppose, and consistent with our American mythology. We like to think we are a nation of individualists who make up our own minds. But what are the limits to this inclination?…

This is genuinely scary. And it’s scary in a new way. For the last several thousand years, large groups of human beings enjoyed consensus about the big questions. We may have believed that the universe rested on the back of a giant tortoise and the tortoise rested on the back of an elephant — and that belief may not have been borne out by more recent advances in astronomy — but at least there was widespread agreement. Today it is not just the beliefs that are crumbling; the whole idea of agreement is crumbling too.

As the cliche goes, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. The problem is we have no agreement on what constitutes a fact. Ghosts? Astrology? Global warming? Evolution? How about communication with the dead?