Am I a promoter of alien abductions?

I was reading an article about an alien abduction hustler by the noted science journalist, James Gleick. He wrote a book about Chaos Theory that I loved years ago.

He talks about UFO believers and takes a distinction from the world of wrestling. Wrestling fans consist of the "Smarts" and the "Marks".

Somehow I ran across the article and I had to apply it to myself, and my efforts to establish a readership for my book. Am I like the Doctor? Am I a Smart passing myself off as a Mark? Or, am I a Mark pretending to be a Smart?

More disastrously, am I doing something that is a slap in the face of capital R- Reason? Or worse, trying to take advantage of the Marks, the True Believers, and thus exploiting people whose beliefs I don't altogether share?

Troubling questions!

What are I Ching fans really like? Are they chumps?

No...They seem to be extremely bright. And they are succeptible to visions. (Why, I wonder?)

I'm thinking about Jung's intro to Wilhelm's I Ching. It is quite an august piece of writing. It puts forward a scientific principle by which this strange little practice can be justified: "Synchronicity."

This preface radically puts divination in another realm from religious practice; recall that sainted Wilhelm, the translator, was a Christian missionary, and his book is saturated with a humane Christian sensibity. My nose tells me he was a very good man, as good as he was erudite. He concieved modern divination as a form of introspection.

Apparently it worked; I haven't heard of people having book-burnings of I Chings. Furthermore, the significant thing for me was that it allowed me to mess with the I Ching not despite my faith, but despite my heathenishness. I was quite a hard-bitten atheist at 20, it let me read the I Ching, convinced I was doing something vaguely scientific.

As often happens, I'm reminded of a Borges story, the one about the Arabic poet who wrote the book that would become the Rubaiyat. He is a Algebraist, a student of the Koran, and an atheist. His lack of faith did not preclude being a competent theologian, as part of being a cultured man.

Within the tent of any belief or organization there is going to be a spectrum of flavors and kinds of faith.

And even being a card-carrying athiest doesn't prevent someone from being a glassy eyed True Believer in something. As a recovering Ayn Rand worshipper, I know this to be true.

One of my friends is a devout Christian, and loves reading about UFOs. But he's at all not a True Believer about UFOs. (I think.) It's like reading fiction.

The more I poke around at it, the idea of the human race being divided into Smarts and Marks seems more complicated, and less obviously true, than it first seems.

"Believing" and "believing in" are ideas that should come in more flavors.

I do know this: being an absolute skeptic es no bueno! It prevents thinking and causes you to lock things out before you engage them. Some flavors of skepticism strike me as a kind of mental crudity.

And being gullible has its obvious problems...

Am I dealing with terribly dangerous things? Or merely slightly silly ones?

Whatever. For the most part, I'm having a lot of fun. And the work justifies me, in some obscure way.

I'm also savoring the friendships I'm starting to make because of the book.

My final thought is that people who fool around with fortunetelling have surprisingly alert bullshit detectors. Though they might not shred me for cutting corners on research (though several would), they assuredly would if I wasn't playing from the heart.

Which, to the imperfect extent to which I even have a heart, I am doing...