The Crime of Credulity

Those who take for granted the freedom and advancement of the twentieth century, and are unaware of the desperate conflicts that were waged by scientists and thinkers to emancipate us from mystical superstitions, are being deceived by the new forms in which these superstitions are being revived. -from the Preface More than a century ago, in 1901, Herbert Casson was railing against faith healers, fortune-tellers, past-life regression, and spirituality cults. The world he saw around him, where science and reason were fighting for attention with religion and superstition, is very much the world we see around us today, and Casson's plea for rationality is still highly pertinent. A precursor of such modern classics of skepticism as Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World and Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, this call to abandon a medieval mind-set and move in the rational modern world could well have been written in the midst of the early-21st-century culture wars. Canadian journalist HERBERT NEWTON CASSON (1869-1951) contributed to numerous New York and London publications, writing mostly about business and technology. He is also the author of The Romance of Steel: The Story of a Thousand Millionaires (1907) and The History of the Telephone (1910).