Michael Shermer

OK, break that down for us.

So this is a term that was popularized by a science historian named Michael Shermer.

And agenticity is basically this evolutionary tendency for humans to look at a series of completely random, unconnected events, find a pattern in them.

And then here's the key part.

Okay.

There's this guy named Michael Shermer, who I did not know until I heard this story, but he's the editor of something called Skeptic Magazine, who's a lifelong atheist or atheist adjacent or something like that.

And he writes this essay about how he married a woman from Germany who was here in America.

She was missing her family and she was missing her, maybe it was her uncle or her grandfather.

Okay.

There's this guy named Michael Shermer, who I did not know until I heard this story, but he's the editor of something called Skeptic Magazine, who's a lifelong atheist or atheist adjacent or something like that.

And he writes this essay about how he married a woman from Germany who was here in America.

She was missing her family and she was missing her, maybe it was her uncle or her grandfather.

But, um, this is exactly where I don't want to sound like...

I don't wanna sound as illiterate as Billy Carson, right? Or to be as thick-headed and insufferable like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Shermer.

We have to be able to get excited about a connection without grabbing it by the throat and forcing it to become evidence.

If we're interested in truth and not merely being right, we s- again, we have to hold things very, very loosely.

I'm Ben Chertoff.

I'm joined today by Jim Meigs and Michael Shermer, two of the most experienced conspiracy debunkers in the business.

And we're gonna unpack how the 9/11 conspiracy theories that were investigated, tested, and put to bed 20 years ago have come back with a new villain.

Yep, Israel.

I was on that team.

I ran the fact-checking department at Popular Mechanics, so we'll be revisiting some of our own work here.

And Michael Shermer is the founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine and executive director of The Skeptic Society.

He wrote a monthly column in Scientific American for 18 years, and he's written two books that matter most for this conversation, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, and Denying History, which is about Holocaust denial, how you recognize pseudohistory, and how you argue with it in the open instead of trying to make it go away.

There's no way to metaphysically make sense of what happens to certain people in these near-death experiences that would be made sense of or could be made sense of by materialism.

I was just reading Michael Shermer's book on the afterlife, Heaven on Earth, he calls it.

It's very, very catchy as a skeptic book.

And he works through the near-death experiences literature, and he offers up a kind of various models, explanatory models of near-death experiences as a materialist.

um so materialism really is an oddity and it it's kind of like it it i do think there's a parallel it's partly conditioning they've been conditioned in this culture they've they've been uh people like chris state very smart guy but he's been obviously imbibing a bit too much materialism a bit too much naturalism i think And that's intention with the Christianity that he actually confesses.

The fact of the matter is that there seems to me to be a clear parallel to those who are skeptical.

The way that skeptics like Michael Shermer treat near-death experiences and this other data that overwhelmingly demonstrates or confirms disembodied experience, Christian materialists have to do something similar, ironically, as these skeptics who don't believe anything.

They're missing out on an opportunity to make sense of the reality of heaven and of immaterial existence.