<p>Reefer Madness!</p>
<p>Bullwinkle – Good ol’ Harry sounds like a soul-brother to Anthony Comstock, whose crusade against vice and smut ushered in an era of book-burning and censorship, as well as giving him the power to inspect any mail he wanted in order to ‘protect children and women’ from obscene material in the mid-to-late 19th century. Reading about him, one finds that many of the arguments he used to win his cases are the same as the ones the government is using now to…ahem…protect us. The problem was that he and he alone decided what was and was not obscene – and his net was cast so wide that it included medical textbooks and birth control information. He probably wasn’t too thrilled with the corset ads in the Monkey Wards catalog, either. </p>
<p>Lealdragon – Gad, there are so many books and articles I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m esp. interested in why religion continues to have such power and there’s been quite a lot in the last ten years or so on whether or not faith has some evolutionary merit. I’m also interested in superstition and non-psychotic belief in things like UFOs and Atlantis despite tons of refutation. (Why People Believe Weird Things is a fun book if you can find it.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s an amusing statement. Are you saying you are interested in those topics, or why some people believe in those topics?</p>
<p>I’m interested in your info about faith having some evolutionary merit, if you care to share.</p>