"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:Wwfvb.262377$Fm2.278122@attbi_s04...
|
| Until yesterday I had run into religious fanatics and cult followers in
| every walk of life EXCEPT aviation. I guess I had assumed that anyone
smart
| enough to get their pilot's certificate couldn't be so gullible -- and
| rude -- as to go around trying to "save" perfect strangers.

Well, speaking as a 'religious fanatic,' which apparently means anyone whose
religious views differ from yours, I would have to observe that pilots on
the whole are extremely gullible and even superstitious.

I have had pilots try to peddle to me everything from magnetic healing
devices to fraudulent investments to legal protection plans (see AOPA, for
an example of a legal services plan that covers almost nothing) to broken
down airplanes.

Gullibility is not reduced by greater intelligence. In fact, I think it
takes a certain minimum intelligence to be fooled.

Of course, if you want to just mess with people's minds, you can offer them
the Consolation of Haldane as Carl Sagan put it: "in an infinitely old
universe with an infinite number of appearances of galaxies, stars, planets,
and life, an identical Earth must reappear on which you and all your loved
ones will be reunited. I'll be able to see my parents again and introduce
them to the grandchildren they never knew. And all this will happen not
once, but an infinite number of times....there will be universes, indeed an
infinite number of them, in which our brains will have full recollection of
many previous rounds." Of course, in infinite numbers of universes Hitler
(and even worse!) will arise again and work their horrors upon humanity.

But then (I modestly call this Campbell's corollary to Haldane's
Consolation), in infinite numbers of universes, there must also arise
infinite numbers of beings that basically have all the characteristics
ascribed to God -- and not just the Judeo/Christian God, but all the gods
ever imagined, as well as all the devils, fairies, demons, angels, balrogs,
whatever, as well as beings capable of moving between these universes,
soooooo...... somewhere there really is an Oz, a Middle Earth, or a Narnia,
and in an infinite number of these places there is a guy named Jay Honeck
who runs a hotel.