Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Praying to United airlines

I often spend 5 minutes of my morning heading over to wikipedia, hitting the 'random article button', and reading about whatever comes up. I do this because it's more interesting to make small talk for the rest of the day if you have something interesting to say rather than just talk about the god damned weather.

A few months ago, in the above described method, I stumbled across an article on Cargo Cults.

I found it fascinating and I would like to see a documentary made... I recently learned that Jared Diamond writes about cargo cults in his book "guns, germs, and steel". I read that book and I don't recall the mention of cargo cults. I guess I didn't read hard enough. (it was an interesting book full of great ideas/theories, but Diamond's writing style is awful. He expresses his academic thesis like an 8th grader would in a 5-paragraph-essay, presumably in order to make it accessible to a wide audience. So it reads like a dumbed down academic journal article, only very repetitive).

It also turns out that Dawkins has a chapter on cargo cults in his book 'the god delusion'. I haven't read that.

No comments: