Confessions of a Born-Again Skeptic
Judy Cleine (May 1, 2019)
Anecdotes are not Evidence
Once upon a time, when I was twelve, my father (a man of science) gave me a blob of quicksilver which I put in a pretty pink glass dish beside my bed.
Every now and again I swirled it around with my finger, enchanted by the magical way it broke into shiny beads and joined up again.
One evening, in a fit of almost-adolescent blues, I held my breath and swirled so long I had a vision of a dark tunnel with a shining light at the other end. According to my Sunday school teachers that would be Jesus welcoming me into heaven.
I decided not to go.
Then, when I was thirteen, one of my two big sisters' many boyfriends gave me a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which said, amongst many other mysterious and wonderful things, "They sneer at me for leaning all awry; What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"
And another boyfriend gave me a Penguin copy of Plato's Republic, which talked of ethical choices and reasoned argument.
What to believe? Shining lights? Shadows on a wall? Anoxia? And what were those boyfriends up to?
Thank goodness for Sir David Attenborough and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which make sense of Life the Universe and Everything, including telephone sanitizers and meer cats.
Illustrations to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam First Version Quatrain
Footnotes The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam tells readers to seize the day through a retelling of the origin story. A translation of it was found by The Pre-Raphaelites, influential artists and craftsmen in Victorian England, and their enthusiasm for it made it very popular at the time. It was even found amongst soldier's possessions in the trenches.
The Author himself Omar Khayyám is famous for being a mathematician and astronomer however, due to the lack of evidence, some sceptics question his authorship regarding this and other poems.
Quicksilver is a charming term for the highly poisonous element Mercury which is a chemical element with symbol Hg and atomic number 80.
Symptoms of Mercury poisoning include depression, and difficulty breathing. Symptoms are more pronounced in children.
About Mercury poisoning:
https://tinyurl.com/skep126-33
How the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Inspired Victorian Hedonists: