Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff. Send your letters to [email protected].
If it was the aim of the Bangor Daily News to degenerate into a supermarket tabloid, with the front page publication of “A Demonologist is Coming to Aroostook to Banish a Curse” on Oct. 27, you’ve arrived.
Knowing full well that we live in an age of paranoia, with frontal assaults on science and reason launched primarily by people on the extreme right, the BDN disseminates an article that, because of the absence of mockery that the subject deserved, legitimizes medieval nonsense about witchcraft, demon possession and exorcism. Witches. Demons. Spoken about with credulity in a major newspaper nearly 300 years after the Enlightenment.
But some people believe these things, you would likely reply. And so what’s next? Front page stories about Holocaust denial, flat earthers, alien abduction, talking to the dead? “Some people,” including some Mainers, believe all of these things, but why stoop to promoting lunacy, empowering charlatans, and entertaining fools?
The forces of irrationality, conspiracy, and primitive spiritualism described so gullibly in this article are the real darkness now facing us. And against that we desperately need rationality and empiricism to be defended by those who hold the power of a platform. In publishing this embarrassing piece I believe the BDN has done us all a terrible disservice.
Al Scovern
Belfast
