Saturday, July 22, 2017

The Enemies of Reason (2007)

Director: Russell Barnes

Writer: Richard Dawkins

Composer:  Glenn Keiles

Starring: Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, Deepak Chopra, Chris French, Craig Hamilton-Parker, Nicholas Humphrey, Satish Kumar

More info: IMDb

Plot:  Professor and well-known skeptic spends 90 minutes exploring many beliefs people have that go against proven science.



My rating: 8/10

Will I watch it again?  Maybe.

Richard Dawkins: "We should be open minded but not so open minded that our brains fall out."

The first half of this British TV documentary tackles such wacky shit as astrology, water dowsing, psychics and so on.  These are low hanging fruit and make easy targets but there's an extraordinary amount of people who believe in them and waste billions of dollars on them.  But they also offer the easiest and most accessible subjects to introduce to those unaware of how easily they can be explained as bogus.  That's just what Dawkins does.  His voice is pleasing, his questions are just and his explanations are sound.  This is the fun half of the program.  The second half gets serious and deals strictly with health and medicine tackling homeothapy among others.  This is much more dry and less entertaining but it's just as informative and important.  You don't have to be a skeptic to enjoy this.  It's fun and you'll learn something coming from the very real world of science and reality which is far more fascinating than superstition and the supernatural.  I've seen this twice in the past yen years so I think that's enough.

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