From Age of Reason to New Age

As an architecture student I became acquainted with the architectural works of Thomas Jefferson, and from this encounter I developed a deep enthusiasm for this American icon and for his achievements as America's pre-eminent 'Gentleman Architect' and free-thinker.

When the writers, philosophers and scientists of Jefferson's time referred to their activities as the "Enlightenment," they believed that they were breaking from the past and replacing the obscurity, darkness, and ignorance of European thought with the "light" of truth. By the eighteenth century the philosophe movement had fully articulated the values of the European Enlightenment with theories that would dramatically change the face of European society and lead to the creation of new governments in both America and France.

My complacency in the belief of the triumph of reason blinded me over the years to the decay that has been occurring in the standards by which we measure knowledge and truth. We apparently live in a New Age of undifferentiated pluralism where all beliefs and opinions are equally valid, where the 'fashionable nonsense' of postmodernism claims science to be nothing more than a socially constructed myth.

I am disappointed, I am angry and I'm not going to take it anymore!
Therefore I am starting this blog. I intend to disseminate as much information and healthy skepticism as I can to counter the irrationalism of New Age pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy and cults. And I'll be taking a few swipes at the more traditional forms of irrationality while I'm at it!