1676) In the welter of words written and spoken in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial and its outcome, one fundamental consideration underlying this sordid saga has been all but ignored. [...] It is that rational thought, the ultimate basis for action on which the survival and prosperity of our civil society depends, has been decisively trashed once again, once too often for comfort. [...] As long as rational thought is devalued by insisting that unsupported suspicions, folklore or superstition should govern over plain, objective knowledge, our civil society will remain at risk. [...] [I]t is the human ability to distinguish fact from fiction that is at the core of the astonishing biological success of our species. The ability to think is a crucial asset, the development of which our educational system has abdicated, and which our political system has increasingly discouraged. [...]

[T]he conduct and outcome of the Simpson trial has much in common with the majority of pseudoscience controversies [...] In the face of irrefutable scientific evidence to the contrary, people continue to assert the validity of astrology, false memories, satanic events, outlandish conspiracies, megavitamin therapies, bogus cancer cures, and psychic phenomena. People insist on the existence of UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and now, milk-drinking statues. When challenged by powerful refuting evidence, the purveyors of these fictions usually change the subject. That is exactly what the O.J. defense team did by changing the subject from murder to Los Angeles Police Department racism. [...] Under such circumstances we should be saddened but not surprised that the O.J. Simpson jury provided a devastating metaphor for the abysmal credulity that afflicts a reputedly modern society about to enter the twenty-first century.

Elie A. Shneour
"Don't Bother Me With Facts: The Simpson Case
and Rational Thought" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Jan/Feb 1996)

1677) [P]roceedings in law share with the scientific method the same kind of thoughtful discipline on rules of evidence. Neither science nor law ever has been the game of strategy that the media has made of them. Ideally, the world of jurisprudence is a rational anchor in a civil society. It is not the self-serving and self-contained universe that some of its practitioners have insisted it is by turning it into a mockery of justice [...]

Elie A. Shneour
"Don't Bother Me With Facts: The Simpson Case
and Rational Thought" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Jan/Feb 1996)