Imagination or reality

Re “Ghosts, aliens and us,” Opinion, Dec. 8

David Klinghoffer’s Op-Ed article was disturbing. The interrogators of the Inquisition also imagined supernatural influences and believed that torture would lead to finding out details about them.

The human imagination can be a diversionary and dangerous thing. Sure there are other dimensions: Physicists have proved as much. This doesn’t mean that we should give credence to astrology, spiritualism and all of the other illusions that have caused so much trouble.

People imagine all kinds of things, including virgins in paradise and ghosts in the attic. It’s a lot more productive to do the hard work of facing reality, as it can be observed and tested. The rest is just clutter, even if it occasionally hits a target.

Michael Roddy

Yucca Valley

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Klinghoffer is charmed by his rabbi’s promoting amulets for healthcare (please, don’t let Kaiser Permanente hear about this) and deems a less mystic Jewish approach as “pallid rationalism.”

Pallid, indeed! It is precisely the insistence on rational discourse, the embrace of scientific truths and methods, and the differentiation between spirituality and delusion that have made our faiths relevant for the past 400 years.

Life may throw more at us than reason can contain, but that makes reason insufficient, not unnecessary. Trucking in magic does not represent an “unapologetic interface with the unknown”; it is a foolish holdover from the medieval world that claims not only to know the unknown but to control it. God demands not only our hearts but our wits.

Rabbi Dan Shevitz

Venice