Deepak Chopra, moron

For those in the business of teaching basic-level critical thinking, this horrendous but mercifully short piece, titled "The Perils of Skepticism," written by professional separator of fools and their money Deepak Chopra is a gem. It's a textbook case of uncontroversially incompetent argumentation. It's so bad that it's hard to believe that it came from an adult. Chopra begins by conveniently neglecting the task of saying what a skeptic is (is there a better way to strawman?), and then gets progressively, hilariously, unbelievably worse. Some samples for your amusement:

1. "Statistically, cynical mistrust is correlated with premature sudden death from cardio vascular disease. Since the skeptics who write venomous blogs trust in nothing, I imagine that God will outlive them."

2. "No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others. Typically they sit by the side of the road with a sign that reads "You're Wrong" so that every passerby, whether an Einstein, Gandhi, Newton, or Darwin, can gain the benefit of their illuminated skepticism."

3. "It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists."

4. "Skeptics know in advance -- or think they know -- what right thought is. Right thought is materialistic, statistical, data-driven, and always, always, conformist. Wrong thought is imaginative, provisional, often fantastic, and no respecter of fixed beliefs."

And then a cheap advertisement for Chopra merch disguised as a conclusion:

5. "Thirty years ago no right-thinking physician accepted the mind-body connection as a valid, powerful mode of treatment. Today, no right-thinking physician (or very few) would trace physical illness to sickness of the soul, or accept that the body is a creation of consciousness, or tell a patient to change the expression of his genes. But soon these forms of wrong thinking will lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of those professional stigmatizers, the skeptics."