From Sky and Telescope Magazine, Nov., 1981
The author has produced a useful, informative, interesting, and well-written work. Furthermore, he has created that rarity of rarities - a book about UFOs that's a lot of fun to read. Most treatments of the subject, whether pro or con, are filled with detail, take themselves much too seriously, and are utterly dull and boring.
Sheaffer is a free-lance writer who has done quite a bit of UFO investigating on his own. He is a good writer, and to judge by what is in this book, he knows his astronomy as well. Rather than bewilder the reader with hundreds of unrelated items, he takes a small number of the most celebrated UFO flaps and discusses them thoroughly.
One's interest is seized as early as page 4, where former President Jimmy Carter's 1969 UFO sighting is taken up. Just about everybody knows Carter saw a UFO, but few seem to know the sequel to the story. It took Sheaffer a lot of effort, but he finally tracked down evidence establishing the correct date of the incident. That done, it was easy to show that Venus was at the same altitude and in the same direction as the UFO at the time and date the observation was made. This incident illustrates an important point: not everyone who files a UFO report is obscure and unreliable. In fact, witnesses are usually sober, reliable, and sincere, and often have some standing in the community...
The UFO "movement" has had a lnog, complex, raucous history, and the author threads his way neatly through the tangle of acronyms that litter the organizational UFO scene. Here is probably the most useful summary in print of a neglected side of a complex phenomenon....
Sheaffer has coined the interesting term "jealous phenomenon" to cover the whimsical behavior of UFO's, ESP, and similar oddities. This "jealousy" is the critical difference between UFO's and legitimate, albeit poorly understood, scientific phenomena. Your typical unidentified flying object is very choosy about when and where it will appear. Apparently, its behavior is governed by an overriding concern for human thoughts and emotions - it is determined to thwart all human attempts to verify its existence......
All in all, Sheaffer sees UFOlogy as a powerful social movement which, fundamentally, is a reaction against science and reason. He blends this view with specific cases and general background in this dandy work, always providing references so the reader can check up on him. If you're only going to have one book on UFO's, this is the one....
From _SUCCESS_ Magazine, November, 1988, p. 4:
Editor's Note by Scott DaGarmo
Resentment Against Achievement -
A Motivational Tour de Force
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Those who hate achievement have made their mark throughout
history.
Angry mobs inflamed by envy destroyed the magnificent works
of ancient civilization. In their insane riots, these madmen even
dismembered the statues we still treasure for their beauty,
despite their missing limbs.
Today we see the hatred of achievement in slashed tires,
vandalized classrooms, and sabotaged office machines.
We see it in a hostile suspicion toward "greedy
capitalists," who are depicted as exploiters rather than what
they really are - the creators of jobs and wealth.
We see it in a surly animosity toward managers and owners,
who are reviled as enemies despite the fact that they would like
nothing better than to inspire the resentful with a desire to
achieve. Instead of seeing employers as powerful economic allies,
the resentful scorn their values, then blame "the system" on
their not being able to find work.
We see it among intellectuals, who seethe with jealousy at
the sight of individuals less educated than they making
bigger incomes.
We see it in lower-class toughs, whose poverty is "an
inevitable consequence of the achievement-hating values they
preserve and (forcibly) transmit."
All this and more makes up the thesis of a new book by
Robert Sheaffer entitled "Resentment Against Achievement".
Subtitled "Understanding the Assault Upon Ability," the book
crackles with ideas that others have failed to perceive, or have
been too timid to express.
The rhetoric of resentment is highly polished, and achievers
are often left speechless in its onslaught. Within this book is a
reply to virtually every defense made for the resentful. For
example, says the author, people do not steal because they are
poor. (A fatuous notion when you note that what is stolen today
are not loaves of bread and beans but luxury items like jewelry
and stereos that are fenced for drugs.) Rather, they are poor
because they steal. Sheaffer makes a rational - rather than
moralistic - case that the "upper-class" values of honesty,
reliability, self-discipline, and respect for property are
integral to success for anyone.
Similarly, Sheaffer asserts that what is needed in education
is nothing less than an assault on lower-class culture. Sheaffer
is not talking about genocide, but about a "benign cultural
imperialism" allied at recruiting lower-class members into the
upper classes by teaching them how to succeed.
Don't mistake Sheaffer for a bigoted arch-conservative. He
is a libertarian, with a powerful belief in individual liberties,
free trade, and open opportunity. He has articulated a philosophy
for a complex, urban, high-tech, competitive, entrepreneurial
society - a philosophy that affirms a new-age morality based on
accomplishment.
This book will offend those with rigidly conventional
religious views, and I suggest they do not read it. On the other
hand, those who thrive on the elixir of fresh insights will be
delighted as the author excoriates religion for romanticizing,
and hence perpetuating, economic incompetence. Sheaffer urges the
impoverished to break away from a slave morality that encourages
passivity, and embrace a new morality based on the pride of
achievement.
Today, you don't need to be born wealthy to be perceived as
a member of the higher classes, says Sheaffer. "Those who adopt
higher-class values and ethics will find themselves gradually
accumulating so much money that no one will doubt their status
any longer."
He urges everyone to experience the joy of being achievers,
those fortunate people who "create because of an inner fire
urging them onward."
For all its harsh denunciation of the resentful, this book
is a positive call to action not to harm people but to help them
succeed. Some will see this work as mainly political. But the
author has also written a valuable tour de force of motivation
with a message for us all:
Harboring resentment is self-destructive. It keeps you from
succeeding.
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Book Confronts Christianity with
New Challenge
A new work published by Prometheus Books confronts Christianity with its greatest challenge in many a year. "The Making of the Messiah" by Robert Sheaffer differs from conventional works of Freethinkers by suggesting a radically different picture of the rise of Christianity. The book describes, to use Nietzsche's phrase, "The Birth of Christianity from the Spirit of Resentment." It tells why Christianity could only develop as it did, emerging from the envious anger of the lower classes. It shows how Christian writers altered historical facts to make the new religion "sell" better among those seething with resentment against Roman power and wealth. By looking at the chronological evolution of Christian writings and doctrine, exactly as skeptics investigate contemporary accounts of UFO abductions or psychic wonders, it is possible to infer the kinds of objections that the infant Church must have been struggling to meet, and from these long-suppressed objections deduce probable historical fact. This new perspective radically impacts Biblical criticism, in a manner that Humanists and Freethinkers will wholeheartedly applaud.
"The Making of the Messiah" presents a compelling argument that Jesus was never "crucified" by the Romans, or anyone else. The familiar Gospel account of Jesus' death is termed the "cruci- fiction story." Biblical scholars generally acknowledge that the confusing and contradictory Gospel accounts of Jesus' two trials make absolutely no sense from the perspective of either Roman or Jewish law. Resolving this dilemma, the book presents compelling evidence that Jesus was indeed condemned by the Sanhedrin as stated in Mark 14:64, stoned to death, and hanged on a tree until sundown: the inescapable penalty under the Mosaic law for blasphemers and heretics. All of the ancient Rabbinical texts mentioning Jesus' death are totally consistent in recalling that he was "slain and hanged on a tree." There are even a few passages remaining in the oldest books of the New Testament proclaiming Jesus to have been slain and "hanged on a tree" - for example, Acts 5:30 and Galatians 3:13. These passages are NOT metaphor: they describe the punishment Jesus MUST have suffered if found guilty of the charges he faced! (See Deuteronomy 13:10; 21:22.) How did the cruci-fiction story arise? Several decades after Jesus' execution, when the infant Church sought to recruit converts among the Gentiles, the tale of a Jewish prophet "slain and hanged on a tree" probably failed to excite or inflame the listener. But when the story was changed to have Jesus "crucified" by the Romans, the tale electrified the resentful throughout the vast Empire.
Another subject covered in great detail is Jesus' supposed "Virgin Birth." In recent years even many liberal Christians have been willing to question this highly-dubious claim. They quietly assume that Jesus must have been the natural son of Joseph. What they do not seem to realize is that it is absolutely clear (see Matthew 1:19) that Joseph knew the child was not his, and that he believed Mary to be guilty of adultery. This is abundantly confirmed by a number of other ancient texts, both Christian and Jewish. Therefore, unless Mary's pregnancy is of supernatural origin, she is an adulteress. Tracing the development of Christianity's various accounts of Jesus' origin, it becomes obvious that the "Virgin Birth" fable, which was not taught until nearly a century after Jesus was born, was invented as a "cover story" to mask the shameful reality of Jesus' illegitimate birth. The gospels of Mark and John say nothing whatever about Jesus' birth; the authors of those gospels must have assumed that the reader already knew of Jesus' illegitimacy, which intrudes upon the text in several places. The genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke differ because the former was obviously compiled by someone hostile to the new religion. It lists among Jesus' ancestors some of the most notorious disinherited kings and fallen women of the Davidic line. The problem was fixed in Luke, whose genealogy contains only respectable names. Because bastard children were treated extremely harshly under the Mosaic law, it is not surprising that Jesus chafed at the restrictions The Law placed upon him, claiming the inspiration of a "higher law" from above. Jesus' experience of being "despised and rejected" owing to an accident of birth shaped the very fabric of early Christianity, and drew together under that religion's banner all who chafed at living under The Law.
What set Jesus apart from other Messianic pretenders was the claim that he arose from the dead. The evidence offered in support of this claim is scrutinized in detail. When these accounts are examined in chronological order of composition, in light of long-suppressed Roman-era criticisms, a clear pattern emerges. The earliest accounts make the least-convincing claims of an actual, physical resurrection. Paul sees a vision of a risen Jesus, which is worthless as "evidence" for anything. As time progresses, Christianity's claims that people had sighted an actual, physical risen Jesus become more definite. Many ancient manuscripts of the earliest gospel, Mark, contain absolutely no sightings of a risen Jesus, whose resurrection is merely inferred because his body was not where it had been left. Mark 16:9-20, which describes such sightings, was written years later, to answer objections that nobody actually SAW Jesus after his supposed resurrection. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that the supposed resurrection never occurred.
Robert Sheaffer is the author of "Resentment Against Achievement" (Prometheus, 1988). Laissez Faire Books hails it as "a modern classic," comparing it to the works of H. L. Mencken, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand. Success Magazine writes that "the book crackles with ideas that others have failed to perceive, or have been too timid to express." Sheaffer's first book was "The UFO Verdict" (Prometheus, 1981), a highly-skeptical analysis of UFO mania, about which Sky and Telescope magazine said, "if you're only going to have one book on UFOs, this is the one." He is a regular columnist for The Skeptical Inquirer.
I contributed the articles The Philadelphia Experiment and Unidentified Flying Objects. In fact, I wrote everything that begins with the letter "U".
I contributed the article Unidentified Flying Objects, in Vol. 27, on p. 159.
I contributed the paper An Examination of Claims that Extraterrestrial Visitors to Earth Are Being Observed. Other contributors to the volume, taken from papers presented to a Conference at the University of Maryland, include Freeman Dyson (Jim Oberg and I had lunch with him), Sebastian von Hoerner, Ronald Bracewell, Jill Tarter, and the late Cyril Ponnamperuma.
This was the now-famous conference organized by John Mack, Budd Hopkins, David E. Pritchard, and David Jacobs. I contributed the paper A Skeptical Perspective on UFO Abductions, on p. 382. When C. D. B. Bryan wrote up his account of this conference, Close Encounters of the Fourthg Kind, so beloved of UFOlogists, he somehow forgot to mention my paper, as well as several others he apparently didn't like.
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