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earilest skeptical memories

gfunkusarelius

Critical Thinker
gfunkusarelius
Joined
Apr 10, 2006
Messages
442
hi all,
sorry if this had been done, but i thought it would be fun to hear people's formative memories...sort of "when did you become skeptical?"

for me, the first thing that sticks in my head is very innocuous, but i guess it often starts that way. it was a commercial for an otc drug- i think it was excedrin. anyway, the commercial compared two other otc drugs, and they said something like "drug one has only aspirin and drug two has only aspirin and acetaminophen, but excedrin has a third ingredient that makes it work better." and i thought to myself "what is that third ingredient and why didnt they name it?" i did a little research and found out it was caffeine...now granted, i understand why this can help, i even use it myself, but i knew even at that age that caffeine had a bum rap and it was obvious to me why they didnt name it.

hopefully some of you have better stories than mine, but hey, i had to share if i was asking for yours.
 
Uri Geller.

It's his fault. I've always had the "Well, I think there's something real with all this psychic, telepathic, channeling, ouija board, ghosty, life after death, alternative health, religion" stuff. Also fell into the trap of "well if uri geller is on tv then there MUST be something in it" and if Derek Acorah knows all this stuff about a building he's never visited, then "there must be something in it". I also had a book as a nipper called "Secrets of the Unknown" which pretty much sold the Bermuda Triangle as the truth, and said that razor blades placed under pyramids mysteriously appear sharpened. I never really questioned it.

One day I typed "Is Uri Geller a fake" into google, and stumbled upon the jref site.

I like to think it was a changing point in my life. I look at things a lot differently now.
 
i had the whole "time life mysteries of the unknown" series. and while i took most of that stuff skeptically, i guess it was a little different, i just took it as entertainment.

as for the "it's on tv, there must be something to it"- i think that is huge for a lot of people. another skeptical eye-opener for me was seeing these infomercials get busted...i was thinking "well there must be something to it because you cant just go on tv and lie" wow, was i wrong. when i saw the first infomercial companies getting busted for selling total flimflammery, it was a bit of a seachange. i realized you really can say whatever you want...for a while anyway
 
I was exposed to a lot of woo literature as a youngster - thinking back there must have been a lot of books on ghosts, ESP, UFOs etc laying around my primary school - all of which presented the subject matter as fact. I remember reading a book at age 10 called something like "Strange Energies, Hidden Powers". It was like Woo 101 for kids, pyramid power, Kirlian photos, curses, mind controlling computers, the lot! All presented as a factual "scientific" look at real phenomena. As a teen I found Charles Berlitz and Budd Hopkins. I wasnt stupid, I could see that these books werent well written and that they relied on assumptions that they didnt test, but I just thought that reflected on the authors rather than the subject. I had encountered some absolute drivel that I rejected at once (Erich Von Daniken and some Florida housewife who was in psychic contact with the aliens on the other side of the Bermuda Triangle for instance.)

However I didnt start really applying skeptical critical thinking in my life until after reading some of the work of Phillip Klass and Arthur C Clarke. Mr Klass rubbed my nose in all the wooly thinking I was having to do to take the UFO abduction phenomenon seriously.

I felt seriously stupid, because I had allowed myself to believe in something because I would have liked it to be true, and I realized with hindsight that I had not applied my judgement to my belief. I had fooled myself.

I dont think you can really be happy in life unless you can separate fantasy from reality. I'm very glad I learned how.
 
When I was a kid, I loved reading all those great Charles Fort sort of things; back in the 50s. At the same time, I had a great interest in science and natural history.
I recall taking one of my grade-school teachers to task for referring to the "Walleyed Pike" as the top predator in US fresh water lakes. I pointed out that perhaps he meant the Northern Pike, or even the Muskellunge....I didn't score any points.

Anothe grade-school teacher (a biblical literalist; dunno how she snuck into a Catholic school) went on about how dinosaurs could not have existed, as they were not mentioned in the Bible. Being a huge dinosaur fan, I immediately objected. "But Miss (insert name, I don't remember), what about all those skeletons!" "They must have been plant formations."

Even in 6th grade, I realized that was a lot of hooey.
 
As I said earlier, most of my 'belief' (if you can call themg aus that) were the "ghost flying saucers sucking people down into the bermuda triangle via astral projection type".

On the opposite side of the coin, I was lucky enough never to have any creationist nonsense imposed me at all. The schools I attended were not church affiliated schools, and my family only ever went to church for funerals, weddings and christenings - and even then only under duress. I was only ever taught the evolutionist point of view and took it as read that everyone believed the same. The very first time I encountered a creationist point of view was in my early twenties. My girlfriends parents were practising Jehovas Witnesses and a bit of it seems to have rubbed off on her. I was sitting with her and a friend and just happened to hear a snippet of a conversation between the two which went something along the lines of "...and they say we are descended from monkeys, I mean how ridiculous is that?".

I was a student at the time and was bit under the influence of something naughty, hence I couldn't really articulate my amazement at her comment. But you still had to peel me off the wall. I really was amazed that anyone could hold that point of view in the 20th century. Talked to her a lot about it once I had straightened out but it was a solid, etched in stone belief in her. Sadly since then I now know it's a lot more prevalent than I even dared to imagine.

I learned a lot of important lessons from that period in my life. One of which was "if you buy a Honda Accord from a Jehovas Witness, always check the exhaust"
 
Bikewer said:
Being a huge dinosaur fan, I immediately objected. "But Miss (insert name, I don't remember), what about all those skeletons!" "They must have been plant formations."
Click to expand...


Unbelievable!

I too had books as a kid about UFOs and mystic powers. And a Guiness Book of World Records that had entries about what's-his-name being unbelievably good at ESP. And of course I accepted it all. What kid doesn't? Not many, still. That's what we're up against.

I didn't start to doubt much at all (but I didn't really think about it much) until I was 18. "God" was actually the first thing I started doubting; then, I had a biology professor in college who was a skeptic, and discovered sci.skeptic on Usenet about the same time. Suddenly I was able to correct label as "hooey" a bunch of stuff that I had just filed away.
 
Hrm..

I can't recollect any particular skeptical experiences that turned my life around, but I do remember becoming more and more doubtful over the entire religion thing. People kept talking about this "god", yet I couldn't see what exactly that "god" was. So, no evidence... Over the years, I realized the religion makes people do a bunch of silly/violent/irresponcible things, and gradually expanded my skepticism from religion to paranormal, UFOs, ghosts, etc.,.
 
When I was 13~14 I read every UFO book in the library. Then I made them order more. I was totally hooked. I mean, they even had photographs. How could it not be real? Well, I had read George Adamski's first book a couple of times, and eagerly awaited his second. Once it did, I began to have that sinking feeling that I'd been duped. In the first book he meets the aliens. In the second, they take him for a ride in their flying saucer out to one of the moons of Jupiter, where he supposedly meets jesus....D'oh! I believe that was the last UFO book I ever read.

As far as 'god' is concerned, we all went to church when I was a (younger!) child, and seeing all the adults firmly believing it and telling me it was true, I naturally assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Then I ran into a kid who didn't believe. I was shocked. Why didn't he believe? I mean, why would all these grown-ups believe something that only might be true? And the seeds of doubt were sown. One day at Sunday school, the 'teacher' stated that jesus had to die for our sins. I asked her how his dying could have affected anyone else's sins. She explained that he took our sins with him when he died. I remember discussing it with my pal after 'class', and thinking the whole thing was more than a little fishy. Years later, I finally got around to reading the bible (actually, I think I was still heavily into the UFO mythology, and read the bible looking for evidence of alien encounters after reading "Chariots of the Gods"). I read the whole thing, and was absolutely stunned. How could anyone in their right mind believe word one of that crap? For a few years after that, although the biblical god was out of the question, I still had the nagging feeling that "there must be something out there. Some higher power". As the years went by, and the evidence of any 'higher power' continued to be conspicuous by it's absence, I finally settled on what I considered to be the only logical conclusion. There isn't one.
 
I was in grade school. A Catholic elementary school. Nuns would talk about all the things Jesus did, this and that. I never really bought the stories, I thought of them as fables, etc. They would talk about how some people would have pieces of the actual cross, etc. they really believed this stuff and I thought it was improbable.

I remember being pretty surprised the first time I heard Pilot was an actual person in history.

This experience really didn't make me become a skeptic, as that actually was later on when I would watch those stupid shows on tv "That's incredible" and "In Search of..." I saw Radi debunk one of the guys claiming supernatural powers and then realized that there are a lot of scam artists out there.

last week my 4 year old looked at me and out of nowhere said, "Jesus isn't real, right daddy?" I had to smile.
 
My earliest skeptical memory was some PBS show (probably Nova) where I was introduced to Uri Geller and James Randi at the same time. "Bend, bend!"
 
I turned from 100% unquestioning believer to critical-thinking skeptic literally overnight.

Until I was 15 a was a complete sucker for anything related to ghosts and psychic powers. I loved reading 'factual' stories and hauntings, ouija board experiences, and 'majick'. It's shocking how much woo can be packed into teen magazines, some of my earliest exposure to ghost stories presented as fact was in copies of Mizz magazine.

One day in an RE lesson about ethics, the teacher showed us a video of Benny Hinn using 'spiritual healing' on members of a studio audience and periodically passing around collection buckets. The audience eagerly shoved handfuls of money into the buckets after seeing severely ill people being miraculously cured.

Cured? Some of the 'healings' looked convincing, but some were clearly not. Benny Hinn attempted to 'heal' a girl with breathing problems, who thanked him profusely for his help whilst clearly still suffering from the symptoms of her illness. A few minutes of online research showed not only that Benny Hinn was incapable of curing anyone of anything, but his attempts to do so were both financially and physically damaging to the patients.

It was a potent lesson learned - that the paranormal should be questioned, and unfounded belief in the paranormal should not be considered harmless fun.
 
<GrandpaSimpson> It was during my training as a scribe to the court of Pharaoh Seti I, Ramses II's dad, the king who began the planning for the pyramids as part of the first Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. BTW, you haven't seen the pyramids unless you've seen 'em topped with the paraboloidal radio dishes they were designed to support! Mighty pretty. Anyhow, I caught one of the high priests... </GrandpaSimpson>

What? Real-world facts you wanted? Okay, I relent. It might've been around age four, when a religious aunt informed me that "our kind aren't animals." Look, I've got paws, eyes, legs, same stuff as the other animals. But I'm not one? Right.

She was a very nice person but I can't imagine living with such a world view.
 
interesting how most of the responses are about religion so far. i guess i was skeptical about it pretty early on even tho i was indoctrinated (for example, i remember not really being christian anymore but when someone said they didnt believe in sin i was totally baffled), but i guess i consider religion something that is so inherently faith based that i dont really even list it as very worthy of skepticism. either you choose to believe it or you dont. thats why i always find it ironic when CTists read something like the davinci code or the gnostic gospels and start talking about how jesus was really a hippie and never claimed to be the only son of God, etc, and i am thinking "wait, do you really believe any of the gospels?"

anyway, i became very skeptical of christianity when i started considering that they preached of a god who would punish someone for eternity just because they didnt believe in or worship "him"... i would never wish that on my worst enemy, so i guess the old adage applied "with friends like that, who needs enemies?"
 
I debunked Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and extrapolated from that to include the easter bunny and then debunked god (for the time being). I suppose one of my earliest skeptical moments was when I figured out that Joseph of the bible was the likely father of Jesus if you can call that skeptical. It was one of those eureka moments when I knew I was right and felt elated so I still remember it.
 
My grandmother use to tell me when I was sick that she would call Tele-evangelists’s to make me better. When I improved, she would attribute the healing to them, and for me to thank the power of god for feeling better. I didn’t believe her and it made it difficult for me to trust adults as I came to realize adults didn’t have all the answers, but acted as if they did. This is the same grandmother that disciplined my brother for being left-handed.
 
Age 5, trying in vain to convince the kids at the school bus stop that there was no Santa Claus "But I SAW my father bring the presents into the garage and hide them!"

The same year, I had a first play date at the home of a kid who insisted that his stuffed animals talked to him. After I insisted that he show me talkiing teddy bears, he cried and I left in disgust and walked a mile and a half home.

That was the year my parents stopped taking us kids to church each week. I think they knew they had a problem on their hands.
 
Up to the age of 14 I was taken to church (chapel, really - United Reform Church) regularly by my mother - Sunday School etc.
Anyway one Sunday there was a guest preacher who based his sermon on the 10% myth. "We only use 10% of our brain therefore Darwin is wrong and godidit". Now, I didn't know enough to debunk the 10% myth but I did know enough about evolution and have enough critical thinking to recognise a bull***t argument.
I was already having doubts about the whole organised religion thing (atheism was to come much later) so shortly after that I told Mum that I didn't want to go go to church anymore - this met with no real objection (partly because I think Dad was at least agnostic) and that was that for me and church (excepting weddings and funerals).
 
wow, that is AMAZING logic...we only use 10% of our brains, so anything that we percieve to conflict with the bible is due to our lack of capacity to utilize our brain. did god cauterize the enlightenment portion of our brains after adam's fall from grace?
 
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