I’d also like to say “Welcome!” to you, jdhammer. I think I remember your name from the old Loose Change forum, but I do not remember you as being one of the utter nutters.
From the posts you’ve made here already, I’d say you’ll fit in very well here, and you have already provided valuable insight into the mind of a truther.
Don’t ever feel like you are an outsider for having once been a truther. You’ll find that lots of JREF members once believed in weird things - from psychic powers and astrology, to Bigfoot and aliens. Many skeptics, such as I, have had similar wake-up-moments to yours.
That moment can happen when you realise that the only thing holding your theory together is your will to believe it, rather than all the evidence in front of you.
LC forumites like to say that we’re closed-minded sheeple. They could not be more wrong. Skepticism is nothing to do with having fixed beliefs. Rather, it is the absence of superstition; the absence of Confirmation Bias; the absence of a pre-formed opinion. These absences allow the scientific testing of a hypothesis with an “open mind”, and, although that term has been tarnished by truthers and woo-woos alike, I’ve taken it back and given it a polish.
Skeptics are often knowledgeable people, in that they are aware of many facts, but, I am claiming, it is an absence of beliefs that gives skeptics the ability to judge evidence based on its own merits. Truthers, as the clichéd X-files poster said, “want to believe”. Skeptics are free to learn.
/me wonders how she ended up on this soap-box.
Wake-up-moment stories remind us of their special feeling that is hard to describe. What seems to happen is that a light is switched on and facts simultaneously fall into place. These images settle into a clearer view of the world than we could have imagined. Many of us have experienced big wake-up-moments, but I, for one, also feel a bit like that when reading, for example, Gumboot’s
recent post, or many of T.A.M.’s or Arkan Wolfshade’s posts – I love it when the facts fall into place.
Again, welcome, jdhammer. I’m glad to have you amongst us, and to have heard your story.
