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How we became skeptics

How did you become a skeptic

  • Total voters
    163
I was born into a conservative, fundamentalist Baptist family, so I always the logical consistency, if not the accuracy, of my current militant atheist views. I have sort of wobbled between the two extremes for a long time, ever since I read an article in Discover magazine detailing evolutionary morality. I have hidden my true beliefs well, although I have been coming out more about it in my social life recently. It is all I can do to keep it hidden from my parents until I am out of their house.
 
Always skeptical, despite wishful thinking

I've always been fascinated by a lot of woo stuff. I'd love for it to be true, but I just cannot move from wishing to belief without some kind of evidence.

This is what pisses me off about so many woos who claim that we skeptics are close-minded and "want to disprove them". That's not the case at all. I don't want to disprove paranormal events, I want to prove them.
 
The religion stuff never made sense...the fall of man because some woman ate an apple? Original sin? But as soon as I heard about evolution, I understood it.

Religion is a clever trick--shutting people up with threats and obtaining allegience with promises of eternal reward. The more I learned about the brain and consciousness and evolution-the more obvious it seemed that souls are an "illusion". I had veered from religion to New Age beliefs because I had been taught that truth can come from faith and feelings. But all those crazy cults that kill themselves or others show that there doesn't seem to be any consistent truths. Plus humans fool themselves so easily.

I just like truth. I like truth I can understand for myself. I love science because it doesn't require belief or going through some spiritual leader or book to find it. I think that "life is a test" crap is damaging to trusting people and it encourages the ignorant notion that truth can come from faith.
 
As a kid I pretty much ate up all forms of woo. I owned a rabbit's foot, read horoscopes, believed in UFOs and psychics and all that stuff. Mainly because:

(1) it seemed cool and interesting. It still does, in the sense that I can enjoy science fiction. By contrast, I don't think my science teachers (and/or the administrators who designed the curriculum) did a very good job of presenting science as a method for learning about the world. Instead we did a lot of memorization of periodic tables and taxonomy.

and (2) I had never really encountered skepticism. Sure, my parents might have scoffed at some of the superstitious stuff, but I don't think I really grasped the idea that millions of supposedly intelligent adults would believe in something without a good reason.

By the end of my teenage years I learned better and pretty much stopped believing in any of it, but I never really considered myself a skeptic and probably wasn't even aware of the term until I stumbled across the JREF site a couple of years ago.
 
GreyPilgrim said:
It was typing "Derek Acorah Proved To Be A Fraud" which got me to an archived commentary link on the Randi site (or it may have been Uri Geller - can't remember)

Was always of the naive opinion "well if it WAS all bull***t, they wouldn't be shown with such conviction on TV, would they?"...How wrong I was...

I hate to sound sycophantic, but the site has opened my eyes and made me question everything. Three cheers for the Randi Forum. Hip Hip...
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Yes, Randi has been instrumental in my "conversion"--I am very grateful. And he's so much more interesting than the invisible sky daddy and John Edwards. I think it's really great to know that people can stumble across this website by accident and have their whole thinking changed. If I was into hero worship--the amazing one would top my list. He shows us that information isn't the realm of mystics--we all can know the "secrets". I love that. He could exploit that knowledge...and he sure receives a lot of guff from those trying to "kill the messenger"--but he jauntily carries making a slow but steady difference that ripples out in far reaching ways.
 
I was born with a skeptical mind but not enough to keep me from being temporarily sort of duped by woo of various types due to being skeptical of authority and not skeptical of the counterculture. I see skepticism as a learning process. You learn how to be skeptical yet are never completely free of unskeptical thoughts. Perhaps it is only that you have to learn to weigh data better.
edited to add: You might be able to push or pull people in the right direction but the rest is up to them. People will respond to certain types of dialog and will resist change if other types of dialog are attempted.
 
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Religion was never a major part of my life. Yet I could see other people having strange religious beliefs. Read bits of the bible and saw how shallow it all was.

Believed in ESP as a teenager. But then a certain person got discredited and so I had to reject that.

Apart from that never got into much woo beliefs. Slowly taught myself how to think. Still learning.
 
This has given me some hope when it comes to my debates with believers.

It seems like a common theme in many of these stories that allot of us were believers before we were skeptics. So I guess my attempts are not without merit. I can only hope to be a part of the reason someone else becomes a skeptic.
 
Well, I wasn't born a skeptic, but was certainly raised that way. My mom is pretty woo-ish, but my dad had a hairtrigger BS detector, and whenever I'd run to him with some amazing bit of woo, he'd promptly deflate it. I don't remember how long it took him to get me to give up on the most popular wooish belief - that people have free will - but that was the final nail. He made me understand that nothing happens without there having been a prior cause, and even if we do not always readily perceive or understand the cause, it is nevertheless still there.

My mom claims that a day or so after he died, the PC in their bedroom went off in the middle of the night and started playing music from Edvard Grieg's Pier Gynt Suite, a piece she says he always loved (though I don't remember him ever playing it on the stereo...). She had no explanation for it, so she of course attributed it to his somehow communicating with her.

"Mom, please. You know how he hated computers. He always thought you were up to no good whenever you were on it. He couldn't be persuaded to try to use it. And now that he's dead, you believe that his disembodied soul or whatever figured out how to play music on it, instead of through the stereo? If he could figure out how to make the computer play Pier Gynt, why couldn't he figure out how to make it say, 'Hi, honey, it's me, having a great time, wish you were here...'? What do you think he would say if he could hear you talking like this?"
 
You don't have an option for 'skeptical believer'.

Even when I was a believer in spirit and all that, reading tarot and stuff, I was still skeptical in my approach. I think of skeptisim as an attitude - a frame of mind - a need to continually question what you read, see, hear, and most of all think.

This desire to learn more about how things were supposed to work, and whether they actually did work that way, made me quite unpopular with my peers for a long time. It took a long time to start making headway in gathering the information I needed, and while open to the idea that someday someone might win Mr Randi's million, or we may find proof of the existence of a soul separate from our bodies, I have rejected much of what I used to believe.

That's what I think skepticism is about. Some day I may find evidence that persuades me dramatically in another direction. I don't know. I'll live each day with what knowledge I do have, and continue to question everything that I think I know and understand.
 
I was raised a Baptist mostly because my mother is very much involved in her church. She still plays the piano for her church and is considered an important member of the church.

In my teen years, I started attending the Assembly of God Church because several of my school friends were going there. I found it to be very similar to the Baptist Church in most ways; with the exception of speaking in tounges and healing by the laying of the hands. In my later teen years, I even briefly dated a Mormon and a Jehovah's Witness, and accasionally went to those churches as a guest. Of course, I never intended to actually become a member of those churches and my short relationship with those two ladies was over for that reason.

During high school and college, I was a member of a Judo school, and of course the intructor was very much into all sorts of metaphysical things. He even suggested many different kinds of books to read. Metaphysical books that he claimed would open up our minds. One of the first woo books I remember him suggesting was "The Third Eye" by Lobsang Rampa. I loved the book and later read many others by the same author as well as many other books by other metaphysical authors. In time, I had a library of several hundred woo books.

I stopped going to church, but developed my own blend of christian belief mixed with a good helping of metaphysical woo.

Oddly enough, during all this time, I had a great interest in science and read many science books as well. It's amazing how the mind can make it all seem logical at the time.

It was the science that made me a Skeptic. People like Sagan, Randi, Assimov, and Clarke helped me see the truth. When I really started to use critical thinking, my world of woo just fell apart. The fairy tales have been gone now for over eighteen years. They have been replaced by clarity.
 
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steenkh said:
And got super powers?
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Yes... it left me with the amazing power of transformation. Every time I walk down the street I turn into a saloon.

Badda Bing!

Thank you, ladies and germs. I'll be here all week.
 
well, i voted "turned" because i started out "open" to all the supernatural wonders, but then i grew up. it might sound arrogant and disrespectful, but i think it comes down largely to maturing. some people's thoughts (to varying degrees on varying topics) never mature. my parents and friends who are intelligent, rational adults in most topics become strangely childlike when they are confronted about some sort of supernatural belief they hold- they turn into kids who want to stay up an hour longer and play with their toys.

so for me, it just seems logical that when i didnt know better and i was less experienced in the world, i was able to cling to unfounded beliefs and when i got older, i saw lack of evidence many of the claims i had taken as fact when younger.
 
Religion was never a big part of my immediate family's life, even though we were living in cities and towns where church is prevalent and people were "exepected" to go. Mom tried to get us (my brothers and I) to go to church a few times, but we were pretty rowdy and always left with alot of questions. "Why this" and "I don't understand that". Basically doing whatever we could to show that we were bored and didn't want to go back.

So I remember being in my teens getting more and more sick of religion, because I was expected to take it seriously, yet not understanding how belief in a Christian god was somehow better than belief in Odin or Zeus.

Then, I found the JREF and spent alot of time browsing through the forums, reading the arguments people would present and, really looking at my own critical thinking skills and personal feelings. And I guess that was when my skepticism became permanent and I became more vocal.
 
I actually did have a defining moment in my life, though it did not result in an instantaneous transformation into being a skeptic.

I was raised in a quasi-catholic family and attended a parochial school from grades 2 through 6. At the time I believed pretty much all the silly stuff that they threw at me, because hey, they were adults and they obviously knew what they were talking about. I also had a fledgling interest in things such as ESP and UFOs, because as another poster said, it just seemed so cool.

My defining moment happened during a 5th grade science class where we were learning about the solar system. The teacher, Mrs. Rousi (interestingly, my brain is still devoting a portion of its efforts to storing her name over 30 years later) drew the standard picture of the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. on the blackboard and told how the planets all circled around the sun. Yes, this was a progressive Catholic school that actually accepted that Earth was not at the center.

Anyway, I raised my hand and asked a rather simple question: What keeps the planets in their orbits? Why don't they just fly off?

I really don't think a quick explanation of gravitational attraction would have been too much of a reach for a room full of 5th graders, but Mrs. Rousi either didn't want to go that route or maybe she didn't know the answer. But without missing a beat, she replied that it was because, "that's just the way God made it."

I immediately thought, "Hey, wait a minute... she doesn't know the answer. She's making this up!" As I said, I did not instantly become a full-blooded skeptic at the moment, but that little exchange got me thinking that maybe, just maybe, some of what the adults were saying wasn't true.

By my early teens I had become very uncomfortable with religion, but was still holding on to some of the other woos, primarily ESP. Again, this was primarily because I thought it would be so freakin' cool if it worked. I really can't pinpoint the moment when I realized that ESP and the likes were baseless, but I'd say that by the time I got to college I was pretty well entrenched in my skeptical ways, though I didn't know there was a name for it.
 
I was a big believer before I became a skeptic. I was fascinated by UFOs, magic, astral projection, ancient advanced civilizations, you name it. Of course I was also a geeky adolescent who was heavily into Science Fiction. I didn't become a skeptic overnight, but gradually grew out of the need for all these "crutch" beliefs. I mean what geeky, outcast, adolescent doesn't want super powers or special knowledge?

Studying real science definately helped the process but I think it was more of a matter of just growing up.
 
I grew out of religious belief by reading about real science. That's what strikes me about woo-woo believers, they're physically adults yet they want to live in a child's fantasy world.

By real science, I don't mean inventions or theorems, I mean the scientific approach, the assumptions of naturalism, the problems of observation and bias, why things that we commonly think are so really aren't.

Hopper:
I veer from feeling immensely liberated to finding the lack of an afterlife depressing
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So do I. If there's more to it than three score years and ten, then I want to find it, but I'm not going to switch off my brain first.
 
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