There is no point in being gullible. What is so special about believing things that it is more righteous than questioning things?
The number of times we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes and later felt sheepish for having been so easily misled has turned some New Zealanders into sceptics. Some have taken it seriously enough to join the New Zealand Skeptics. As someone who has recently thought it worthwhile to join this organisation, this writer thought it would be useful to define what it is that makes me a skeptic:
I did not know what to expect at my first Skeptics Conference. I enjoyed it, however, and was told several times, “We don’t see many young people these days.” I left the conference thinking I wanted to do something to convince young people that skepticism was a good idea. I was confronted with the fact that these days, it seems, skepticism is not hip. I got into a conversation with an even younger friend, a girl who I liked at the time, about this topic. She assured me that skepticism was definitely not cool. She said there was no need to go around attacking people’s spirituality. I thought this was odd, as nothing at the conference had been about attacking anyone’s religious beliefs; it was about alternative medicines, scientific documentary-making and other things. It was not about poking fun at religion. I tried to tell my friend this, but she stopped talking to me. I made a note to myself not to go after younger women…
For a while I was on the back foot. I didn’t discuss the conference with anyone, and became despondent with the fact that no-one I knew supported skepticism or seemed to approve of it. Then, months later, I got to thinking: what right have people got to be so affronted by skepticism? Why is it the enemy? What is so special about believing things that it is more righteous than questioning things?
I was reminded of teachers that had tried to challenge me. I had had a principal when I was around 12 who had told children to think for themselves, and to challenge everything he said. The next year, in a music magazine of all places (it was RTR Countdown Magazine), I read an article that said that people should question everything, and that just because something was written in a book or paper it didn’t make it true. This was to stick with me, and came in handy when friends and family came up with ludicrous theories based on misleading information they found on the internet.
Several years ago I found a skeptical appraisal of the New Age movement by Martin Gardner, which turned out to be a collection of his articles from the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Having been so prepared to accept New Age beliefs, I was confronted with all the ways that it was phoney, baloney, and unreliable: mostly all chicanery and deception. One point here is to confirm that skepticism is not the enemy of religion: I had read a book when I was younger by a Christian author, who made many of the same points about New Age fraud.
I went on to read more of the Skeptical Inquirer, and some books by some of its founders, such as The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and The Mask of Nostradamus and The Faith-healers by James Randi. One overall point now stood out in my mind, mostly thanks to the Carl Sagan book: the world has been duped many times, and people are regularly buying into not only fraudulent, but terribly dangerous, beliefs. We’ve supported and condoned witch-burnings, holocausts, crusades, and the like. The same gullibility sees us sucked in and ripped off by the media, by astrologers, homeopaths, gurus, diet fads, acupuncturists, chiropractors, internet information, vitamin supplements, bee-pollen salesmen, exercise machines to give us instant abs, loans to consolidate our debts, politicians and spin, bargains… the list goes on.
It is being said now that we have been misled about low-fat diets: that is what is killing us. High saturated fat diets saw far lower rates of cancer than we have today living off muesli, snack bars and vegetable oil. Homeopathy has been shown to be just water. Nostradamus was a fraud; Randi’s book will tell you that, most books will hail his powers. Many cheap imitation products are genuinely inferior quality, it is crucial to know whether it’s worth the trade-off on price. There was something Carl Sagan said, although he probably didn’t make it up: “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”
Many students now do their research on the internet, as is mentioned on a recent broadband ad. But how reliable is the information they find? Many students in Australia now are handing in assignments that are simply wrong, because they found information online; it was just wrong information. One young man has a solution to this: he checks ten websites, and if they all agree then it must be true(?).
Why did we not question the low-fat diets, when our grandparents had cooked in dripping and lard, and were still alive at an old age?
When a documentary is screened on television, whether it’s about the Moon-landing being a hoax, the 9/11 attacks being an inside job or Dare to Believe being hosted by a genuine-article channeller, we just accept it. The camera can’t lie. No, but facts can be distorted. When Bush told the world that Iraq was linked with al-Qaeda, and had weapons of mass destruction, and failed to produce evidence for either claim, Britain and Australia didn’t hesitate to support his war. There is nothing about being a skeptic that would make one automatically be left or right-wing, however the more wary among us, in fact, many New Zealanders, were highly suspicious of Bush’s claims.
Perhaps if we were less willing to trust people’s word, and more willing to critically analyse things, we would be less prone to having the wool pulled over our eyes by the media, by politicians, by cult leaders, salespeople, gurus, ‘natural health practitioners’, etc. We would have rejected the witch-burnings (which happened fairly recently), abolished slavery sooner, given women and dark-skinned people equal rights sooner. We would not support unjust wars; we would not be sucked into debt by scam artists, psychics, loan sharks, and it might even be harder for people to convince us to take up stupid things like smoking and buy food with artificial sweeteners that are more dangerous than sugar. We would not buy bottled water because not only is it no safer, the oestrogen mimics and other chemicals leaking from the plastic into our water are toxic. Water’s free anyway, just turn on the tap. We would not be anti genetic-engineering based purely on comparisons with Frankenstein (a fictional character), and we would be aware that when people try to market chemical-free foods to us that everything is chemicals, therefore the product is a farce, playing on irrational fears.
If we were all skeptics, we would all be better off. Does skepticism set itself up against religion, or spirituality? No. It challenges people to question things and get to the bottom of claims, to check their veracity. If claims turn out to be false and misleading, we should all be prepared to give them up. It seems silly to hold onto some belief when we know it’s wrong, or probably wrong. On that note, perhaps that’s why religious people fear skeptics: we might expose something they believe in as a lie. Well, if we do that, so? The mere concept that someone would rather go on believing a lie than be told the truth is the ultimate irony: if the things that comfort us, whether faith-healers or channellers or belief in a leader purely because of their religious persuasion, are scandalous, we would all be better off if we know the truth.
Skeptics place truth above comfort, and carry on the long-standing human traditions of curiosity, fascination with the world and universe, rational thinking (thank that for all our technological accoutrements, like the machine that printed this magazine). Skeptics hear strange ideas and say, “That doesn’t sound right”, and won’t settle on an opinion until they have examined every angle and found a solid basis for a conclusion. Because of that, some skeptics are in a perpetual state of bewilderment, and appear to sit on the fence for their entire lives, on such issues as whether or not there’s a god. And that’s integrity. That’s placing a high value on the truth and placing strict criteria on what can count as such. We might hesitate eternally before making our minds up, but that’s because we think it’s important to only believe things that can be proven. And, finishing on the witch-burning topic because it has a nice, high impact, and also is true: it was a skeptic that finally had the courage to speak out against the trials and declare that it was all a farce; an intensely greedy and cruel one at that. Those who think it would be nicer if we all just accept things and don’t argue should know that they are of the kind that would have condoned the witch-hunts; probably would have joined in; it’s not nice to rock the boat, is it?
Behave, be polite. Don’t question anything. Mummy and Daddy know best; Pastor knows best; Prime Minister knows best. Don’t think; just sleep. There, good.
And on a last note for the religious people who think we should just go along with things, who find skepticism just a wee-bit too offensive and confrontational. This is especially for you. Ponder this: why did God give us brains to think with?
Why think? Because you can; why question? Because being lied to sucks, and can be fatal; if not for you, for someone else.
