An excellent statement advocating skepticism. I have a long post that I made to Christian Forums about skepticism, what it is, and what it is not. I'll post a link here if this thread seems to generate enough interest. The basic point I'll transcribe her now is, unfortunately about atheism and religiousity. A lot of vocal skeptics are also vocal skeptics and that - IMO - tends to turn off a lot of relgigious believers from being active with skeptic groups.Jose wrote:Much of the US public seems to have chosen not to trust science. Instead, they trust anti-science. They will eat anything if it promises weight loss, even in the face of hard scientific evidence that it may cause death. When the FDA finally banned ephedra, people complained that their Constitutional rights were being taken away. Of course, the relatives of the people who'd died from it felt that FDA should have banned it sooner, not realizing that Congress, in its "Contract with America" a decade ago, made dietary supplements immune to FDA oversight. This is just about as anti-science, anti-public health as I can imagine, yet it is what we've done, and what Americans seem to have voted to continue.
My personal attempt at reconcilliation is a random number - 30. If I, and a religious believer agree that 29 or 30 topics, be they cryptozoology, homeopathy, theraputic touch, psychics, etc., except for the issue of religious belief - that person is a fellow skeptic. I'd embrace them in our collective efforts to reduce the sales of quack medicine and Nigerian scam spam in our e-mail inboxes.
The issue, per se, isn't about pseudoscience or being anti-science, but simply about asking questions. Asking where the evidence is. Asking how much support for advocates of these issues are emotional or belief, and not evidence. Asking like Clara Peller said so many years ago... "Where's the beef?"
