One thought which regularly occurs to me whilst listening to various topics relating to the skeptical movement is if you don’t consider yourself skeptical then what does that make you?

I don’t mean that in a bad way but, to me, being skeptical doesn’t mean not believing in something just for the sake of it (that would be cynicism) but merely not believing in something until there is sufficient evidence to do so.  The question is, if you don’t do that, or don’t consider that you do that, then does that mean you just believe everything that you are told?

Someone says “if I stick a needle in here then all the pains will go away” and you say “okay”?  Someone says “actually don’t even stick a needle there, I’ll just wave my hands over it for a bit and you say “okay”?  Someone says that purple aliens landed in their garden and replaced them with a robot replica of themselves and you say “okay”?

Surely it’s not about whether you are a skeptic/skeptical or not but how skeptical you are?  Everyone, surely, when told something, will analyse it somehow and then come out with a conclusion to either believe it or not believe it.  And if you’re not going on evidence then what are you basing your decisions on?  Faith?  Trust?  Opinion?  All of those, to me, are scarily subjective and subject to massive margins of error.

If a whacko comes up to you in the street and tells you that you should never again wear a green t-shirt because they can only get into your head when you wear green do you not assess the likelihood of this being verifiable true?  Does the guy seem mentally stable?  Does his statement seem likely to be true?  Is there any precedent you are aware of for them (whoever they might be) being able to use the colour of a piece of clothing to interfere with your mind?  Surely these sorts of questions, looking at empirical truths which can be queried in order to lead you to your conclusion, are all the scientific, skeptical method at work?

Surely we’re all skeptics – it’s just a case of how skeptical.

Just ran a chunk of Guerra through the “I Write Like” tool provided by Coding Robots who created the BlogJet software I use to maintain my blog and got the following result >

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

The latest update in Jetse De Vries’ SHINE Anthology blog seems to show that he’s getting quite a good amount of decent optimistic scifi stories despite the (rather surprising) reaction I’ve seen from many that optimistic SciFi is hard to do or not interesting or not popular.

My fiction is often described as quite dystopic and I suppose that it is in places but for me most of my stories are quite optimistic.  I certainly am an optimistic person.

The story that I wrote for the antho and which is with Jetse now in amongst that huge pile of great stories (dammit…) hopefully manages to encapsulate some of the optimism that I truly feel.  I see a lot of the problems that we have, and have faced, are rooted in a lack of knowledge or understanding and the more of both of these that we get the better off that we will ALL be.  So many of our fears and hatreds can only exist when there is a lack of knowledge or understanding whether it be of other people, of events, or whatever.  To grab a current example, what about the astroturf groups currently protesting attempts in the US to create a national healthcare system?  How many of them could truly be standing there saying that it would be a terrible thing to have everybody covered for half the cost of the current system if they really understood the issues at play?

It’s not about being ignorant, that’s nobody’s fault.  If you aren’t told something then it’s hard to blame you for not knowing it (unless it’s something obvious you could figure out for yourself) or if you are told something that isn’t true and aren’t aware that it’s not true then who can blame you for acting as if it were?  If you truly believed that the new healthcare system would kill off old people who were sick and force people to have abortions it would be entirely logical to oppose it.  But all it would take to make this switch is some tiny pieces of knowledge – the wordings of the bill, for example, rather than somebody else’s interpretation of the wording of the bill.  Or the knowledge that those promoting this “grassroots” movement are the corporate bodies which would be negatively affected should this new healthcare system come into being.

I feel positive for the future because the number of channels through which information we can reach us is expanding all the time and yes this means more garbage but it also means just more.  You can distort and try to hide knowledge but really, once we know something, once it’s out there, it can’t be easily put away again.  Information, knowledge, is the single most important thing to our future and it’s not just that I think it will probably cease to be controlled by corporations or powerful individuals in the future, it’s that I think it cannot be controlled by them.  You can threaten people not to give out information, you can create whistleblower laws, you can do whatever you want but once that information is out there, that’s it.  It’s out there.

Damn right I feel positive.

One of the takeaway moments I had from watching Bill Mahr’s RELIGILOUS documentary recently was quite near the start when he asked what I think is a fundamental question that everyone should be considering …

WHY IS FAITH A GOOD THING?

Faith, even amongst the not-particularly religious, is seen as a positive thing, something to be admired and respected, something to strive towards – whether that’s faith in your God, faith that your book will one day become published or faith that your partner will remain true to you.  But why should that be? Faith, to me, is a neccessary scaffold to fill in the gaps between one or more truths.  It exists because it has to, not because it should.

In the past, people have had faith that their crops will not fail if only they sacrifice animals or pray a certain number of times in a certain way because they didn’t have the knowledge and understanding to recognise that ensuring your crops don’t fail really relies on whether and other variables.  They have had faith that God will look after them if they behave in a certain way because it gives them comfort without which they may end up feeling lost and scared.  But I think it’s fundamental that we realise that as soon as we can get rid of that faith we should.  It provided a support for us when we needed it but once we know longer need it, it instead holds us back.

Imagine walking through a darkened tunnel.  You don’t know what’s in there but you can see the exit a hundred yards up ahead and if you can make it there you’ll be safe.  There might be holes in the ground, there might be animals, there might be expxlosives set to go off should you step on them.  If we had no way of dealing with this fear of the unknown we would be frozen in place and not able to do anything so if we have faith that we’re going to make it if only we whistle as we walk or repeat a single word over and over then at least it allows us to get to the exit.  But say instead we had a torch that could illuminate the tunnel and show us if there are traps or animals to be avoided.  We would therefore have no need to have faith any more because we could know if there are dangers or not – even if there are traps we can see them and avoid them now.  So what would be the point in continuing to chant or whistle?  And more importantly, the fact is that whistling or chanting probably wouldn’t do a thing to protect us from either bombs or animals – so although it might bring us comfort, once we realise it has no effect it is in fact damaging to continue to belief it will help as it could mean that we’d step onto a bomb and be blown up.

Faith is a neccessary evil that should only be relied upon when there is nothing else.  As soon as it can be discarded, it should be.  There’s no doubt it’s assisted us in getting us to where we are today (at least in part) but I really do think that we’re getting to a point where the promise and approach of science, of reason, is such a better option for us that we should drop faith whenever and wherever we can.  It should be seen as the neccessary evil I think it is and not as something to aspire to or respect.

When you apply for insurance you have to detail exactly what it is you are insuring – in this case a domestic shorthair cat, 4 years old-ish at the time we got her. When I took out the insurance I gave them these details, alongwith my own address and name details.  I also notified the insurers of her initial vet’s details, then of the new vets when we moved her there.  I, in return, was issued with an insurance policy number which, I’m assuming, is then linked to all these details.

WHY IS IT, then, that when Ihave to make a claim for the vet’s treatment of said cat, and I fill in a a claim form with my policy number do I also have to list my name, address, the name of the animal, its age, type, gender and which vet it is registered at!  What is the fucking point in giving me a policy number when I have to always give the full details of the animal anyway?!

It’s not just pet insurance but all insurance it seems.  When you take out a policy it covers the specific thing you have listed in the policy application, right?  So when I make a claim on my policy for my 2001 Honda Civic it is fairly unlikely that this car has somehow morphed into a 2006 Skoda Fabia or a frickin’ Pontiac.  So why do they need anything other than my policy number?!