This article is 90% quote from Rob Brezsny… on true skepticism versus pseudo-skepticism:
It’s timed perfectly (it landed in my inbox this morning) given my new passion of proving that the diet industry, the food industry, the medical “industry” financed by the pharmaceutical industry (66 billion dollars a year!) is out to milk you, alive or dead, for their own profit and to the detriment of you and the detriment of humanity.
How I do that, whether I am a true skeptic or a pseudo-skeptic should make a huge difference… a pesudo-skeptic is a believer who has given up thinking, proving, questioning, doubting, and intelligence.
You be the judge.
- True skepticism does not carry an undertone of anger, ridicule, and derision. It is even-tempered, clear-minded, and full of equanimity, satisfied with showing what’s illogical or incorrect in the argument it critiques.
- A true skeptic does not use emotionally charged language in an effort to portray the person whose argument he’s critiquing as a stupid fool.
- A true skeptic has no attachment to proving that she is smarter than and superior to the person whose argument she is critiquing, but rather is content to have her argument win the day purely on the strength of its elegant reasoning.
- A true skeptic is willing to consider the possibility that there is some merit, however small, in the argument of the person he’s critiquing. He is not afraid that acknowledging this merit will undermine the absolute truth he purports to possess.
- A true skeptic is not consumed with the certainty that she is always right. In other words, she resists the temptation to become a fundamentalist.
- A true skeptic has a respect for the fact that many questions don’t have final answers. She recognizes how much about the world is mysterious.
- A true skeptic is skeptical of his own skepticism.
- A true skeptic is as likely to be a woman as a man. (97 percent of the pseudo-skeptics are men.)
- A true skeptic shows humility, in the spirit that Carl Sagan demonstrated when he said this:
- “An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.
- “Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no God exists.
- “To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
- “A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissable.
- “Considering the enormous emotional energies with which the subject is invested, a questing, courageous, and open mind is, I think, the essential tool for narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the subject of the existence of God.”
PS: I am almost ready to start the sessions to teach you to live and eat in a way that turns your body into a fuel efficient, fuel burning furnace, so you can live well, live long, be intelligent, happy, calm, energetic, and sleep well. There are more benefits, but the list is to long…
And for those of you that love car analogy: the job is to turn your car’s engine into a self-cleaning, hot fuel burning machine, that won’t need much upkeep, and can take you from commute to transcontinental trip without worries.
The main job is to increase the heat of the machine, without burning the gaskets… lol.
