Archive for September 8th, 2008


What’s Your Woo?

September 8th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

Nobody is born a 100% clear, rational thinker. Even the most skeptical person will occasionally succumb to a mistaken conclusion of causation or an unexamined assumption (or twelve). It happens. You’re busy. If you stopped to analyze the evidence and test the premises of every single thing you heard, you’d be overwhelmed faster than a one-legged hiker in an avalanche.

So it’s time to fess up. What’s the weirdest, least rational, most obviously wrongheaded thing you’ve ever believed in? Did you handle snakes in church, or shoot a chupacabra in your back yard? If you did, we want to hear about it. (Bonus points if your story ends with a mention of how you managed to break the grip of fuzzy thinking.)

EDIT: Lest I be accused of asking questions I can’t answer, here’s a short history of my own wrong thinking. As a kid, I believed in everything: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, psychic powers. If it was mentioned in a book with the word “unexplained” in the title, I was ready to believe it. I was raised Methodist, so I practiced a dry white toast version of Christianity.

As an adult, I had a minor brush with numerology after I read The Bible Code. The scientific trappings were convincing enough that I got a little freaked out. These days, debunking resources are a lot easier to find online, but in 1998, I was taken in just a smidge.

I also had my Tarot cards read by a friend, and found it interesting. There was just enough about the reading that was relevant to my life that I thought it was valuable, if not necessarily psychic or divine. (I think there might still be something valuable about that kind of introspection, provided the recipient sees it in the right context, as a sort of a guided self-analysis.)

I wish I had a great story about how I shook of the chains of credulity, but I really just sort of grew out of it. If you’re curious about how I moved past my childhood religion, you can start reading here.

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Call And Response

September 8th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

In case you missed it, we were issued something of a challenge last week. Ms. Janice Jackson, a contributor to a past version of this site, took me to task for the changes I’ve made since the last time we worked together.

While I don’t agree with everything she said – the words “suck” and “whore,” for instance – she did manage to blindly stumble into the general vicinity of at least one valid point. Since I brought the reactor back up to operating temperature, we’ve focused almost exclusively on the skeptical, rational perspective. We haven’t set aside much time for dissenting viewpoints.

So I’m going to pick up Ms. Jackson’s sparkly pink gauntlet, and I’ll do her one better. Not only will I publish her “investigative” reports, but I’m putting together a special page for her work, tentatively titled “Believer’s Corner.” We’ll let her speak for the credulous, in her own words, and see what she comes up with. It may not make an iota of sense, but it promises to be entertaining.

Welcome back, Janice.

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