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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This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Panic!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


Discussion (6)¬

  1. Camilla Carter says:
    September 8, 2008 at 10:38 am

    Britney Spears? :)

  2. Oskar Kennedy says:
    September 8, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    So how did you get over it?

  3. Camilla Carter says:
    September 8, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    Oh…. well, I kind of just realized she sucked. I think “My Prerogative” was really the impetus for change. :)

  4. herbert says:
    September 8, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    Pluto. turns out we had one less planet all along. wtf.

    asbestos isn’t unhealthy. anyone fall for that one?

  5. Waldorf Van Buren says:
    September 10, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Let’s see. . . get a College Education and everything will be fine. . .

    People under (insert age here) don’t get cancer. . .

    Good and Bad, no in-between. I didn’t find gray until the early nineties.

    ghosts, gargoyles, and strange men living in my parents’ attic in a secret room. . . I still get freaked out by weird phenomena like at the old theatre, but I tend to stay rational. Gargoyles lost their terror with the cartoon and Ghostbusters. The strangers in my parents attic was based on a dream I had, but I’ve never been able to shake it.

    I also believed in Nostradamus and his magical hat.

  6. Waldorf Van Buren says:
    September 10, 2008 at 5:36 pm

    Trolls — I still believe in them.