For me, what being a 'true skeptic' entails is being open-minded to every possibility, without blind belief in any of them. This doesn't exclude passion or conviction for a subject; ideally, it should just mean a calm lack of single-minded obsession with proving only the preferred thing to be true or false.
For me, Arthur C. Clarke was a hero for this:
Clark's Three Laws:1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction is some of my all-time favourite. To me, it really stands out for its open-mindedness... without falling into tepidity or mindlessly exploring topics the author had no passion about (usually accompanied by a great deal of academic self-importance and pomp). Each thing was sculpted almost preciously and was a personal interest of the author. The stories also never sought to 'prove absolutely that God didn't exist', nor to prove that the 'God' that did or didn't exist was the 'God' from the Old Testament that so many people are blindly and automatically fighting for or against. (I can't say they're fighting 'thoughtlessly', because part of the problem is that there is way too much 'thought' going on.)
The guy seemed to me to basically explore this stuff with a kind of almost-childlike joy, beautifully mixed together with and supported by his adult intelligence. Rather than artificially limiting things in an attempt to make them "realistic" as people would accept it at the time, he explored as far as he could in each direction. He also didn't fall into the trap of trying to not offend people by making his explorations artificially 'open' enough to be 'interpreted how people want'. Instead, we're presented with something that we can interpret how we feel like interpreting it, with all of our natural or unnatural personal bias, but it's also depicted as just what it is. There is almost no needless, cowardly ambiguity here. The author's personal beliefs are present as a part of the exploration and theorizing, in whatever forms. To me, this is beautiful; this is what makes his works feel so whole and appealing.
What I see now, mouthing off loudly all over the world, are not 'skeptics', but "rabid or fundamentalist non-believers" or "anti-believers", who are only 're-acting' to or against people who are "rabid fundamentalist believers". People calling themselves "skeptics", but think of everything as rigid, already-decided, dead and inert, in a loud social war against people who obsessively refuse to think for themselves. And this 'loud social war' is almost totally monopolizing the ability for any human being to think independently and scientifically, with any degree of freedom.
What makes you a 'skeptic' if your whole life is rabidly devoted to the highly emotional quest of proving that the universe is a dead, empty pile of randomness? Proving that any deviation from your preferred social norm is rooted exclusively some kind of mental illness? In reality, the people doing this are as mindlessly, emotionally, blindly devoted to the topics they condemn as the people trying to get us to believe that "God" is a hirsute male human giant on a throne in the sky, and that the Earth was made a few thousand years ago.
I suppose I could just blurt "I mourn for Science"... because I see it being extinguished in the world, and replaced by nothing more than the flipside of the coin of fundamentalist religion, or even simply an expert part of a marketing scheme.
The original dreams of the founders of "scientific thought" basically seem to stand dead now.
When a person goes into an experiment, one has to be truly open-minded. What I see, almost universally, are people going into an experiment not to 'learn', but to prove something. E.g., "transsexuals suffer from a mental illness", "spiritual experiences are real/false", even things as ridiculous as "ferrets aren't weasels, they're cats" and "birds did not evolve from dinosaurs". We may be totally over the "bird-dinosaur argument" now because of China's archaeological discoveries, but when I was growing up in the nineties it was a huge deal, and people were getting their livelihoods ruined for trying to prove that turkeys and tyrannosaurs were not so different from each other. The viciousness and closed-mindedness of the arguments against the bird-dinosaur connection wouldn't be out of place in an argument in the church or among fanboys. And really, that's what it's all about, isn't it... Those things aren't actually different from each other at all.
They go into it completely without joy. Without that 'childish joy' of discovery, there can be no scientific thought.
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