Al wrote,
"BTW, Geoff has said at least one thing in this thread that I agree with, although he did not originate the saying. From one of his posts above: Keep an open mind but not so open your brain falls out."
That's true, I did not originate the saying. Skeptics did. That’s what Skeptics always say, you know, as if the thing in question is too preposterous to grasp or accept or disobeys some Law of Physics or another. It just turns out that aftermarket fuses and fuse directionality seem to push all the right Skeptic buttons. Lol Which is I why I posted that particular little gem of a Skeptics creedo. Of course, skeptics actually never investigate the claims they rail against. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of the truth. Frankly I don’t really believe they’re particularly open minded, now that you mention it. They kind of pretend to be open minded. At the risk of being repetitive, here’s the bit from the intro to Zen and the Art of Debunkery that seem to apply rather well here,
"As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery."
"If folks believed in too much rather than too little they would be much better off generally." - PT Barnum
geoff kait
machina dynamica
"BTW, Geoff has said at least one thing in this thread that I agree with, although he did not originate the saying. From one of his posts above: Keep an open mind but not so open your brain falls out."
That's true, I did not originate the saying. Skeptics did. That’s what Skeptics always say, you know, as if the thing in question is too preposterous to grasp or accept or disobeys some Law of Physics or another. It just turns out that aftermarket fuses and fuse directionality seem to push all the right Skeptic buttons. Lol Which is I why I posted that particular little gem of a Skeptics creedo. Of course, skeptics actually never investigate the claims they rail against. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of the truth. Frankly I don’t really believe they’re particularly open minded, now that you mention it. They kind of pretend to be open minded. At the risk of being repetitive, here’s the bit from the intro to Zen and the Art of Debunkery that seem to apply rather well here,
"As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery."
"If folks believed in too much rather than too little they would be much better off generally." - PT Barnum
geoff kait
machina dynamica