Amateur Debunker, Or Killjoy?

Great Debates
1

I really wanted to start this thread in MPSIMS because I don’t like arguments; or rather, I don’t like arguments if they get nasty. But I thought I had better start it here because part of my reasoning involves religion.

There’s another thread wherein a fellow Doper bemoans the fact that his wife is superstitious. While the OP was fairly low-key about it, some other posts reflected an attitude which I don’t understand, and would like to ask about.

I’m talking about the mindset where a person has to “debunk” any kind of metaphysical or extra-logical belief, even those held by people whose intellect and character they otherwise respect. I don’t mean good-natured kidding, I mean like an acrimonious, arrogant compulsion to belittle and discredit such beliefs, out of all proportion. Certainly there are many people for whom such beliefs can be getting in the way of a normal life, but I think much of the time it’s something that’s just a personal thing, a minor trait. Why does it matter so much to them, if it’s not doing any harm?

Here’s the sticky part: I am truly not trying to insult anybody, but there is one religion I won’t name which I think was just plain made up. This is based on my views and analysis as a rational human being with a fair amount of experience with human nature. I just think the guy obviously made it up. It seems laughable to me that anybody went for it at all.

But I don’t feel compelled to laugh in their face and tell them they’re fools for buying a load of crap like that. I don’t want to make fun of them and hound them until they admit that what they believe has no basis in fact and is stupid.

I mean, since there is in most cases no way to know whether superstitions and metaphysical things like life after death are valid beliefs, why do some intelligent people feel so driven to make a big deal about somebody else choosing to see them that way? It’s like they are somehow taking it personally.

2

Scientology and/or Mormonism?

Anyway, people around here get offended by willful ignorance. It’s one thing when someone just doesn’t know something, it is another when they make a choice to believe something patently stupid. They are doing their little part to make the world a stupider place.

3

I’m not telling. I don’t like arguing. :wink:

And you’re right; I understand perfectly that people are like that around here. It is, after all, a place where reason prevails.

I’m talking about out in the real world. The reason I ask is, the knee-jerk and vehement nature of this kind of behavior suggests to me that such peope have some underlying psychological issue in play.

4

I can’t comprehend the mindset where reality and truth are actively discriminated against.

There is always some resistance to being corrected. But to refuse to re-examine your beliefs in the face of new evidence and reasoning – to actually become hostile towards the person who showed you that your beliefs are most likely false – that is the quickest way to lose my respect.

If your beliefs can’t stand a little questioning then what kind of beliefs are those? It’s like the pig who made his house out of straw – you can’t really complain when the wolf blows it down because the wind was coming sooner or later.

5

Whilst I agree with your intent and the general thrust of your statement, I’m concerned about the last bit.

I’m not going to say it’s a good idea for people to believe things that are patently false, but not everything that is good is also strong.

6

By “strong”, I mean well-founded in reality. Not really the “hard as a rock” type beliefs that blind-faithers have.

Reality itself is what your beliefs should be founded on. That way, when your understanding of reality changes due to evidence or rational argument, changing your beliefs isn’t that big of a deal.

7

Fair enough, although that does assume that the challenger is arguing from the described strong foundation in reality, and that he/she has the sense to discern between that which is delicate because it is false, and that which is simply delicate.

8

At the very least, it fosters a mode of thought that leads to harm. And the time to do something about something potentially dangerous is before it causes harm, not after it’s too late. It’s better to, say, debunk someones belief in psychic powers before they die because they choose a psychic healer over a real doctor.

Stupidity doesn’t bother you ? Self destructive behavior doesn’t bother you ?

And in my experience, far from being “knee-jerk and vehement”, most skeptics keep their mouths shut.

9

Oh come on, a lot of the people who deride the supernatural [hexes, witches, ghosts - whatever] are also frequently very christian, and I find they are guilty of the same fuzzy thinking they are railing against [but god exists, the bible tells me so … but hexes aint real]

Everybody wants to feel superior - be it demanding cites or thrashing on christians/scientologists/spiritualists.

I will admit I am a deist [spiffy word I found on the SD] although I find certain created religions silly or stupid, I won’t argue against their practice. I am fully willing to believe that someone believes Dagon got them their last pay raise just as easily as Jesus did, though I am more inclined to personally believe that either their boss likes them or they had been there long enough to get a raise anyway.

10

What kind of answer are you looking for here?-“I have no idea what you are talking about specifically here, but I have to agree with you”? Sorry, but you’ve stacked the deck here in a couple of ways. You won’t tell us what these beliefs are that we are supposed to argue for or against, then you give a reason for this action that is against the very purpose of this forum in the first place:

You let us know what these beliefs you are defending are first, and give us some examples of the "knee-jerk and vehement nature] that you speak of, or there is nothing to discuss here.

11

He might be referring to my post in the thread where I say:

Or perhaps Hal Briston, whose wife moved into an office which had previously been a funeral home. Orbs showed up in pictures, which his wife said proved there were ghosts.

I’m a little ashamed of the mocking I did; I was ruining their fun and perhaps out of respect for my friends, I should have kept silent. I’m still conflicted, though; as others have pointed out, it’s hard to keep your mouth shut in the face of such stupidity.

And I wish to register my objection to the inference that a belief is God and Christ is analogous to hexes and hocus-pocus. I suppose I’ll never convince a non-Christian that there’s a difference, so I won’t try and anyway, if you consider yourself a deist you DO believe in God. So :stuck_out_tongue:

12

I have to raise a hand as guilty of this. If an email comes around thats on Snopes I can feel my hands leaping to the keyboard. I had , to use immense willpower to resist debunking one yesterday.

It can be overdone. I have overdone it, where its clearly more about me showing how smart I am vs the yokels rather than really being about rationalism.

But it seems awfully subjective where the line lies, basically weighing the importance of the truth vs the cumulative effect of challenging every myth or incorrect belief, no matter how inconsequential. Sometimes its worth being a pain about it, sometimes its not worth the effect it can have on relationships with other people.

Otara

13

I am occasionally guilty of the behavior described in the OP. I do generally try to limit my attempts at debunking to instances where someone is hurting themselves because of their beliefs, or with someone who is trying to convert me to their belief.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people will cling to beliefs like their lives depend upon them. I’ve seen people get angry when presented with evidence that their belief was wrong. I have a friend who loves Airborne, and when I showed her the ingredients and said that it’s just a multivitamin, she blew up at me and swore up and down that it worked. Even the recent lawsuits and revealed faked studies haven’t swayed her.

14

Or rather, people around here can be quick to determine that some ignorance is willful and then quick to condemn it as a result. That’s not useful if you’re trying to cure someone’s ignorance, but it does fulfill a sense of superiority.

15

When Mr. A. Square of Flatland insisted to his compatriots that there was indeed a direction that was “Up, but not north,” they ridiculed him.

The problem was that both he and his compatriots were “right.”

As we know, A. Square was correct – the three-dimensional Sphere that visited his world, spoke with him, and pulled him up out of his two-dimensional world showed him things that were true – that there was a third spatial dimension, and that it was inhabited by thinking, talking creatures.

But when A. returned to Flatland, he had absolutely no evidence to prove this fact. He was reduced to explaining futilely, “Up… but not north,” because that was as close as he could come to telling two-dimensional creatures about what he had personally seen and experienced. And lacking any evidence whatsoever to support his claim, the rest of Flatland was right to dismiss it as unproven and place no weight whatsoever on it.

(And when A. during his journey asks the Sphere, “Are there FOUR-dimensional worlds with four-dimensional creatures, greater even than you?” the Sphere reacts with anger, noting that such a thing would be impossible – there are only three dimensions.)

My point is this: it’s perfectly appropriate to say: “Such-and-so claim is unproven. There is no credible evidence for its existence that I am aware of.”

But it’s also appropriate to accept that others may have had different experiences and those experiences may support different conclusions, even if those experiences cannot be duplicated. That’s not to say you should accept the truth of the claims – just the possibility, however faint, that someone else’s absurd fantastical claim is the legitimate result of reasoning and fact, buttressed by an experiential base that is not shared.

Here’s where we can start to draw distinctions, then: when a claim is made that X is true, and “X” involves real-world phenomena that may be agreed-upon by everyone, it’s easy to test, and legitimate to sneer if the claim doesn’t pan out.

“I can use a pair of sticks to find water underground!”

“OK, let’s test that theory. Here’s a field with buried water pipes. Mark where they are.”

Success or failure proves the point.

“There is a God, who created all of the universe.”

What’s the test for this claim?

I am drawing distinctions between claims that are falsifiable and claims that are not. If someone refuses to listen to evidence that falsifies a claim of theirs, I think they’re legitimate targets for scorn. But when someone believes in things that are not falsifiable, I suggest that polite neutrality is more appropriate.

16

Bricker, I can certainly get behind this philosphy, and it is what I usually hear from educated Christians.

Except that if you listen to them carefuly, you being to realize that they are not really saying they belive in a literal “a god who created the universe”, but more specifically, in the YAHWEH character from the bible and the parables and myth written therein, all of which makes certain flasefiable claims- many of which have been provent to be incorrect fabrications.

17

::Missed edit window And lost my copy of what I was abotu to post, damn it!::

As to the OP, I can understand the desire to confront silly beliefs, because often times they can elad to self-destructive behaviour.

Take my mother for example: she always held notions of sipirts and ghosts and other silly things which I listened to patiently, but never dismissed for fear of hurting her feelings.

Unfortunately she lost a baby after being 8 months pregnant and began saying how she could feel her spirit, saw her ghost, etc. Ridiclous I thought, but at the same time a traumatic event for her, I wasn’t about to confront her about her beliefs. But maybe I should have. Months later I find out she spent a LOT of money on crackpot psychics who claimed to be able to “communicate” with the baby. PErhaps if I had confronted her earlier she might not be in the financial situation she is now.

18

I’m more on brujaja’s side in this debate. I don’t much understand the furor to “debunk all that crap” either. To me, it sometimes seems much more an attitude than a determination to uphold the rational. Specifically the attitude is to look down on those who believe in the supernatural with contempt. When this happens, the debunker rarely seems to have interest in discussing the issue calmly and trying to explain the rational train of thought that they follow. The thread that brujaja mentioned in his OP is an example, since that poster never mentioned trying to discuss this issue with his wife. His basic attitude seemed to be, “how could this admittedly smart woman have such a huge chunk of stupid?”

In point there are skeptics such as Carl Sagan or Michael Shermer who try to approach issues of the paranormal while respecting all sides (though Shermer has become more shrill of late). But the more common attitude among your garden-variety skeptic is to always start from the assumption that anyone who disagrees with them is simply lacking intelligence, hence there’s no need to try seeing from their viewpoint. If one takes that attitude, then the chances of successful communication between the competing sides is necessarily quite low.

19

Then what are you doing here?!

20

Good point. Frankly, I’ve always been a little scared of GD. Though I appreciate everyone keeping a reasonable tone here.

Bricker, your position is very elegantly stated. Thank you.

Like I said, For some people, such beliefs are getting in the way of a normal life. I would say that spending a lot of money on a psychic might certainly qualify as destructive or harmful. But what about, say, a baseball player who feels he must scratch himself three times, adjust his hat & spit before every at-bat?

Ellen Cherry, thanks for your comments. I understand your feelings of ambivalence; but IMHO, I’m not sure that spending money on a fortune-teller is necessarily any more stupid than, for instance, spending money getting one’s nails done.