I have serious doubts about this whole skeptics suck thread.
By the way, how come the opposite of skeptic doesn’t have a group lable? You know, the “Oh, I believe in everything.” crowd?
TrisIt does. Unfortunately, that name can’t be posted in Great Debates; it has to be relegated to the Pit… 
Well, the opposite of skeptical is gullible.
I would never want to be labeled the latter.
I would say that the opposite of skeptical would be credulous. Gullible carries the connotation of being easily duped and cheated while credulous simply says that one is too ready to believe.
Tom~
Seen around (or just made up):
Credophiles (those who just love to believe);
Believeniks;
Trusties;
Induhviduals (with emphasis on the DUH);
Normal people…
Okay, Polycarp: you’re right. Those other, shorter words do a better job (although, which one did you mean?).
Yeah, Tom, but I like the term “gullible” it rolls trippingly off of the tongue.
And, for the record, my beer has never exploded. Although there was one pretty dicey batch a couple of christmases ago…
Waste
Flick Lives!
Sorry I’m late, but I was sceptical about looking at this thread.
WallyM7 - superb!!
Is Beeruser too drunk to come to the keyboard? I don’t believe we’ve heard from him since he started this thread. I almost miss his witty rejoinders to our comments…
Oh, and I have never had beer explode on me. However, this summer a batch of my wine proved to be a little unstable in the extreme heat…
Hangover’s gone. (Time to start a new one)
The opposite of a skeptic? It would have to be sucker (fish).
Contrary to my OP, I don’t mean any ill will to skeptics. We need skeptics as well as suckers. After all, it takes two to tango. And gosh, we really gotta tango.
All I meant was, it takes real balls to make a leap of faith.
There’s always another beer.
I don’t know, Beeruser… I think it would take more courage to insist on evidence in the face of a majority who are leaping at faith.
Jess
Full of 'satiable curtiosity
Sometimes. But not if it just means [getting the warm fuzzies from] running with the pack, or believing without questioning what your mom believed because your granddad believed it, etc.
Sometimes (usually?) it takes more huevos to to question the powerful and prestigious, to question the Accepted Truth of the Masses, or to espouse a position that ‘only’ has evidence and logic supporting it, but which doesn’t ‘feel good.’
Um… david? I think you mean it takes cajones…
What you actually said is “Sometimes (usually?) it takes more eggs to to question the powerful and prestigious…”
I think you got your words SCRAMBLED there… But don’t look so BEATEN!
Hey man, lighten up, it’s just a YOLK…
Okay, I’m just going to hide OVA here now…
It takes real balls (or huevos) to jump out of a plane without a parachute, but I don’t think I’d recommend it. Leaps of faith are fine to come up with wild theories to test out, but unless you pack reason and logic with you, it’s long way down…
“Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”
- Bertrand Russell
And speaking of courage, balls, and skepticism – how much evidence is there that having balls (or the testosterone levels produced by having balls) makes one more courageous? There are eunuch societies out there; has anyone measured their Bravery Quotients?
(Although I’ll admit that having balls probably makes one more courageous when it comes to asking women out on dates. Not much motivation to do that without a working sex drive. Or if you’re gay, of course. But I digress.)
Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.
Satan,
I can’t remember how the word cajones translates to English (it might be the plural form of “citizen of El Cajon,” but I doubt it. But I think the rather (ahem) earthy Spanish word you were looking for was cojones. Huevos, on the other hand IS a commonly used word in some Spanish-speaking locales that fills the function of “balls,” as used in this discussion.
Reminds me of the book “Pidgin to da Max” (difficult to find outside of Hawaii), a haole-pidgin/pidgin-haole dictionary of sorts, where they gave as the definition of “tako” (the actual Hawaiian word for squid, unless I’m wrong): What locals call squid, so they can use “squid” for something else (I’ll leave the “something else” to your imagination).
Anyway, if you’re driving down through Michoacan and it’s breakfast time, and you want to barter some of your Starbucks with a campesino for some eats, you might prefer to ask for Rice Krispies.
Sittin’ here with a three-year-old sleeping on my lap. I don’t even care if my legs fall asleep.
Satan: just going along with elelle (page 1). Seemed harmless at the time…and while yeah, come to think of it, cojones is the word I knew, too, well…there’s no reason in theory to resist a polite ivirgin unless they’re just Wrong (which elelle wasn’t).
A number of responses come to mind, namely:
- Damn! Is it a requirement? And if so, does the State Dept. issue warnings about travelling there?
- They probably weren’t around long enough to test.
- But seriously, I’d say there are enough brave women, and cowardly men, around to explode that whole ‘balls give courage’ myth.
Eunuch societies are pretty reclusive, for obvious reasons. And no, I doubt visitors are required to remove their accoutrements before entering .
What amazed me, though, was discovering the newsgroup alt.eunuchs.questions . It started out as a “joke” newsgroup, making fun of alt.unix.questions, but it has since become a hangout for REAL LIVE EUNUCHS!