JREF Swift Blog

[Editor’s Note: As a precursor to The Amazing Meeting! 9, we have collected a series of stories from readers like you; people who have, through one means or another, discovered skepticism and critical thinking. These stories remind us that we all started somewhere and some of us are still finding our way as skeptics If you are interested in contributing your own story, please submit your piece of around 1000 words to maria (at) randi.org along with a short 2-3 line bio.  

Today’s stories come from Ky and Toni]

Ky's Story:

It was a long process, but hopefully you're willing to stick with me. It's a process that went from religion->conspiracy->new age (deist)-> and lastly skepticism.

I was raised in a Catholic family, and converted to an Evangelical Religion when I was 13... Thought it was true and was really great at compartmentalizing/rationalizing things at that age. Only when I was 20 and one of my friends became a born-again Christian, the things he brought up to rationalize his belief in God started making me wonder. During my christian days, I still followed science, believing Evolution, but when my friend brought up what he believed as a Young Earth Creationist, that's when I questioned religion. This is when I read up on different religion and stopped believing in religion and just plain god, becoming a deist. Like a fool, I jumped onto the next credulous belief... Conspiracy...

The problem without any great education and skeptical friends, all I did was replace a belief with another belief for a while. I went into conspiracy pretty credulously, and believed in all those bad documentaries as true, from "Zeitgeist", "9/11 conspiracy", "organic/anti-corporation" and then to ""What the Bleep Do We Know" to ".

Only with my love of science, around the age of 21, I downloaded a whole variety of science podcast, and this is where I downloaded the Skeptic's Guide to The Universe. When I heard about critical thinking, logical fallacies, and all the human psychology about self-deception and such, that's when I started questioning everything. Using the null hypothesis, I realized there's no evidence for a god, so I became agnostic. I also listened to all the entire Skeptic's Guide episodes within 2 months, and then to other podcast. When I understood logic and reason, I started watching old conspiracy videos, and 15 minutes into every video, I just stopped watching because it was it felt like it was killing my brain cells from all the nonsense.

So I'm a skeptic for 3 years now. Appreciating all the skeptic's podcast out there, and all of you guys really made a difference. Thank you for being skeptical!

Skeptic guy from Southern Cali,

Ky Van Nguyen

Toni's Story

When I was very young, I had my first encounter with death. No surprise there, considering I grew up on a farm (I was born in the 80s) and got my first taste of what life (and death) meant for us lowly toiling peasants. That may sound a bit melodramatic, I admit, but basically, that’s what life was all about on a farm not far from one of the cities around the farm. To this day, the farm exists, as does the railway just half a mile away from it.

Growing up, I had a very skeptical mind, but even so in my country we seem to go through the motions if not for propriety’s sake then for the incentives: my grandparents had been saving small coinage for sixteen years until my Lutheran confirmation. Even so, I always found it very odd that my often disgruntled and stressed-out family rarely even spoke or thought about religion. I’ve since then come to understand that in this particular country very few people even pray before eating or, well, before going to bed.

I did, for some reason I can’t quite fathom. I’ve always been very stressed and worried about the people around me, and as a child I used to pray that God put me in Hell in place of any of my relatives. They’re decent folk, mind you, but the Skygod seemed to have put ‘isself firmly in my head through the actions of a teacher of mine. She was (and is) a very good person, but for some reason I read the Bible at an early age and became positively (heh) terrified of “the two states of existence” beyond our world.

You might imagine that’s not a healthy combination.

The irony in my story is, when my confirmation camp finally came around, my pragmatic and pretty much non-religious parents dropped a bomb on me. They have done that many a time since then, but the first bomb was that while I was spending a week trying to learn the Lord’s Prayer and learning about how nice and cuddly Lutheran Christianity is, they put down our cat. Well, really, the cat was half-feral and made a nasty habit of waking me up in the middle of a freezing winter night by bringing me (nobody else) voles, mice, rats and birds. In hindsight, it was a bit hilarious – waking up in the middle of the night to a cat (who was probably just trying to teach me how to hunt) knocking on my window. Then again, in hindsight, he did do a number two on my priced possessions a couple of times to show me who was boss.

In any case, I had my sip of wine and a loafer some weeks later and officially joined the ranks of people who could wed their cherished one according to doctrine. I didn’t quite, but almost, realize at that moment that there was something ridiculous about this ritual. Even so, I found it disconcerting that I had basically been bribed into participating in a religious tradition.

The cat, however, was the first incentive that sent me on a journey away from the customs of my extended family. It was that loss of life, and I had grown somewhat jaded when it came to the deaths of animals, having carried off cow intestines as a child. (A good thing, mind you – I seem to find people who don’t even know where their supermarket meat comes from or what the burden of raising that meat can be like!)

About two months later I found myself ambivalent toward every belief. Sure, I liked and do like mythology. They’re great fantasies, but nothing more. They make for great background material for stories to boot. I kept my skepticism to myself and simply decided to go the neutral route: discuss, do not slam down someone’s beliefs unless they slam down yours and for the sake of sanity, consider everything.

At sixteen, I had finally realized I had been an agnostic for all of my life. Since then, I’ve come to admit that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in any gods, orbiting teapots, unicorns or such. I do like the stories, of course. One can always go on a flight of fancy… if one’s feet are firmly on the ground. It’s just food for thought. Especially the unicorns. Invisible and pink ones, of course.

That, however, is not the end of this little tale. You may have noticed I have hinted that the country I live in is, from my perspective at least, nominally Christian-dominated in that the Protestant Christians are trying their best to accommodate secular and popular opinion into their agenda. I can’t speak of the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Christians of other denominations. I simply haven’t the knowledge or experience.

What shocked me the most happened some years ago when serving my compulsory military service as a conscientious objector. My parents, being straightforward farmers like they are, informed me in, er, colorful language that we should forego any traditional Christian burials and just scatter their (I quote) “damned ashes on the fields, it’s where we got our livelihood from!”

They didn’t give a tinker’s damn about afterlife or respect for empty and spent husks. Just life. Fair enough! I realized just then that I had been living in a family of agnostics and atheists. Never mind that my mother believes in acupuncture or that my grandparents have a friendly relationship with a chiro who also “heals from a distance” as my gran says. I had been living a life of a skeptical person with the illusion of something being required of me to be a “proper” person, when in fact nobody in my family had ever told me I’d have to believe or go to hell. Decent folk, and though I disagree with some of their… medical choices, they let me be… me.