JREF Swift Blog

Your Skeptic Stories

Print
Details

[Editor’s Note: “Your Skeptic Stories” is an ongoing series written by 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 story comes from Jorge.]

I was lucky to be born in 1966 to parents who were communist simpathizers. It was the dark times of the fascist regime in Portugal, and religion (Catholicism) was one of the 'opiums' the government used to silence the suffering people. When I was six, and went to school, I realised most of the other pupils were also attending sunday school, and I wanted to attend it, too. But I was, for reasons I could not understand then, rejected by my church

After the revolution in 1974, Communism became one of the major political forces in Portugal; at the height of the Cold War, when I was in High School (around 1980), every student belonged to a major political party, and the two most aggressive were the Communists, and the former Fascists. As a communist simpathizer, I tended to accept everything that came from Soviet Union as perfect, and everything American as corrupt. As a matter of fact, I has substituted politics for religion.

Until one day, I happened to read a small newspaper chronicle by a famous politician, Raul Rego, a well known Freemason; in it, he claimed that nothing is totally good or totally bad, nor should we seek to attain perfection, but the equilibrium between both good and bad - also known as 'justice'. Many people say skepticism doesn't come overnight, but that chronicle (that I kept on my wallet and reread several times for months) made me start looking at politics with different eyes. Thus I rejected Communism, and all other forms of bigotry, credulity, and "snake oil" - who claim to be 'good' over 'evil' but are never 'just'. In the meanwhile, the fact that I had never been given a religious education made me wonder about religion, and I found the religious texts by myself, and read them with an open and inquisitive mind, interested more in the historical and allegorical aspects of the Bible than on the religious ones. And I also read the Apocripha, Greek mithology, etc.

Recently I found the skeptic movement through the Internet and books, and I thank the fact that I managed to reach knowledge through clean - and just - eyes, and not through the tainted glass of religious faith or political allegiance. And, as a matter of fact, I believe I know more about the Bible (or the Apocripha) now that I'm an agnostic, or about politics now that I'm an iconoclast, than many religious and political people I know, who can only see and acknowledge what they need, or are forced, to believe.
My pet-project, now, is to (critically) surf "conspiracy theory" sites, as a form of entertainment, but also to find alternative explanations for official government stories about the world around us. You see: I stopped trusting governments many years ago, and I don't watch TV anymore...
Jorge is a Psychiatrist, Mensa-member, father of two. Agnostic (raised as Catholic) and iconoclast (with leftist tendencies). He wrote a novel about the 'apparitions' in Fatima in 1917, based on the diaries of Sister Lucia, that debunks the 'official' explanation.