Hate the belief, love the believer

Hate the belief, love the believer

I always try my best to separate the beliefs from the believers. One can sometimes become frustrated with someone who believes a nonsense claim, especially if it’s a destructive belief. But I try to keep in mind that it’s the claim that I’m upset with and not the person. When someone gets cancer, you don’t get mad at the person, you get mad at the disease, right? In my opinion, good skeptics should avoid being too harsh with people who believe silly things. Be less condemning and more understanding. Teach, don’t shout. After all, we’ve all been there in one way or another and at one time or another. When I was a kid, I believed, briefly, in the ridiculous claim that superintelligent aliens visited the Earth long ago and showed our mentally deficient ancestors how to paint on cave walls, build pyramids, brush their teeth, and so on. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it, either. I’m human. Such stumbles come with the territory.

Like good people, good skeptics care about others and want to offer a helping hand when and where possible. Whether the topic is Atlantis, reincarnation, or conspiracy theories, my goal is to enlighten people, to show them how easy it is for all of us to fall for a good story delivered by a confident storyteller. Simply being a human being and thinking the way we do sets us up to believe these things. I care about the world, so I try to make it less goofy and less dangerous by showing others how they can keep their guard up. Sensible people don’t want idiotic ideas wasting valuable space in their heads if they can avoid it. The problem is that they need help to become good at recognizing idiotic ideas when they come along dressed up as perfectly reasonable and respectable claims. If you are not already, when you become a good skeptic you can help others spot the nonsense, too. Simply by spreading skepticism, you can help make the world better, and that’s a beautiful thing.