Healthy dose of Skepticism

A couple of months back, my parents and I went to the grocery store to do some shopping. My dad was pushing the cart while my mom walked beside him and in the cart was a huge watermelon. "That's strange," I thought, "we usually get our fruits from the market." My dad had this huge smile as he came up to me and started explaining the watermelon as if he'd read my mind.

He mentioned that when picking a watermelon, you need to pick a round one. An elongated one will not be so sweet. The color is another thing and he goes over his little mental checklist. I pause for a second and think that all these details he mentioned seemed very familiar. I ask him where he got this information and quickly followed with, "Facebook?" He laughed and nodded. My mom was beside him shaking her head knowing my dad doesn't check his sources or verifies what he reads online.

My dad still felt pretty good about his new found knowledge and decided to share it with my sisters. That night, we had watermelon after dinner to see if Facebook was a reliable source for picking fruit in a fruit stand. We all got a slice and as we expected, it wasn't all that sweet.

Dad later claimed that the reason he bought the watermelon was because he wanted to see if what he learned on Facebook was indeed true. Whatever the case, a healthy dose of skepticism is always good. Since I started visiting this atheist website, I've noticed that a lot of people believe things which wouldn't normally be accepted by the vast majority of people. They usually hold on to these beliefs even if logic and history tell them otherwise. And this goes with both atheists and theists.

Sadly, people still hold to the logical fallacy of, "God is real because the (insert religious text here) says he's real. We can believe said religious text because it is the word of God." That line of reasoning may be fine but it only shows blind belief which pretty much means you're willing to put your belief in God on the Spin the Wheel at a fair. When people (rightly) show them that they're basing their belief on a logical fallacy, they simply fire back with, "You just don't see the truth." I'm sorry but even I can't follow truth in a circular argument.

On the other side of the debate, you have atheists who stick to a belief there is no proof for God's existence. When proof is then given, they simply fire back with, "I think that's false" or "I highly doubt that" or even, "You're just making things up" without stating a reason for the statement's falsehood.

One of my favorite atheists on this website -let's call him Joey- loves to shut me up by saying, "You believe in a made up religion/fairy tales," which hurt me at first then I realized why they hurt me. They were attacking my person, not my arguments. I then later began to see which arguments made sense, what fallacies I was making, and so on and so forth. I loved the exchange as it forced me deeper and deeper into my faith. An allegation would be made against my Catholic faith and I'd definitely want to know if that was true so I do my research, being skeptical of both the allegation and the Church's position, and every time, I find myself thinking that the Catholic position on that allegation actually holds more water.

Issues like the Spanish Inquisition, the Galileo controversy, the Crusades, and many many other issues caught me by surprise with how we buy into falsehoods these days. I went into my research with skepticism and told myself that if my faith is proven to be false during the course of my research, I'd leave it.

I won't lie, there are a bunch of points raised by some atheists that I've yet to dive into but I've dove into enough to know that many times, they're basing their "research" on poor to very poor research probably 80% of the time. And half the time they cite reliable sources, they stretch the meaning of the text further than what their sources say.

One of the positive effects I've experienced in myself lately with my new found skepticism is to always ask for sources. We can then try to verify these sources then see for ourselves if these sources can be trusted. The more sources we have, the better. Lies always hide behind a veil of truth but it can't hide all the time. Conflicting stories are usually a red flag for these instances.

My favorite atheist, Joey, once told me that the Catholic Bible has always been changing and that some books were removed when it didn't serve the political purposes of the Church then he gives me a bunch of links to check out. I was curious and upon reading the first link, I thought he had me. He lists a bunch of books which were in Catholic Bibles before the 1600s and were absent after. The names didn't look familiar save a few of them. I read another link he sent which asserted the same thing but placed the date in the 1800s. Now, I was confused. They both asserted that the Church removed 14 books from the Bible so I go through each one and checked it with my own Bible. All of them except one was in my Bible printed in 1987. The last one, I checked was never in the Bible to begin with. Some versions do include, as it's a very good prayer, but state that it was not part of Sacred Scripture.

I told Joey this then he simply shut me up again with his favorite line and added I refused to see the truth. So I ask him in return why he holds to an opinion which is clearly contradictory or can't even stand after the first round of fact checking. He then shifted the topic to something else which he could not prove again.

I realized that the past few months, I have been open to be proven wrong. I have a healthy dose of skepticism and I consider that a gift. Some people don't really have this and they're truly missing out. My parting words for you is this. Check your sources. Be open to be proven wrong. Question everything, even your sources. A lie, if it's hiding, will always pop out of it's hiding place. If none does, maybe you've found the truth.