Missing in Action
What Happened to Skeptics?
By Daniel Muniz

What happened to skeptics? Did they lose their skepticism?

Back in the day, the Amazing Randi and a host of others tackled fortune tellers, psychics, astrologers, the New Age, and just about any kind of occultist who sought to impress the world with their duplicity. Paul Kurtz, a philosophy professor, founded the Committee for the Scientific Inquiry into Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) whose audacious goal was to debunk all the hogwash of the paranormal and the occult using reason and rational thought.

However, the occult still flourishes in our modern society and psychics are still making vast sums of money while maintaining an enormous presence on television shows. In fact, the New Age movement hasn’t diminished at all but has grown by leaps and bounds. Sadly, popular culture is still tremendously fascinated with the supernatural and is accepting of so many incredible claims without any scientific proof to validate such feats and abilities.

So what happened?

Of course skeptics are still around but nearly all of them are totally different from the days when they used to humiliate hucksters like Uri Geller by exposing their fraudulent stunts in public. In fact, they are now reluctant to “debunk” the occult and the paranormal. Today, their aims and agenda now revolve around a “positive” defense of science that sounds more like a boring college lecture from a political science class instead of the masterful refutations of the supernatural and bunk that they were once famous for.

Sadly, even Paul Kurtz now abhors debunking.

In the beginning, skeptics were a motley assortment of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and even magicians such as the Amazing Randi. Not only did they want to passionately debunk the flashy showmanship of scam artists who incessantly preyed on the naïve and the uninformed, they also wanted to introduce the world to reason in order to dispel the superstitions that continue to plague our modern age.

Unfortunately, a number of the skeptics were militant atheists who were hell bent on bashing Christianity. Consequently, that effort attracted partisan liberals who delighted in this. As time passed, skeptics began to develop a left wing ideology that spewed irrational hatred towards any conservative ideals. And liberal Democrats had a lot to offer skeptics particularly with their ire against organized religion. In exchange, skeptics gave up their independence along with their skepticism against many of the left wing sacred cows.

As a result, criticisms against the special interest groups aligned with the Democratic Party nearly disappeared. I remember when skeptics used to rail against radical feminism and other half-baked liberal ideologies. Sadly, too many skeptics have adopted political agendas instead of relying on reason.

Today, instead of doing battle with the occult, their chief villain is George W. Bush and the Republican Party with a special emphasis on Christianity. And instead of enlightening the world with rational thought, they now seek government funding and federal subsidies to the special interest groups that pander to the Democratic Party.

There was once a time that I didn’t mind tolerating their militant atheism because they had done an incredible job exposing flim-flam. And I loved the Skeptics Dictionary particularly with their well thought out refutations of the paranormal. It was a comprehensive and handy resource for looking up all the nonsense of the world.

Overall, it is sad to see how such a bright group of very independent minded individuals deluded themselves with politics. Science, reason, and rational thought do not belong to a political party or to any ideological spectrum. Myself as a conservative, I do not hesitate for one moment to criticize any tommyrot I sometimes see coming from conservatives because reason stands above politics.

Regrettably, what is most unfortunate is that today the scientific method is under assault. Unscrupulous scientists are addicted to the trough of federal funding. They refuse to allow their work to be scrutinized by peer review and by the public although it was financed under governmental auspices and could influence public policy. Basically, they regard their conclusions as a “take my word for it” type of mentality which is the antithesis of the scientific method.

Right now there is plenty of bogus scientific research and junk science that our press and politicians tout as fact yet the skeptics are adamantly silent because they actually do not want this governmental funding spigot to stop flowing dollars to extravagant but dubious programs.

In essence, many skeptics have lost their vision and have embraced the bunk of the left wing.

However, it is refreshing to still see the aged but sprightly Amazing Randi tackling another generation of hoaxers such as psychic Sylvia Brown even though his fellow comrades have given up on that calling. One evening while watching CNN, a sympathetic Anderson Cooper was quite defensive of Sylvia Brown but the irascible Randi debunked every one of her claims even when she insisted that she was unable to contact him for scientific validation. He retorted about what kind of a psychic is she if she cannot find out what his phone number is. I fell off my chair in laughter.

I just wish that skeptics would give up Democratic politics and return to reason and rational thought. The world is still filled with plenty of scammers especially the new batch of them that have turned out to be academic scientists. 

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