When did you first realize you were a skeptic?
Asked by
Rarebear (
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April 19th, 2010
For me it was when I was 11 years old, and I was playing with a Ouiji board with a couple of friends. One of them asked a question and the answer was my name, spelled incorrectly. I realized that it was all people pushing around the little thingy around the board, however subconsciously.
Then a couple of years later, I had another friend really into Tarot cards. She once did a Tarot reading on me and was really freaked out by it. I said, “Why not just shuffle the cards into another order?”
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When George Bush was elected president by two stolen elections. After that, many things in government were questionable to me and I was very skeptical regarding our “democracy”.
When I first really read and learn about all kind of science books. About 12th/13th years old. I always love the ‘Evolutionary Theory’ till nowadays.
I don’t remember how old I was, but it was when I would ask questions about things such as god/faith/religion or why people did/believed certain things and found the answers didn’t really answer much of anything but instead just led to more questions that no one else seemed to be asking or wanted to answer. As long as I can remember I just could never accept the answer: “Because that’s the way it is.”
Very early on in my eleventh year.
It was the same moment I realized my own mortality and lost my faith in God.
Around that time, I started to really understand science and had a glimpse of what it would soon mean in my life.
I have doubts that I am one.
I think I was born that way!!
@lloydbird What do you mean that you have doubts that you are one?
I won’t use religion because that is a ubiquitous example, but it was around my early teen years when simply started questioning everything: media, religion, people, personalities etc. Still….everything seems so…..artificial that I can’t watch T.V. except for some select shows and I don’t even like watching mainstream news anymore. When people seem fake it annoys the hell out of me and I want to yell at them and tell them to employ rational thinking!
I’m not sure, but I know it was well before I turned 13, because by then I had a history of asking unwelcome questions in Sunday school.
It may have been when I was no more than 6 or 7 and discovered how gullible other kids were when I made up explanations for things—and how stupid I felt when I realized that I’d been gullible myself.
I have grown up to be the kind of skeptic who questions her own skepticism.
Now I’m skeptical about my own skepticism. Awesome.
Age seven, around about the time my parents got divorced.
At birth, when the doctor slapped my ass—I thought “he must be a quack; a real doctor wouldn’t administer corporal punishment for just being born.”
I guess about the same time, 11–12 years old. But the real breakthrough were physics classes a bit later. I was extremely skeptical when the teacher claimed that the two fist-sized balls of iron he held in his hands would attract each other i.e. really be pulling at each other. Then he showed us an experiment demonstrating the effect. Wow, not only does the Earth keep us down, but you and me we are pulling the Earth up ever so slightly.
Later I realized that being skeptical can also mean being wrong in some cases. Einstein was skeptical about God playing dice. Still, skepticism is a good thing. We should always exercise critical thinking.
Yes, for me too, around 10–11
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