Unhealthy Skepticism

I want to talk about the tragedy of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the first to re-discover ancient cave paintings in 1879. The Lascaux Caves with similar paintings was discovered in 1940, at which famous painter Pablo Picasso was said to have remarked, "We have learned nothing." The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave was discovered in 1994.

Sautuola was written off as a fraud, until the end of his days. He wasn't a fraud, and I don't believe the world can ever be sorry enough for that false accusation.

The word skeptic derives from the Skeptikoi, from Greek philosophers who asserted nothing. I understand that it's a faulty frame of mind to live in: to function in society, most of us have to make decisions, assertions, inventions-- and cut away what doesn't serve us and isn't true. We don't live well by suspending every judgment indefinitely, there's a time to call bullshit out and in a world full of it that time is all the time. None of us have unlimited patience and resources to keep investigating every little thing, that might be more of an unavoidable side effect of living rather than what a person lives for.

Arthur Conan Doyle had made the assertion that the Cottingley Fairies, photographed by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, served as evidence for the supernatural. Had he been alive to hear the confession that the photographers made paper cut-outs of fairies to use as props-- had any of us been in that position, of choosing to believe and turning out to not only be wrong but be deceived-- how many of us can say that it wouldn't hurt?

There's a wound in the world, still, from people who knew the truth and refused to share it untwisted.

When you don't want to ever be fooled again, then it's easy to confuse the suturing of that wound, with the suturing of someone else's lips.

There are wounds in the world, still, from where people who only thought they found the truth met with others who actually had found the truth and simply weren't sure.

This isn't a safe world, or a safe life, to seek and explore.



Recommended links:


http://forgetomori.com/2009/skepticism/psychic-powers-video-proof