Saturday, July 14, 2012

A Skeptic Leaves Skepticism

Stephen Bond was born in Ireland, and admits to an early hatred of Ireland’s drunken culture, Jesus, and Christianity amongst other things. As soon as he was old enough and able, he left all those things behind and moved to France, winding up apparently in Belgium.

He became a capital-S Skeptic, and for years haunted the internet skeptic sites. But he has left Skepticism behind with a scathing assessment of its inhabitants. It’s not that he has changed any philosophical positions; he merely became skeptical of the Skeptics. He has written an article describing his rejection, and the reasons for it are those which are obvious to those of us who have always been skeptical of the Skeptics, but which apparently are new to him. Nonetheless Bond spares no one any feelings when he slashes the Skeptics’ sexism, racism, elitism, positivism, hate mongering, etc. And yet he still feels that “friars, preachers, despots” … are the ” historical enemies of progress”. Apparently sexism, racism, elitism, positivism are objectionable but don’t get in the way of whatever he thinks progress constitutes.

There are a couple of other articles in his “opinions” file which are interesting conjunctions to the above article: utopia, and purity. I haven’t read all his work, and I agree with only certain portions, but it is interesting writing and a view into real, if seemingly under-informed, skeptical inquiry.

1 comment:

Martin said...

Heh. I like this paragraph:

"skeptics have no time for philosophy; many skeptics hate and fear it. It's the skeptic Kryptonite. As a fundamental, rigorous, intellectually respectable but defiantly non-scientific discipline, philosophy makes a lot of skeptics feel threatened. Skeptics are like a naval fortress, with weapons fixed to sea; while they regard themselves invulnerable against fleets of art grads, paranormalists, and true believers, they know that philosophers can strike them freely in their defenceless rear. Little wonder that philosophers bring out their inferiority complex. Some skeptics would love to dismiss philosophy, all philosophy, in the same way they dismiss religion, but they'd be afraid of appearing stupid or attracting ridicule in doing so. If anything, they're afraid philosophers already find them ridiculous."

I do indeed find that philosophy makes them angry.