Well, even though this thread has gotten unwieldy to the point where I doubt anyone else is reading it, I think I'll toss in my two cents, mostly because this is a big deal with me. I take skepticism very seriously, but I haven't really told anyone the story of my "conversion", as it were, because it's embarassing how naive I use to be.
I grew up in a highly religious Baptist household. We weren't allowed to celebrate Halloween. I wasn't even allowed to watch He-man or the Smurfs because the church was convinced they were evil. Sometime around there, I was exorcised by my Sunday School teacher. It was in retaliation for my mother and the church elders exorcising her a few weeks earlier, but I was a kid and the politics of the situation were a bit beyond me.
At some point, my parents must've decided the church was ******** and left. The problem was, they still had all this faith and nowhere to ground it. We drifted from church to church, but none of them really gave us what we wanted, so after a while we stopped trying, but we never really stopped believing.
This was all ancient history when I got into high school. Being a teenager, I had all these emotions and frustrations, and all this bound up with a lot of faith and a fear of dying (for some reason), and I fell into the old trap a lot of people here talk about. I had to prove to myself that the supernatural existed, and I started trying my hand at "magic with a K", as my sister calls it.
I got pretty deep into it, and I think a lot of it was my fault alone. I was stupid, and I honestly think laziness had a hand in it, too. No matter how many times I did a ritual and came up with nothing, no matter how many times I believed and found myself thwarted, I still clung onto the old occult trappings simply because it was too much work to change the way I thought.
And it was easier the further I got into it. Most everyone I met believed wacky or wackier things. The internet was rife with the kind of anecdotal evidence that substitutes for real proof, and I ate it all up. If it hadn't been for two people, I think I'd be a close-minded chaos sorceror and full-time woo to this day.
The first was my biology teacher, who started off one of his classes with "I know there's a lot of controversy out there, and I know a lot of people don't want me to teach this, but hell with them" and launched into a long lesson on the theory of evolution. Of course, this highly offended my delicate Christian sensibilities, and I tossed out all the old defenses at him. "What about the second theory of thermodynamics? What about the tendency of things to fall towards disorder? What about the chances of a human being evolving being astronomical?" all of which he swatted away like mayflies, ending it with a kind suggestion that I should read "Dragons of Eden" if I wanted to understand the subject.
The other was my dad, who became a skeptic sometime after leaving the church but kept it mostly to himself. He gave me a copy of "Demon-Haunted World" to read, but I only got through the introduction before deciding that I had devised enough one-liners to end any argument that might come up over it.
None of that really changed me, though, until one night. I had a friend over who was as into woo as I was, and we stayed up all night scaring ourselves silly, faking possessions, that kind of thing. Finally, in a fury of belief and the NEED to validate that belief, I ran out into the night screaming some damned thing.
It woke up my parents. They both came out to see what the holy hell was going on, and the sheer disappointment in my dad's eyes was enough to seal it right there. At that very second, I was converted to a skeptic. It happened just that suddenly.
Of course, it took me a long time to get myself THINKING as a skeptic, and even now at the age of twenty-five, I think there's still more to learn. But I maintain that what keeps most people from living skeptically is LAZINESS, pure and simple. It's a hard thing to train your mind to consider things as they come up. Someone talks about seeing a ghost, or reading minds, or bending spoons...it's easy to just sit back and agree. You don't have to think, and if anyone wants to argue, they're a bunch of close-minded fools. It's much harder to train yourself to ask questions, to probe everything people tell you, to tap away at the story until you uncover whatever truth, if any, it might have. And that kind of transformation happens inside a person. You can show them all the books on skepticism you want, all the proof that what they believe is a misunderstanding at best and a lie at worst, but THEY have to WANT to see it.
