Skepticism should be seen as a tool not a tribe.

Whilst traveling the BS rich ecosystems of social media it is wise to hold a skeptical attitude. Question everything.
Yet conversely, you don’t want to throw any precious metaphysical babies out with the mainstream-consensus bathwater. You may just miss something revelatory. Question the questioners as well.

There are plenty of ‘professional skeptics’ online maintaining their monetised presence by debunking the weird, the fringe, the liminal, the outliers. And sometimes (not always) it becomes more about defending their tribe of skeptics and maintaining the sanctitude of the previously debunked than actually examining the topic with an open balance.

What are they skeptical of? God, bigfoot, parapsychology, conspiracy theories, homeopathy, ghosts, dualism, aliens, and other things they take to be irrational or pseudoscientific. People only believe in God, conspiracy theories, souls, aliens, and so on because they suffer from cognitive biases and are prone to committing informal logical fallacies.

That’s a loose description of what the skeptic community is, what they believe, and why I have a problem with them. To reiterate: a number of skeptics fail to live up to their professed values, including many leaders in the skeptic community, who have repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy sources of information on the topics they speak about; and their analysis of why people believe what they believe is often astonishingly superficial.

Emerson Green.

Emerson Green describes himself as a naturalist interested in religion, and consciousness. In this video he explains his own disillusion with some in the online community of skeptics.

Photo image: Tandem X visuals.