Let’s Debunk Skepticism

We live in a very rational, post supernatural, post religious world where it seems every thing must be questioned except extreme skepticism itself!   Of the proponents, James Randi is probably the most famous or should that be ‘notorious’?  It would seem that extreme skepticism is almost acquiring ‘cult’ status and that among todays rational enquirers, it’s now fashionable, hip and cool to be a disbeliever.  To be a disbeliever, gives you immediate ’street cred’ as someone who can be trusted to be honest, down to earth and genuine, whilst followers of religion, new age movements,  psychic phenomena, spiritualism or any other ‘ism’ is for the stupid, the gullible, the sheep!

Since the time of Jesus, the ever growing army of doubting Thomases, Richard’s and Harry’s have maintained that unless it can be smelled, weighed, touched, poked, prodded, examined in a laboratory under strict, rigorous scientific controls, whatever ”it” is…can’t or doesn’t exist and therefore has no validity in today’s scientific, logical and materialist, empiricist, agnostic, atheistic, unbelieving world!   Strangely enough, there are many things around us that we don’t quite understand but we take them for granted…electricity for one……the wind, for another, we can’t see it but we see its effect on nature. there are sounds inaudible to the human ear, but we know they are there, there are many sources of energy from outer space and we need scientific instruments to measure them…but again, we know they are there.  

When it comes to ourselves however, we are at our most skeptical.  We don’t trust our own minds, nor other peoples’ minds for that matter. Take psychic ability or spiritual healing….we don’t quite know HOW they work, but we know they do….so we label them as dangerous, fraudulent and the people who practise them as unworthy of the labels honest, genuine and trustworthy.  Admittedly, there people out there who will try to rip you off and they seem to get away with it, but that does not preclude the fact that there so many genuinely gifted, sincere and ethical practitioners of clairvoyance and mediumship out there too who believe they are offering a service and ministry to people  and who want to help.  These people, like others, have bills to pay, mortgages to pay etc and this is their livelihood but they do it with integrity and honour.  They too, have pride in their work and want to do a good job.

At the end of the day, it is down to peoples’ personal choice whether to employ the services of a reputable medium, it should not be the job of skeptics to try to destroy and defame the character of good psychics and mediums by tarring everyone with the same brush and lumping the ethical practitioners with the frauds, fakes and conmen.  The trouble with extreme skepticism is that even genuinely gifted psychics are labelled frauds, tricksters, who use cold reading techniques or body language techniques to read their clients.  Actually, any good medium worth his/her salt, has no need of any such techniques, but should be able to proffer information to the enquirer without any fishing for clues or prompting and the information should be personally relevant and informative to the querant.

My question is this,  are all psychics and mediums becoming society’s new ‘whipping boy’?  Will we see a return to the dark ages where people are burnt at the stake….or will we expand our consciousness, our compassion, our tolerance and broadmindedness and find ‘faith’ again in something that is ‘bigger’ than all of us?