An old but still relevant essay Roy Stemman titled Skepticism: The New Religion addresses how spiritualism (the system of belief) is declining while its skeptics are becoming better organized.
Just about every parapsychologist I am aware of and numerous lay paranormalists have written rants about how skeptics are wrong-minded, uninformed and hinder progress. Some even use skeptics as a foil for their publications.
I see Wikipedia as a microcosm of our society's struggle for free inquiry of frontier subjects. In the early days of the online encyclopedia, it was still possible to influence policy ... more correctly, to help establish how the few guiding principles were to be implemented. I became an editor in 2009 to help "set the record straight" for the EVP article. If you review the record, I was immediately attacked by skeptics who habitually patrol the frontier subjects to ward off encroaching heathens. Although not banned from editing the EVP article, any edits I make will, often within minutes, be reverted based on the argument that I have a conflict of interest.
As I mentioned elsewhere, three arbitrations have set official Wikipedia law to assure that frontier subjects will be forever treated as fairytales. One of them, the pseudoscience arbitration was used to stop me from editing the Rupert Sheldrake article because I was supporting a pseudoscience subject. Extending the Wikipedia mentality to the greater society, the bad them for blasphemy mentality is one of the reasons our concepts have been rejected from mainstream society.
Every effort I have made to solicit help from other paranormalists to edit Wikipedia has been ignored. Some parapsychologists have also tried to recruit help from the better organized part of our community, but I have not seen a response. It seems that people who are not normally active in organizational, research or educational parts of the paranormalist community have little taste for activism other than the typical anti-skeptic rant.
And that is my point. It is obvious that skeptics are zealots of some kind of strong belief system. I had not thought atheism would be the core belief, but that makes sense. In general, paranormalists are not zealots about their belief in survival and psi-related phenomena. Those who are are might be compared to people who admire cars but who are not apt to buy a car magazine. Most of us are determined to understand the actual nature of these phenomena, albeit some of us are happy to limit the data set.
Dominance is a human survival instinct. Siding with the dominant belief system is one of the way it shows. It does not seem to apply to curiosity-related thought. It has been this way throughout history as the majority driven by human instincts have forced compliance from the minority driven by the urge to gain understanding. This human instinct-curiosity dichotomy, by the way, is one of the ways I distinguish between the human influence and the conscious self influence in who we are.
I have often written about the fact that our freedom to publicly study these phenomena is not assured. It is a lot like pissing in the wind.
Just about every parapsychologist I am aware of and numerous lay paranormalists have written rants about how skeptics are wrong-minded, uninformed and hinder progress. Some even use skeptics as a foil for their publications.
I see Wikipedia as a microcosm of our society's struggle for free inquiry of frontier subjects. In the early days of the online encyclopedia, it was still possible to influence policy ... more correctly, to help establish how the few guiding principles were to be implemented. I became an editor in 2009 to help "set the record straight" for the EVP article. If you review the record, I was immediately attacked by skeptics who habitually patrol the frontier subjects to ward off encroaching heathens. Although not banned from editing the EVP article, any edits I make will, often within minutes, be reverted based on the argument that I have a conflict of interest.
As I mentioned elsewhere, three arbitrations have set official Wikipedia law to assure that frontier subjects will be forever treated as fairytales. One of them, the pseudoscience arbitration was used to stop me from editing the Rupert Sheldrake article because I was supporting a pseudoscience subject. Extending the Wikipedia mentality to the greater society, the bad them for blasphemy mentality is one of the reasons our concepts have been rejected from mainstream society.
Every effort I have made to solicit help from other paranormalists to edit Wikipedia has been ignored. Some parapsychologists have also tried to recruit help from the better organized part of our community, but I have not seen a response. It seems that people who are not normally active in organizational, research or educational parts of the paranormalist community have little taste for activism other than the typical anti-skeptic rant.
And that is my point. It is obvious that skeptics are zealots of some kind of strong belief system. I had not thought atheism would be the core belief, but that makes sense. In general, paranormalists are not zealots about their belief in survival and psi-related phenomena. Those who are are might be compared to people who admire cars but who are not apt to buy a car magazine. Most of us are determined to understand the actual nature of these phenomena, albeit some of us are happy to limit the data set.
Dominance is a human survival instinct. Siding with the dominant belief system is one of the way it shows. It does not seem to apply to curiosity-related thought. It has been this way throughout history as the majority driven by human instincts have forced compliance from the minority driven by the urge to gain understanding. This human instinct-curiosity dichotomy, by the way, is one of the ways I distinguish between the human influence and the conscious self influence in who we are.
I have often written about the fact that our freedom to publicly study these phenomena is not assured. It is a lot like pissing in the wind.
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