Thanks for the artcle. I've bookmarked it and will check it out later when I have some time.

A related word is "zetetic."

I've been reading Skeptical Inquirer (SI) since about 1980 when a prof introduced it to me. It was such a breath of fresh air - confusing time for me. Nowadays I prefer Skeptic magazine. Oddly, the only reading material that my wife and I have in common is the Skeptic Magazine. I'm surprised she likes it.

I've begun to find SI a bit too harsh, but when I first heard of it, it was such a wonderful thing for me. I felt like I was suffocating, surrounded by people who believed things that for the life of me I couldn't imagine any sane person believing. I was so happy at my good fortune for discovering these people who also found these unbelievable stories just a little TOO unbelievable - and actually were willing to spend a little time to research.

In my hs, we had a "Monsters, Mysteries, and Myths" club. I was the only skeptic and I'm sure the others wondered why I was in it, if I wasn't there. So did I sometimes.

Many years before that, in 8th grade, we were told about an artifact that had been found somewhere - this object that was presented as a battery. Everyone just accepted it and that it could only have been there because aliens gave us the technology. I came up with two alternate ideas: 1) maybe it was actually something else and it just had this ancillary, serendipitous property that it could be used as a battery, and 2) there was a secret society of people who knew things in advance of the rest of society and they had the knowledge that they just gave to us when they thought we were ready or they kept it to maintain control over us. Everyone (including the teacher it seemed to me) thought I was fishing and being completely unreasonable for not accepting the obvious truth - that this was a gift from aliens. Mind you, I didn't say my ideas were right, only that they seemed more reasonable to me than visiting aliens. I mean, if aliens left the technology, how come it wasn't a 20 million volt battery made from some material we wouldn't even be aware of?

About the time I started reading SI, there were some debates going on in the popular press. I like this skeptical stuff because it gives you an alternative. You hear these stories told by the true believers and you think, "yes. given this information, their conclusions must be true." But you always wonder (or *I* always wondered) is that really the way things happened?
SI gave me some extra info I never had before.

So I loved Joe Nickel's "Inquest on the Shroud of Turin." (And I've actually met and talked with him a number of times, listened to him speak, and perform some magic. We were both members of KASES at the time, KY association of scientists and skeptics.) I loved reading Gould's books (though there were parts of them I found irritating - his writing seems a little formulaic to me), and Dawkin's and Sagan's and Asimov's and Hansel's and Gardner's and Randi's (met Randi twice, but didn't get a chance to talk with him) and many others. To me, these books were like a keg of cold beer after a long spell in a dry county. I was dirt poor at the time - I almost dropped out of school and on numerous times I did not buy class books - but I would buy these things hot off the press and I would keep my SI subscription flowing (well, except for a very few times when I just couldn't afford it).

k