Why am I doing this??

Hello everyone (that is if there is anyone at all reading this),

Anyway, this one is intended to be a blog promoting skepticism and critical thinking. It was very hard to decide how to start this thing, so I just decided to start right from the beginning, so no big science nor fancy terms for this first one, or at least I will try to stick with it.

Anyway, perhaps it’s a good idea to start explaining what I actually intend to to get out of this and how I actually got into this idea. I would like to start clarifying what I mean by being skeptical and a critical thinker. Well, this is not a term I made up nor use to impress people around me, at least not to impress them about my persona, but rather by the wonders and unlimited possibilities science and critical thinking can put in front of us.

Being a skeptic doesn’t mean you are going to start having doubts about everything around you, like the world itself, at least not in terms of its’ existence, but rather it means that person is going to go through a process of critical thinking and evaluation before drawing any conclusions instead of doing the opposite and just relying of what other people told you to be truth without any testable, reliable data supporting it. I don’t see anything fancy nor the need to be a scientist in order to do this, in fact I think that’s the real way of starting using our brains and make the real difference between us and the rest of the animalia.

I actually still feel amazed by people who get offended just by considering the idea that humans are part of that animal kingdom, but I’m getting off topic now. So going back to it, I was always a kid who loved everything about science, I actually memorized (and still remember thoroughly) the periodic table of elements, so yeah, you could say I was on the nerd pack, that is if we took mathematics out of the question, which is why I would have a hard time making it into the scientific field. Nevertheless, I was always too lazy to read, and to my surprise I discovered not a while ago that I actually knew (and still do) very little about many things of our Universe.

I was introduced to the term skeptic by a fellow colleague named Markus Lenhard not too long ago, and from there on my concept of everything surrounding my existence made a full twist, for that I will always be grateful to him. The more I get into it the more addicted I become. Somebody tried to make a point once in a discussion that science and religion are pretty much the same, they both look for the same answer he said, which is basically the origin of everything we know, he went on saying that at the end they are both so right and at the same time so wrong, based on pure theories.

I strongly disagree with this position, in fact I think they lay in totally opposite poles, but the statements this person made could seem valid at a first glance, that is without making critical thinking, without being skeptic and falling into a biased opinion. I am not going to discuss now why these two approaches are so different because is not the point of this particular entry but rather I will tackle it on my next one, so there you go, we already have a starting point.

The reason why I am doing this is not to get more clicks out of my webpage, nor to get more friends nor appear as the Mexican prodigy in Helsinki, I might actually get more people disagreeing with me which would be fantastic, but rather because I am a true lover of science and contrary to what some people believe, that has helped me appreciate and love my life and the things around me more than ever, it just feels so good to base your life on real, tested and well supported evidence rather than fairy tail sounding stories…so much that I feel it fair to share it. If anyone feels I am wrong with whatever I say and proves me with reliable and valid evidence and arguments to be so, I will eagerly recognize my mistake/s, you have to start from yourself to be a truth skeptic, and my believes are not bounded by emotions, I haven’t even come up with the great majority of them on the first place, so why should I be offended by anybody challenging them then?

I have a good amount of information, sources, podcasts, etc, I would be more than willing to share if anybody is interested. In my opinion, they are a real slap to the brain, sometimes not so easy to swallow, especially if you are emotionally attached to your believes, which would make the process of letting them go even harder. But hey, I hope at least one of the persons who read this receives the same lesson and reality shake that I got, and truly starts realizing how incredibly amazing our universe is when we start dissecting and analyzing each part of it, breaking our brains to get to a reasonable and valid conclusion instead of taking the easy, lazy shortcuts we have all encountered at many crossroads of our lives. I don’t know if I made any fucking sense here but I guess it will get better as I write more entries. For now I found this quote from Voltaire very appropriate to close this blog:

“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities” – Francois-Marie Arouet-

Carl Sagan was one the greatest scientists and skeptics of our time, I found this explanation about the human brain very interesting, especially coming from him, check it out:

"What distinguishes our species (from animals) is thought"- C. Sagan

So that’s for now, like they used to say on the MTV’s celebrity death match series, good fight, good night!!

Rode