In the last posting about the job opening at the James Randi Educational Foundation, if you send in an application be sure to include your resume.
Hello, my name is Eric Carlson and I am a professor at Wake Forest University. I am writing to inform you that I am attempting to form a skeptics group here in North Carolina called the Triad Area Skeptics Club (TASC). Our website is at http://www.wfu.edu/~ecarlson/tasc/ Our group is growing daily, especially after our Friday the 13th bash, and soon we hope to start a newsletter. For further information contact: ecarlson@wfu.edu
Here are two more datapoints supporting the theory that believers can convert to skepticism immediately (shall we call this PUNCTUATED SKEPTICISM?!):
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your excellent organization and frequent communications. I enjoyed the God debate stuff. Maybe it was brewing inside my brain during the many weeks of studying chicken embryos, but I can remember the exact DAY in my embryology class back in 1981 when it suddenly became clear to me that human life was NOT unique. It then made no sense to believe in God any longer. Keep up the good work!
Mary _____, M.D.
Michael:
While most Born Again Christian take a bit of time and go through a period of being softened up before becoming Skeptics; still many of them can point to defining moments when they were more or less pushed over the edge into Skepticism. I am a case in point. I can tell you now the time and I can take you to the place (those are words in an old Gospel Song) where my thought processes were different after that moment than they were before. So don't despair over not converting people right on the spot. My conversion took place in a class room experience in New Testament Greek at one of the most conservative of schools, John Brown University at Silo Springs Arkansas. It was 1950 as I recall. We Preacher Boys had just returned from Compulsory Weekly Chapel
Services where we had heard a fabulous sermon on Zionism. The Jews, God's chosen people, were back in the Holy Land. Jesus was coming soon! To our surprise our Professor was less enthused about all that talk we had just heard reviewing the entire Chosen People Biblical concept. He recommended that we read a book entitled I Have Been Robbed. I never did read that book, but just reflecting on that title alone got me to thinking about the absurdity of a righteous or just God having a chosen people, a people he heaped all sorts of blessing's on while at the same time beating the hell out of everyone else. I realized then that without that belief in the Chosen People, all other beliefs about the Hebrew God were awash on a very rocky beach. It has taken me nigh on to 50 years to reclaim even a good part of what a belief in a Chosen People concept had robbed from me. I would like to suggest that such conversion moments can be very liberating and full of great joy surpassing even the Born Again's experience of knowing they have passed from death to life because they love the brethren.
Bob _____
On another note, has anyone yet seen or read a new book from Cambridge University Press by William Dembski called The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities.? A correspondent tells me that "This book was ostensibly written to challenge Darwinian evolutionary theory. But it also provides a mathematical foundation for the types of statistical inferences parapsychologists use to identify paranormal phenomena. In particular, the book shows how to deal with statistical experiments whose p-values are extremely small (like those that regularly come up in parapsychology experiments)."
We (Skeptic magazine) are preparing a new version of the "25 Creationists Arguments" publication we did a few years ago (and still in print and available for $3.00 each), to include these new attacks on evolutionary theory--the so-called "new creationism" of "irreducible complexity" and "intelligent design." It seems every couple of decades the creationists mutate into a new species of jargon because everyone figures out what they are up to.