What should skeptics think?

I was walking through the Student Life Center after lunch today, looking at random posters that were up on the bulletin boards. One of them caught my eye. It was titled:

Same-Sex Marriage
and
Public-Policy Making

What should Christians think?

So, this is the position of Christians in power, eh, that Christians need to be told what to think? For the self-proclaimed faithful, they"re showing a surprising lack of faith in their own. Maybe they"re afraid that if Christians start to think for themselves, they might realize some of the numerous problems with the religion.

This isn"t a fluke occurence. A Google search on the specific phrase "What should Christians think?" gives 267 results (some of which are probably repeats, though). Christians are told what to think on a wide variety of subjects, from homosexuality to the Fourth of July. The only thing that should really be uniting Christians in their thoughts is Christianity itself, but a search for "What should Christians think about Christianity?" returns zero results. (Though once this post is up, you might get this when you try it out yourself.) I can"t say for sure whether this is limited to Christianity or not, as I"d have to figure out translations into different languages for most other languages. A few stats that might be relevant, though:

"What should Jews think?" - 2 results
"What should Atheists think?" - 0 results
"What should skeptics think?" - 0 results
"What should Humanists think?" - 1 result
"What should Agnostics think?" - 0 results

Looks like it"s the Christians that have the big problem here.

Now, a little story about my personal experiences with Christianity. My parents are both Christian, but my father is Catholic and my mother Anglican (though she"s grown more Deist in the past years), so they couldn"t decide on which form of Christianity to raise me and my sister in. So, we were brought up as just generic Christians, but religion was never a big part of our lives. We"d only go to church on holidays, and the only time we really studied the religion was when I had to know about it for the Cub Scouts (the version of the Boy Scouts for younger kids).

After one of the many moves of my childhood, I ended up going to an extremely crappy public school, where I spent an entire year learning absolutely nothing. My parents decided that it would be best for me if I went to a private school, and the only one available was a Catholic school. It was here that I finally became fully exposed to the religion. I only stayed there for half a year before we moved again, but the experiences there were very enlightening (or should I say "delightening"?) for me. I was about 9 or 10 at this time.

My naturally inquisitive nature led me to ask a lot of questions in class. The most frustrating one for the teacher was "How do you know that?" Picture, if you will, the following exchange:

Me: How do you know that?
Teacher: The Bible says so.
Me: How do you know the Bible is right?
Teacher: Because it was inspired by God.
Me: How do you know that?
Teacher: Because it says so.
Me: How do you know it"s right?
Teacher: Because I have faith in it. You should, too, if you want to avoid going to Hell.

Circular logic backed up by an appeal to consequences. I couldn"t name the logical fallacies at the time, but it didn"t sit well with me. So, I was asked to believe things on faith. I was trying to be good, so I made an honest effort to do this. There was a problem, though. The things my gut told me were true didn"t match up with what the Bible said. For instance, I was particularly fond of the idea of reincarnation, but this didn"t sit well with the teacher. So, we had to base our beliefs off of faith, but my faith was wrong. It wasn"t as if there was any evidence we could consult to settle the matter. I just had to think what they told me to think, and that was that. I didn"t end up deconverting right then, but it left the seeds of doubt in my mind that would later sprout once I had the intellectual tools to analyse the religion properly.

So, let"s go back to the title of this post: What should skeptics think? The answer here is that skeptics should think for themselves. Hell, everybody should think for themselves, but this is one of the defining characteristics of being a skeptic. You should be analysing all claims for yourself, even those of skeptics. If you go along with everything some skeptic says, then in the end, you"re just another gullible sheep who follows a skeptic, and not one yourself.

And if there"s something in this post or any other one of mine that, when you think about it, doesn"t sit right with you, the "Leave a comment" link is right at the bottom. Use it.