Thanks for all the fish
1st November 2014
It’s about 25 years since I joined the NZ Skeptics, and eight years since I took on the editorship of this magazine. It’s been fun, but it’s time I handed the NZ Skeptic on to other hands, so this will be my last issue as editor. Thank-you to all who have contributed over the years; together we’ve covered a lot of ground. I thought I’d indulge myself a little here by looking back over past issues and some of the material in them.
Some topics never go away. Alternative medicine remains as popular as ever, and mediums are still fleecing the vulnerable and the grieving. Others, such as crop circles, may emerge, prosper for a time and then fade. A few may morph in unexpected and occasionally alarming directions. Hypnotic regression started out as a means of ‘discovering’ a person’s past lives or alien abduction experiences (see p 5) but became more sinister when subjects began to report instances of satanic ritual abuse and, later (coupled with flawed interrogations of children), more conventional forms of sexual abuse (see NZ Skeptic 50, this issue p 21). The skeptical movement worldwide played an important role in highlighting the insanities of the moral panic that arose. Though the panic has since faded much damage remains, and ‘regression therapists’ continue to practise.
The skeptics themselves have also changed. As Martin Bridgstock wrote in NZ Skeptic 102, the average skeptic was once “overwhelmingly likely to be male, older than average, very intelligent, mostly conservative and grumpily critical of anything to do with the paranormal.” More recently though, there has been “an influx of skeptics who are much younger, much less likely to be bearded, and who include a substantial minority of women.” They are also more likely to be atheists (though there are plenty among the old school), and it is unlikely we will see another article like Dr Robert Mann’s in NZ Skeptic 42, arguing that Christianity was the only ethical system under which science is known to flourish - something that generated a huge response in Issue 43!
But NZ Skeptics has always had members who hold a wide range of political and philosophical views, and that has helped to keep the society lively and vibrant. We might all agree that rationality is a Good Thing that we should all aspire to, but we’re human, our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge rather than perfectly designed reasoning machines, and some matters simply defy rational analysis - at least with our current level of knowledge. We won’t always all agree on everything. But we (I hope) can agree that the world is an amazing place that is better understood and appreciated by assuming it operates according to natural, rather than supernatural principles, that it’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ rather than sieze on a paranormal explanation for an unexplained phenomenon, and that these are views which are worth promoting and defending.