“It’s a weird overlap,” says Watson, who also co-hosts the popular podcast “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and contributes skeptic-centric articles to the blog Bostonist (bostonist.com). “When you’re a magician, you learn all the secrets behind everything. You see psychics like John Edward or Sylvia Brown doing magic tricks, but they’re calling them magical supernatural powers. They’re using that lie to manipulate people’s emotions or take their money.” Magicians like Watson see that as a call to action; Penn and Teller’s Showtime series Bullshit!, a skeptic touchstone, embodies that ethos.
But Watson saw the need for more. Taking a cue from friend Sid Rodrigues’s London-based Skeptics in the Pub organization, she started a Boston version a year ago. About 70 people showed up for the first event, a talk with local blogger Mike the Mad Biologist. Out of that effort, the Boston Skeptics were born. Since then, similar events have been launched in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Calgary, Phoenix, Atlanta, and elsewhere around the world.
Oh yeah?!
So who joins Boston Skeptics? And why?
“There are a lot of people out there who struggle with certain questions about how the world works, and they don’t know that there are other people out there who feel the same way,” says Watson.
Tressa Breed, a 42-year-old administrative assistant from Gardner, sees the group as an opportunity to make up for having “spent too much time living too quietly.” For Claudia Flores, a 32-year-old government researcher from Falmouth, the best part of the group experience is “realizing that I’m not alone, that your off-the-wall thinking is not unique.”
Others have professional objectives. “The more I can learn about [science versus pseudoscience],” says Elizabeth Grimm, a 26-year-old science-and-health-regulations lawyer, “the better I’ll be able to help folks separate fact from fiction.”
Groups like Boston Skeptics are also resources for people who may just be emerging from the shadow of a “long-held belief,” which suggests such things as a religious conviction, social prejudice, or superstition.
And some skeptics are activists. Atlanta-based software engineer and one-time pub-night guest speaker Tim Farley took the call to advocacy to heart. His Web site, whatstheharm.net, compiles accounts of the financial and physical victims of homeopathy, detoxification, psychics, chiropractic medicine, exorcisms, and more. (The site has been praised by no less than doubter-royalty Penn Jillette himself.) By Farley’s current tally — drawn from 790 sampled and documented cases — 368,379 people have been killed and more than $2.8 billion lost as a result of pseudoscientific practices.
“Why are we skeptics? Are we just complainers who sit in the corner and make snide remarks?” Farley asks rhetorically. “I needed to do something and not just be another skeptic.”
Another common denominator among many skeptics is atheism. That said, skeptics claim to be more concerned with separating church and state and the dangers of fundamentalism than with convincing someone there is no God. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to have a discussion.
“We tend to think that your religion or your beliefs about astrology are just as open to criticism as, say, the political party you’re in,” says Jackie Lavache, co-founder of Boston Atheists.
“Nobody’s going to tell you that you shouldn’t believe in whatever you believe in,” says Watson. “It’s more like, ‘Why do you believe that?’ ”
