I supposed it was learned, but looking back it seems that I have always had the skeptical approach to things.

As a child in school, I always liked sciences best. I liked the fact that was a "right answer" in math and science, whereas in literature the discussion could sometimes go on forever without conclusion. Studying science, one becomes accustomed to basing judgements on evidence. That's all skepticism is: demanding, and basing judgements on, evidence.

My grandmother, who I have mentioned here occasionally, was a strong influence. She was a deeply religious christian woman from the church of "prayer and practicality" amd "god helps those who help themselves." Other than her unshakable belief in god, she had no patience for superstitions of any sort. She told us more than once not to let anyone "fill your head with nonsense," and it was she who sat with me and turned the light on and off to show me that the monster in the corner of my bedroom was just a shadow. "There's nothing here in the dark that's not here when the lights are on." Grandma was the first of several people who taught me to take life as it comes and deal with things in a straight-forward way.

My father was a civil engineer (bridges, roads, buildings, etc). I used to look at his professional journals. As a kid I couldn't understand a lot of it, but I did notice one thing: if a bridge failed or a building collapsed, there was always an investigation and they always found a cause. It was always something like design flaw, or faulty construction, or substandard materials, or improper maintenance. It was never gremlins or magic or bad luck.

Another influence was my ninth grade science teacher, Mr. Rosenthal. Early in the school year one of the kids started up about ESP. Instead of dismissing it as the crap he knows it is, Mr. R took some time to talk about it, and had us do some simple tests. We did the "guess what card I'm looking at" test, we tried telekinesis, we tried remote viewing. Of course, none of us "had ESP" of any kind.

Sometime in high school I read Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by David Mannix.

It didn't have such a flashy cover back then, but Mannix reveals a few of the circus sideshow "secrets" and gave me some examples of how things are not always as they appear.

I was raised Catholic, went to public schools, then to a Jesuit university where I "lost my faith." Ironic that a Catholic school should help me to give up religion, but they made us study theology. Prior to that, I hadn't really thought about it very much. When I did think about it I saw that there was no evidence to support religion, and, even if you still wanted to believe, no way to decide which religion was "correct."

I see no evidence of "the hand of god" in the universe after the big bang. It appears, from all we know, that once the universe came into existance, there was no need for divine intervention. The universe functions as it does, and 12 or 15 billion years later, here we are. However, mankind did not create the universe, and we don't know who or what (if anyone or anything) did. Whether there exists a creator, a god, is an open question: there is no evidence to examine. I guess that makes me agnostic, at least until some evidence is discovered.

Raybar