Does Scepticism Develop With Age?

[McAvennie]

As a kid I beleived everything, the Newby Church ghost, Bigfoot, Nessie, UFO's et.

However growing up it all started to go wrong, Santa, Cottingly Fairies, the Nessie photo's etc. It all began to come out as hoaxes, even the bloody Bigfoot footage!

Now I find it hard to beleive anything as being truly Fortean. UFO's well they could be real but ghost pic's are never convincing, weird beasts are never found and if they are it's all scientifically explained.

Basically the older I get the more sceptical am of everything and it is very depressing

Is it just me turning into a miserable non-beleiver or is this a common trait as you start to get older?

 

[gyrtrash]

Dunno mate. The world is still a bloody weird place!
I believed everything as a kid too. It's only my perceptions of mysteries that change over time.
Just because some evidence is proved a hoax doesn't disqualify all evidence! Every time something is proven to be a hoax or explained, twenty things pop up to replace it!
Yeah, I know. But I'm an optimist!

There are loads of Foetean things going on, just seeing them, that's the thing!

 

[McAvennie]

True, I pity the fool who doesn't even bother to look.

 

[Breakfastologist]

I think maybe you just get less trusting of what people say. I think the more time you have to talk to pathalogical liars the more you realise that so many of the truly intriguing things you hear about could easily come from the same imaginations. When you're dealing in areas with very little evidence (and the evidence you do see turns out to be hoaxed in the majority of cases) so much relies on what people reported and as you get older you learn more about how unreliable that is.

That doesn't mean that you're not open to genuine phenomena, you're just a little less credulous is all.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

Forteana is an enjoyment of the stories we tell each other about the
world we inhabit. Yes, a lot of questions arise from that sentence.

The headline stories are soon replaced by new headlines - poltergeist,
no poltergeist; Lake Monster, no monster.

Our belief and disbelief tend to fluctuate with our internal weather and so
does the attention we give to those non-causal relations which Jung called
Synchronicities. An interest in Forteana is mainly a branch of literary curiosity
or arises from experience of astounding coincidences in life. Direct experience
of ghosts, aural hallucinations etc is the lot of a minority.

Some stories are fully explained as hoaxes and frauds. In many others, an
attempted or detected fraud blights months of careful investigation. I am
thinking of Spiritualism, here, where Mediums were exposed as fakes, attempting
some pathetically simple tricks. Yet their most florid demonstrations have never
been successfully explained.

I am reading Nandor Fodor's 1958 book, On the Trail of the Poltergeist, which
details his involvement in the Thornton Heath case twenty years before. From
the start he makes it plain that the focus of the phenomena, Mrs Forbes, is a
fraud. Yet her frauds co-exist with phenomena which he cannot explain. He comes
to see her dissembling AND her production of weird phenomena as aspects of
the same damaged psyche.

The rational thing is to dismiss a witness, when they are caught out. The Fortean
thing is to wonder why a medium who could produce an aspidistra out of thin air
should have needed to conceal coins beneath her breasts!

 

[intaglio]

Depends on the kid and on the environment.

I think my scepticism started at Sunday School at about age 7 when the rector insisted that Adam and Eve were the only two humans and I pointed out the incest angle

And at school when a Teacher told me that I would get lead poisoning from chewing a pencil and I told her that I couldn't because it was graphite

Or perhaps the Maths teacher who told me off for using 3.14159 as pi instead of 22/7

I sometimes got the impression teachers didn't like me ...

 

[Anonymous]

Reminds me of my argument with a primary school teacher over whether an earthworm was an annelid or not. Teachers, eh?

 

[Beakmoo]

I was virtually laughed out of the room by a biology teacher when I suggested birds might be descended from dinosaurs. (was a new theory at the time) Who's laughing now eh? Eh? Cow

 

[brianellwood]

Well, I'm bloody ancient, but the only thing I'm sceptical about is politicians! And remember that scientists are the 'new' gods who explain everything - except scientific theory is just that, and ready for the garbage bin with the next advance...

 

[Anonymous]

I'm still amazed anew with every dawn at what human beings are capable of and willing to believe a great deal of them. Degenerates.