*I’m* Closed-Minded?

I’m a terrible blogger. I used to update pretty frequently and, well, then school started and it’s pretty much sucked all the creativity and life right out of me (not that I had a whole lot of either to begin with). I have still been getting into the odd flame war here and there, though. Lately, it’s been my favorite group: anti-vaccinationists (oh, excuse me, they’re “pro-vaccine safety” now). 
 I’ve been called closed-minded a lot over the years debating all sorts of woos for my refusal to buy whatever it is that they’re selling, be it faked moon landings, magical magnetic water, 9/11 conspiarcies, ghosts, et cetera. It finally dawned on me how deliciously ironic a true believer calling a skeptic closed-minded is.

Look at it this way: on one side, you have the proposition that one – and only one – interpretation of events is the correct one – that vaccines are teh (sic) evil, that George Bush personally detonated the World Trade Center towers, that the orb of light in the photograph is actually a spirit from the beyond, so on and so forth.

But, to me, being a skeptic is all about considering alternative explanations and ruling them out when they are no longer tenable based on the record. That orb in the photo probably isn’t a ghost, but rather it could be any number of different things (each of which wouldn’t require that we make some pretty big assumptions).

So, it’s not that I’m closed minded – I think that there might be any number of different explanations for the phenomena we see going on in our world. Just because I’m not believing your theory that a sentient race of lizard people actually hijacked our world-leaders ala pod people and are secretly controlling our minds via the mass media, doesn’t mean that I’m closed-minded.

It just means that I don’t believe your narrow (and sometimes hilarious) interpretation of events.