Why are skeptics & atheists dowdy & dull?
Archive: Richard Evans Lee • Archive: Skeptics & Atheists
When my partner Gordon said he had a subscription to Free Inquiry I asked him to pass them along to me. He warned me that I wouldn’t be thrilled. After scanning several issues I can see why he won’t be renewing his subscription.
Reminded me of why I never renewed my own subscription to Skeptical Inquirer. Deadly dull stuff to say the least.
H.L. Mencken was my own introduction to deriding the nonsense believed by the majority of mankind. Mencken’s artful laughter at pious buncombe, earnest, highfalutin Americans and starkly nutty believers in god and higher power has insured even his minor prose continues to be reissued.
Martin Gardner always writes well. His early books like Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science were hilarious tours of crackpot theories and befuddled pseudoscience. His later books aren’t as much fun, how much can you have with the 98th analysis of bad parapsychological testing?
Why don’t I get any pleasure out of Free Inquiry or Skeptical Inquirer? Partly they are dowdy. Mencken would’ve applauded their goals, but if only to himself would’ve shook his head at the tedious pursuit of their targets.
The prose is boring in a way worse than a bad textbook. I was strongly reminded of old fanzines: amateurish pursuit of ingrown self-satisfaction. In SI this was more forgivable. Many of the articles are semi-technical attempts to invalidate bad science and careless observation. FI reads much like a group of middling protestant pastors patting each other on the back. There may have been a lively paragraph here or there (I’d already read the bits by Hitchens and Dawkins on the web).
It is hard for me to believe that anyone who isn’t published in FI or a friend of one of the writers can cope with the windy, wandering syntax. (Yeah, I’m sharply alive to my own failings. For now I feel there’s a distinction between what is required of a hobbyist with a weblog and someone who asks that his words be printed.)
I couldn’t help but smile at seeing Richard Rorty listed as a humanist laureate. Rorty’s most technical sentences give more pleasure than the dully demotic ones in the skeptic fanzines.
Speaking of laureates, I couldn’t help but feel that Paul Kurtz’s secular canonization in his own publication would be more seemly after he’s gone on to oblivion.
If y’all feel indignant about the preceding, take your huffiness to a forum. I’m a village atheist amusing himself while he sips some beer.
2 · Posted by: Richard on April 1, 2004 04:04 PM
I almost bought a second year of SI. Even reading FI for free would be too much. I skim. I guess Free Inquiry is the atheist’s equivalent of The Nation and National Review people telling other people the things they think are right: compulsive preaching to the choir.
3 · Posted by: Eli Sarver on April 1, 2004 06:04 PM
Is it just me, or is “Skeptic” more substantive than both of those magazines? I find it a good cover-to-cover read, but SI spends too much time trying to be funny on subjects such as bigfoot and ufos. We know they aren’t real, no need to debunk the nuts out there, thanks.
4 · Posted by: Richard on April 1, 2004 06:45 PM
I never read Skeptic, just SI. I think I subscribed to the latter because they reprint Martin Gardner articles.
5 · Posted by: Amanda Banks on April 19, 2004 07:21 PM
i am writting a paper on skepticism for my high school english class and would appreciate input…if anyone feels strongly for or against the beliefs expressed in this article please email me at rainbowbrite1506@yahoo.com thanks
6 · Posted by: online poker on December 25, 2004 08:36 PM
Feel free to say something about Why are skeptics & atheists dowdy & dull?.
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Thanks, Richard
1 · Posted by: William Scott Scherk on April 1, 2004 08:10 AM
Not indignant about your comments, although I am a regular reader of both FI and SI. Both magazines are dowdy indeed, with SI taking prizes for grey and unappealing layout.
Regular reading takes one through the umpteenth debunking of Ogopogo, or yet another slap at gullible news and media. What makes the magazine come alive to me are the works that have come out of the organization and its affiliates, and that show SI at least is part of a larger group of active skeptics. The coverage of alternative medicine and witless fads in psychology is still a draw — it was in SI that I found out more about “therapeutic touch” than anywhere else. And the Loftus/Guyer article of last year on “Jane Doe” was very good.
Of course the good grey skeptics of SI are still reviled by the UFO nuts. Seems the boring, plodding debunking still gets up their noses.