While I have tried religion in the past, something has always led me away from faith and toward reason. I found the burden of proof is not on the atheists to prove that God does not exist; it is on the theists to prove the existence of a deity. I just have not been presented with any convincing evidence.
I guess you could say I am skeptical about a lot of things, things we hear from politicians, religious figures or the media. This is not to say that everyone is involved in some big conspiracy with black helicopters. I just take things with a grain of salt.
If you have not guessed by the editorials this semester, I am a libertarian, and I believe this comes from my skepticism.
A while back, when the media reported that cellphones might cause cancer, I thought that this was probably overblown and needed more research before a conclusion could be made.
It was the government that moved quickly to "protect the people." In 2010, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors required cellphone makers to post notices warning about the levels of radiation in their phones. This year, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found no link between cellphones and brain tumors, even in children who have been using cellphones for five years.
I have learned while studying history, politics, economics and religion that everything must be approached with a level of skepticism. One must question all claims made by the media, political figures and even your professors.
I am not saying that the truth can never be obtained or reached. Objective truth exists and can be acquired through the use of our ability to reason. This means that we cannot rely upon emotions or whim. We also should not rely upon public opinion.
When I hear, for instance, that a majority of Americans support waterboarding, I do not immediately accept that this policy is correct for the sake of democracy. Democracy constitutes the surrender of the rights of the minority to the whims of the majority; that should not be the standard by which we determine right and wrong.
When the government came to us in 2003 and said that we had to go to war in Iraq to spread democracy, the American people blindly followed without asking whether this was the right policy to pursue. In March 2003, 72 percent of people polled by the Pew Research Center said the use of military force in Iraq was the right decision. And now, after a decade of needless war and destruction, can we say that we are any more safe or that the Middle East has more freedom?
When we are told that capitalism is an evil system of exploitation, I just do not see the evidence. I believe that true capitalism (not the corporatism and government favoritism that we have seen over the past few decades) has brought more prosperity and has increased the standard of living more than any government program ever could.
The state is truly the destructive entity.
How much destruction occurs when the government taxes (either through increased tax rates or inflation caused by printing more money) the private sector and then claims that it has created jobs when it starts a new "shovel-ready" program? The money taken out of the private sector could have gone to more productive pursuits, creating more wealth and more jobs.
Government has a monopoly on force, and we must demand that politicians prove their case to us before they start stripping away more liberty.
When it comes to these important issues, skepticism is critical for a free society.
Justin Hayes is a political communication graduate student at UF and the opinions editor for the Alligator.
