Skeptics Associations

Is there people here interested by or part of Skeptics Associations or Societies? They seem to be very useful as watchdogs of the scientific method.

The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit, member-supported organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. The Skeptics Society was founded by Michael Shermer as a Los Angeles-area skeptical group to replace the defunct Southern California Skeptics. After the success of its magazine, Skeptic, introduced in Spring 1992, it became a national and then international organization.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptics_Society

And: http://www.skeptic.com/

I think the Skeptics Society is a cult, with Michael Shermer their Messiah

No. I do not like these Skeptics Groups. Many of them don't know what skepticism means; instead they are nihlist. 

Ok there are some people that are more ideologically driven than others but I think the Skeptics associations are very useful to debuk claims of paranormal phenomena. Just take James Randi, how many fake psychic and so call faith healers did he exposed? This guy deserves a lot of credit for rooting out scammers and frauds who bank on credulity. They are a rempart against pseudoscience and promote critical thinking and scientific inquiry to the laypublic.

Michael Shermer's dismissal of government conspiracies should put your own skepticism on alert, in my view. Just to give you an example, he actually believes there was no conspiracy involved in the JFK assassination!? That's just unreasonable. It is far from enlightening to have him tell us that people who deny the systematic eradication of communists, Jews, and gypsies by the German National Socialists are in error, or that faith healers are suspicious. Government skepticism is a must in today's society as much as ever, yet all he does is tell everyone not to investigate things like the JFK assassination and the 9/11 event because people in government, military, and intelligence agencies are too dumb and unorganized to ever be able to get together on anything and cover it up. That's just ridiculous, in my view.

What Shermer is telling us is that there is no proof whatsoever that the JFK assasination was a conspiracy. And he's right. Not that conspiracies can't happen. For exemple we know that the assasination of President Abraham Lincoln or that of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand killed by the Serbian Secret Society (Black Hand) were in fact conspiracies.

In the case on JFK, the available evidence point to a lone-wolf assasination. Of course, one can always 'believe' that there was a conspiracy involved either with the CIA, the Soviets, Lyndon Johnson or whatever but a skeptic needs more proof.

We could as well believe that a spaceship crashed at Roswell and that the governement covered it up somehow, but I mean where are the proof suggesting it's more than a weather balloon? It's easy to make up all kinds of irrational theories and speculations that are unsupported but when it comes to back them up though.. Occam's razor can help us in such a case. Between competing hypothesises, the one requiring the fewest assumptions should be selected. If new evidence should be found, then the more complicated solution, in this case ''Aliens'' may ultimatly be proved correct and accepted.

Actually, the evidence does point to a conspiracy and there really is "no proof" that Lee Harvey Oswald did it. In the 1970s, The Church Committee, which was a Senate committee formed for investigating the Kennedy Assassination among other things, concluded that the evidence points to a likely conspiracy. 

If you simply use Occam's razor on the JFK Assassination, you have film footage of a person being shot from behind, and from the front-side. The people who performed the autopsy said there is an exit wound near the back of the head, which would be impossible without someone shooting near the front of the head. You can't have shots from the back and the front without two people shooting, therefore a conspiracy. Shermer doesn't seem to follow his own advice, right? Isn't it much more honest for him to say, "I never studied the JFK assassination"? Shermer seems like someone who would rather you not question the establishment, in my view;)