Lately, I’ve found my thoughts returning to a passage of Carl Sagan which I first read years and years ago.

The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?

That’s from The Demon-Haunted World, chapter 24, page 416. I read that book as a child. I still remember the sensation of coming-to-wakefulness which that reading brought. Since then, I’ve grown taller and greyer and just a touch more bitter. I broke my heart a couple times, got my name into the learned journals here and there, and witnessed more than a few laudatory invocations of St. Carl of Ithaca.

I should have been less surprised to learn that skeptical institutions, fancy ones with Inquiry and Education in their names, belong on that list too.

It is difficult to have patience for those who restrict their community-building to those who need it least.

EDIT TO ADD: Basically, this.

If you want an effective movement with a broad reach, this is roughly the dumbest move you could make. However, if your goal is to reinforce the public’s belief that secularism and atheism particularly is nothing but a bunch of misanthropic white guys whose only real goal is feeling superior to believers but who don’t care about making real change in the world, well job well done. And fuck you.