Hi I'm Mark.
I come from the Midlands in England and have come across this forum after spending some time listening to the Skeptico podcast. My accademic background is in social science and philosophy - I have an undergraduate degree joint honours (1st) in Sociology and Philosophy (minor in theology/reigious studies). I went on to do an MA in Sociology with a major emphasis on soical research and I have worked for a while carrying out, designing and leading social research projects for local and regional government. I now work in local government but have moved on from research into more senior policy making role.
All of this has left me with a keen interest in research design (although from a soical science rather than natural science position), epistomology, philosophy of science/social science and philosophy/sociology of metanarrative belief systems (including religion).
As a child (10) I was drawn into a fundamentalist Christian church and was very involved in this until around the age of 17. I had some very real and intense spiritual experiences during this time but came to question the explanational context for them provided by Chrisitianity. I suppose you could call this a personal paradigm shift that caused me to leave Christianity behind and inded become very critical of it. I have also come across a number of extraordinary events in my life that I have had to try to understand and make sense of on a personal level. I have been very aware of the problems of making general beliefs about reality from specific individual extraordinary events, but like Alex has said on Skeptico, I have also been blown away by the large number of similair experiences of family and friends. There comes a point when I had to say "there really seems to be something going on here!" and have started to look into the scientific research into psi and related phenomena.
I have some experience of militant skeptics whose views seem to me to be informed by an unshaking faith in natualistic materialism and a 'that can't possibly be true can it' approach to this subject rather than on any knowlegable digestion of the evidence.
So thats me - clearly not a skeptic, but I hope not a dogmatic believer either. I'm interested in the evidence.
Regards
Mark  |