Just another day at the office for the Skeptics convention

By RICK LAX - LAS VEGAS WEEKLY
Added: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:45:59 UTC

Complete with a fake moon landing, delusions of God and a haunting by Michael Jackson

I’m standing in a lukewarm hot tub with 30 atheists. A big guy named Rick is teaching me the history of the modern Skeptic Movement. He’s explaining how magician James Randi and biologist Richard Dawkins have debunked psychics, mind readers, remote viewers, astrologers, homeopathists, acupuncturists and God.

This, I imagine, is how the Sophists must have felt—philosophizing in crowded Greek bathhouses as the fingers and toes prune. Then again, the pre-Socratic philosophers spent their time forming hippy dippy theories (“All things come from water,” “Everything is in flux”), and the modern Skeptics spend their time picking those theories apart.

Last week, 1,320 Skeptics gathered to Las Vegas to disprove, discuss, debate, and inquire. They were joined by a man who swore the moon landing was faked, a man who claimed he could cure terminal diseases over the phone, and 1 million pissed-off ghosts.

So did this motley crew play nice? The answer might surprise you ...

Part One: Richard Dawkins, James Randi, and Some Random Guy With No Identification

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m pulling into the South Point parking garage. I’m heading to The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM!): A Celebration of Critical Thinking and Skepticism. It’s the eighth annual meeting. And I’m running late.

The Richard Dawkins press conference is supposed to start in 10 minutes, and I haven’t even parked, let alone walked through the casino and to the convention hall, let alone checked in at the press registration table, let alone fired up my laptop up and typed up some clever questions. Oh, I’ve scraped by with dumb ones in the past, but Richard Dawkins topped Prospect magazine’s list of Top 100 British Intellectuals, so clever queries were de rigueur.

I double-time through the casino, breeze through the registration process—nobody asks for ID—and locate the room in which the press conference is set to take place. I take a seat next to a young man holding a giant crystal ball in his lap. I deduce that he’s not a “genuine” fortune teller (i.e., one who genuinely claims to tell fortunes), but a Skeptic pretending to be one. Presumably, to show how silly fortune tellers are.

“Do you know what I’m going to ask Dawkins?” I say to the pseudo seer, secretly hoping he’ll write my questions for me.

“You plan to ask Dawkins ...”—the mock oracle stares into his ball and squints his eyes—“questions pertaining to skepticism.”