I adore my Dad, no question about it. He's always been the stable, reasonable, rational force in my upbringing, even when he wasn't there half the time. It's thanks to him I had the foundations to be able to think skeptically as a child, in an environment where hard questions were dismissed or silenced.
So sometimes, when it's late at night, there's nothing but pessimism on the news and he's downed a few, I get a bit shocked by what he admits. Like his belief that the world will end at 2012. That the police should all be given guns and orders to open fire. That we should arm ourselves ready for society's collapse. That he wishes he had sturdier legs to run on when the apocalypse happens.
There's something surreal in trying to associate those admissions with the man who taught me to always keep an open yet skeptical mind.
Everyone has a limit to their scepticism, I mean when you think about it, you probably out-rightly believe a lot of things simply because there's no obvious reason not to believe it. God? Sounds pretty far-fetched, but that you breath oxygen, that the world around you is real and not part of a dream, that you have complete free will? Sounds obvious, but how do you really know that's the case? The thing is, you sometimes just accept things because you can't be sceptical enough and I don't think anyone can be.
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