Healthy And Irrational Skepticism

I have no patience for people who use skepticism as a way to escape responsibility to the truth.  I have reluctantly resorted to skepticism on many matters out of great concern for truth and out of a desire to make no assumptions, mistakes, or errors in my judgments about reality, God, ethics, epistemology, and many other subjects.  As I have grown older, I have also encountered those who use skepticism to just deflect away any claim without truly considering it.

The difference between the two manifestations of skepticism is explicit and overt.  For instance, I doubt many moral claims because of the fallacious reasoning used to justify them, while others might doubt or deny moral claims because they don't want to have to submit to any moral obligations.  I doubt if science is ultimately useful for discovering ultimate truths because science is not self-affirming like logic is and because it cannot prove anything, whereas other religious people might doubt science simply because they feel that their "faith" is threatened by words like "empirical evidence".  I doubt many things on a regular basis and could easily join the ranks of the best doubters.

Yes, I am someone who is highly skeptical of almost any truth claim and someone who has doubted every premise and idea I have encountered in the past few years, but I strongly despise extreme skeptics.  I openly admit this to others without hesitation, despite the fact that I have thus far been a committed Christian, yet I still loathe skeptics who try to avoid confrontations with truth.  Some people use a charade of skepticism to dismiss what they themselves believe or suspect to be true.  A vast difference exists between me and these pseudo-philosophers.  For instance, it is rational for me to doubt if my conscience is reliable or if Christianity is true, and nothing about this expresses a disrespect for truth.  But it would be the zenith of irrationality for me to be unsure if I exist or to be uncertain if logic exists.  I understand and acknowledge that it would be asinine for me to doubt the existence of my mind since I would be unable to doubt my existence did it not exist for me to use in order to contemplate the issue.  That is the difference between a total skeptic and a legitimate skeptic like myself: I do not doubt what is self-evident as an axiom or what is undeniably obvious to me (the existence of my mind).  In fact, complete skepticism is damningly self-refuting, as someone who claims to not know anything is really claiming to know something.  I have on several occasions come very near to total epistemological skepticism, but even acknowledging axiomatic truths separates me from those who pretend they can never know anything at all.

Skepticism, the liberating disease, is a mandatory requirement for any rational person.  It is liberating because it emancipates us from poor arguments and false conclusions, yet a disease in that it must infect how we view everything in order for us to truly comprehend what we can know for sure.  But legitimate uses of skepticism will never result in absurd contradictions like doubting the precious few foundations of knowledge everyone knows.