memes

I'm glad I grew up watching Scooby-Doo where the believers are just being duped by scammers and there's always a rational, scientific explanation for everything (except in the movies).

I think neither view is accurate really, people who readily believe in the supernatural have been very much been the same kind of person for the last half century, which is that breed of person who doesn't know a lot about science and history and related fields, but will immediately start tying together disparate pieces of evidence to support a pre-conclusion that the answer is supernatural, while more scientific minded people are usually like "It's probably not aliens, but we need to learn more and study more to eliminate everything else first" and are generally very ready to consider the fantastic if they can learn anything about it... it's just that reality is what actually rules it out, not some stuffy adherence to science as a dogma.

This is why I dislike X-files now despite loving it when I was younger, it fed deeply into the uneducated mind that they too can be a "Mulder," casting aside process and "going against the grain" to find the reality that THE MAN doesn't want you to know. It led to a whole ass generation of middle-americans believing in magic oil and horse dewormer, which was one of the many forces that opened the door for massive harm done to our society and collective understanding of objective reality.