We do?

"Alternative Medicine" guru Mike Adams is fed up with criticism from skeptics, so he "did a little research" to "find out exactly what 'skeptics' actually believe." His list is very strange, starting with his assumption that skeptics all believe the same things. But, anyway, here he goes:

Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

Actually, Mike, the only virus we know of that is pretty near 100% fatal is rabies. But even if only 5 or 10% of the kids who get measles die of it, isn't that too many? When every one of those deaths could be prevented by a vaccine?

Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)

I'm not. There certainly is, in America anyway, an association of natural childbirth with suspicion of the medical establishment and the like, but really skeptical people (like me) are as unimpressed by the medical magic of hospital childbirth as we are by psychic surgery.

Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.

Certainly many self-proclaimed skeptics are opposed to religious ideas like our having a "soul," but consciousness? I don't know skeptics who don't think we are "conscious" in some sense of the word, and only nutty behaviorists think people are "mindless."

Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).

Well, I guess I do agree with this one. Not in the sense that I think all water is the same; to take only the most obvious example, water with fluorine in it is good for your teeth. But that would be explained by the chemical composition of the water. How else, exactly, does water vary? Does water from springs contain some essence of the earth goddess that toilet water does not?

The really interesting thing about Adams' whole list is the absolutist, either-or, black and white nature of his thinking. To Adams, if you are skeptical about one thing (anti-vaccine hysteria, say) you must be a "skeptic" who denies everything. Flipping this around, it seems that to Adams the right-thinking people are the ones who believe in everything. In his world you are either one of those "skeptical" pawns of big business who parrots drug company propaganda, or you are a believer who accepts at least the possibility of everything that comes from the earth, plants, and the soul. The complexity of the world, the need to deploy skepticism in the right doses and in the right ways, is lost on him.