skeptic

Though some skeptics smiled when told of Berg's merits, it could not be denied that he was a painstaking and brave officer, on excellent terms with his superiors, and a moral young man with a brilliant career before him and an assured position in society.

I cannot pretend to recount all that he told me, but I gleaned from what he said that he was the genius who presided over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it was to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic. Once or twice, upon my venturing to express my total incredulity in respect to his pretensions, he grew very angry indeed, so that at length I considered it the wiser policy to say nothing at all, and let him have his own way.

Of course, it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waive etiquette and quit and call it half a day, since he would never be able to start that water, for he was a true magician of the time; which is to say, the big miracles, the ones that gave him his repu- tation, always had the luck to be performed when nobody but Merlin was present; he couldn't start this well with all this crowd around to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's miracle in that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial moment and spoil everything.

There is little on this critical topic in Boiling Point, except for an oblique reference to Christy, described as one of "several longtime climate 'skeptics'" who "had long cited satellite records to downplay the reality of climate change." Gelbspan says "the satellite argument fell apart in 1998," when independent researchers applied an estimate for expected decays in satellite orbits and found "a distinct warming."

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "The God that gave us liberty and life gave them to us at the same time." Moral clarity is an essential virtue in our world today and for sixty years cynics and skeptics have proven that we have been looking to false choices in the Middle East.

Current events enter into play in a consideration of these miracles, which also embraces believers, skeptics, religious zealots, and others.

The preaching group's answer was that "we live life certain that this is a preparation for what's coming." But what would we say to skeptics? If those skeptics came from the community of believers to which I belong, we would point to the life and death of Ken Phillips.

Through a discussion of canonical texts by Eisenstein, Bazin, and Barthes, I hope to evoke some sense of how students can be encouraged to "experience themselves otherwise" through their engagement with film theory--as passionate producers rather than cool consumers, as believers rather than facile skeptics, and as embodied rather than disembodied thinkers.

In answering this challenge, Rosen concluded that his first order of business should bhe to persuade skeptics that a balanced approach is actually necessary.

Of course, skeptics may ask whether the change is merely window-dressing, with the same CEOs simply toeing a new party line to appeal to the more critical masses.