When we're young children we believe whatever mom, dad, media, religion, and schools say. We are spoon-fed food and thought. Like sponges, we soak it all in.
 
It's a wonderful state of affairs. Everything's all figured out for us. We're housed, fed, clothed, and don't have any responsibility other than to believe and obey. The sense of security those early years and the months in the womb brought are embedded, never really forgotten, or not desired.
 
Hopefully we eventually tire of being bossed around by parents. We move out, get a career, become financially independent, and take care of our own physical needs.
 
But the opinions, faiths, and beliefs we were nurtured with linger. The reasoning part of our brain is not even fully developed until we're about 30. So we lack the full capacity for critical thought.
 
To become an adult means everything we've been taught as children needs to be scrutinized.
 
Unfortunately, grownups who aren't adults abound and insist that belief, opinion, and faith are like unalienable rights and that it's socially unacceptable to challenge them. So, they feel justified in clinging to childhood beliefs.
 
We're inherently lazy and want to fit in with the crowd. So, keeping our beliefs saves us the work of dismantling them and the risk of ostracism.
 
"Where all think alike, no one thinks much." -- Walter Lippmann
 
Underneath that is the lingering need for the sense of security and belonging we felt as infants. That euphoric state of comfort and security is never really forgotten or recovered from.
 
But that's not how adults should behave. The belief pabulum we were spoon-fed as children needs to be spit out and examined critically.

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​We have a responsibility to self and the world to do the hard work of earning what we put in our minds, not just slumber through life in a popular unambitious manner.
 
But the vast majority of people want their moms and dads back. This creates a constant tension between taking full responsibility for our thoughts and actions, and our lingering desire to return to the womb.
 
When faced with the hard trials and questions of life, we naturally long for knowns like we had as children.
 
We, as children and adults, panic if there is an instant of uncertainty.  But retaining the knowns of children is to shirk responsibility to self and the world.
 
We all eventually shed the given beliefs about Santa, tooth fairies, and Easter bunnies. But the growing up and shedding should not stop there.
 
All beliefs must be tested using the adult tools of free will, reason, experience, and conscience.
 
Religions make no bones about being based on beliefs and faith. Obviously, they should be tested.
 
But it’s the information supported and promoted by experts, scientists, doctors, government, educators, media, and other authorities that get calcified in our brain and trickier to discern their validity.
 
Therefore, as a starting point of investigation, all popular consensus beliefs should be scrutinized.
 
Particularly is this so for claims labeled as science, a moniker that thwarts challenge. For example, Atheism, psychology, food pyramid nutrition, human-caused climate change, gender dysphoria, modern allopathic medicine (turns out to be the number one killer), political "science," abiogenesis (life from nonlife), evolution, cosmology, cosmogony, space rocketry, geology, archeology, AI replacing humans, are all supposedly science-backed.
 
When these claims are examined closely, one can only marvel at how unsupported they are with facts, logic, or the scientific method. The depths of human gullibility know no limit.
 
Science is now a buzzword. It's used to confirm observations, models, stories, claims, assumptions, and logical fallacies. We're cleared to believe it's science that someone is beaming messages from Alpha Centauri through the hair dryer. We're also cleared to believe that injections not tested for safety and effectiveness are safe and effective, that we are the result of an accident in ancient mud, and that we live on a ball moving and accelerating through space in multiple directions at 2.8 million mph without physically noticing it.
 
None of today's popular claims are supported by the scientific method (a specific step-by-step process), making them all, by definition, pseudosciences.
 
The master controller of all these pseudoscience belief categories is government. Like our mom and dad, government needs us to believe and obey. To make sure any probing that challenges accepted beliefs don't gain strength, heresy Inquisitors fact-check, debunk, and label those who are breaking from the flock, conspiracy theory knuckle-dragging crackpots.
 
It takes bravery, a thirst for truth, and hate of the lie to become an adult.
 
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."—William Casey CIA director 1981

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