What in the devil is skepticism?

People often shy away from words like skepticism because, more often than not, they're really not sure what it means. In some cases they're pretty sure they know what it is, but have been advised or taught to abandon this natural inclination.
Skepticism, put quite simply, is the tendency to doubt a claim that hasn't got any visible or tangible evidence to back it up. My friend tells a funny story about a kid he went to school with who claimed that Ringo Starr was his father. When pestered for proof, there was none forthcoming. Why? Because it wasn't true, obviously. This is a pretty harmless realty among children, and sometimes adults. People who claim that they went to see Led Zeppelin's last concert but have no tickets to prove it, are likely to be believed if they're old enough and you know that they went to a lot of concerts in their early years.
What's the difference?
Is there a chance that Ringo maybe got a fan pregnant? Certainly. Is there a chance that you could prove the paternity? Sure. But when a kid says that Ringo is his real father, there's just something about the claim that makes it hard to believe. Something not quite jiving with the way we know the world works. It's not reasonable, perhaps, but we doubt it.
That is skepticism.

"Hic Rhodus. Hic salta"
Here is Rhodes. Jump here.

In one of Aesop's Fables is the tale of an athlete who boasted of an amazing long jump that he performed on the Island of Rhodes. He pestered many people with this tale, telling all who would listen and likely annoying many of them. Finally, one of his listeners, weary of the tale and the tellers famously tells the athlete "Here is Rhodes. Jump here."
Skepticism is a natural tendency. It most likely developed as a way to protect us during the infancy of our species. We could surmise that it became necessary to doubt the claims of other humans to keep from being robbed or clubbed and eaten. However, the tendency toward skepticism, in humans doesn't mean that it is universal and it certainly doesn't mean that natural skepticism cannot be overruled. We all know someone who believes in or supports conspiracy theories. Taken at face value, some of these theories seem to have some veracity. But they rarely hold together under rigorous scrutiny. As such, it becomes necessary for people who want to continue to believe these theories to dampen down their own natural skepticism.
These credulous humans then become a dumping ground for any ludicrous claim from any charlatan. I know a man who otherwise was a sterling example of a human that spread about an email that had a video that showed it was not a plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 but a heavy duty missile. This friend is a scientist, and so I was a little aghast that he would even consider sending this about to do anything more than ridicule the preposterous claim, but his only comment was that it was 'interesting to consider'.
I liken this kind of credulity and abandonment of the critical faculties as well as the squashing of skepticism to the prank that is sometimes played in schools where one friend says to the other "Look, the word gullible is written on the ceiling" to see if his friend will look. Harmless fun, but what about when you have fully functioning and otherwise typically developed human adults absorbing nonsense and holding it to be golden law?
Well, the point of this blog is to open a discussion about what skepticism is, how it has been largely abandoned by people and how you can exercise it like an atrophied muscle and get it back.
It should be clear that skepticism is one of the main portions of our critical faculties that we will need moving forward in a world rife with "alternative facts" (whatever the heck those are, other than lies) and 'fake news'.
The next time you hear something on the radio or read something on the Internet or watch something on TV, be sure to doubt it until you can verify the claim with hard—or as I like to call it, empirical evidence—before you take it as perfect and true.
As the late, great Christopher Hitchens once famously wrote, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."