When observing contemporary social phenomena - from family life to academia - they've historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn't be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn't credible as social criticism, or if it didn't speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I'd have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory's own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I've seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking -- a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels' writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we're comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of "false consciousness" clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature - something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I'm not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that ...
I recently learned that a friend of mine, and a long-time atheist (and atheist blogger), is planning to convert to Catholicism. It seems the impetus for her conversion was increasing frustration that she had no good naturalistic account for objective morality in the form of virtue ethics; that upon reflection, she decided she felt like morality "loved" her; that this feeling implied God; and that she had sufficient "if God, then Catholicism" priors to point toward Catholicism, even though she's bisexual (!) and purports to still feel uncertain about the Church's views on sexuality. (Side note: all of this information is material she's blogged about herself, so it's not as if I'm sharing personal details she would prefer to be kept private.)
First, I want to state the rationality lesson I learned from this episode: atheists who spend a great deal of their time analyzing and even critiquing the views of a particular religion are at-risk atheists. Eliezer's spoken about this sort of issue before ("Someone who spends all day thinking about whether the Trinity does or does not exist, rather than Allah or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is more than halfway to Christianity."), but I guess it took a personal experience to really drive the point home. When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things. I seriously considered (and investigated) the possibility that her post was some kind of prank or experiment or otherwise not sincere, or that her account had been hijacked by a very good impersonator (both of these seem quite unlikely at this point).
But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter how strongly you seem to champion the "atheist" side of the debate. Seriously.
But second, and more immediately, I wonder if anybody has advice on how to handle this, or if they've had similar experiences with their friends. I do care about this person, and I was devastated to hear this news, so if there's something I can do to help her, I want to. Of course, I would prefer most that she stop worrying about religion entirely and just grok the math that makes religious hypotheses so unlikely as to not be worth your time. But in the short term I'd settle for her not becoming a Catholic, and not immersing herself further in Dark Side Epistemology or surrounding herself with people trying to convince her that she needs to "repent" of her sexuality.
I think I have a pretty good understanding of the theoretical concepts at stake here, but I'm not sure where to start or what style of argument is likely to have the best effect at this point. My tentative plan is to express my concern, try to get more information about what she's thinking, and get a dialogue going (I expect she'll be open to this), but I wanted to see if you all had more specific suggestions, especially if you've been through similar experiences yourself. Thanks!