Clik here to view.
Sandy Hook and Jesus Mythicisms
Most of us have watched in horror and dismay as a small handful of people have spun conspiracy theories around the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Andii Bowsher...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mandaean Roots of Christianity?
This book came to my attention recently via Facebook.There is also a promotional video which contains only text plus images that can be found on the internet.This self-published book is unlikely to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ender’s Game
It was a longstanding gap in my reading of science fiction literature that I had never read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. With my religion and science fiction class soon to begin, and Ender’s Game...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fundamentalism and Conspiracy Theories
Jeri Massi has been blogging about the connection between Christian fundamentalism and conspiracy theories. Here is a taste from her second post about this subject:[C]onspiracy theories are launched...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Whom Can We Trust?
Yesterday in my class on religion and science fiction, we began discussing Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Year of the Flood. On the same day, news broke of a salmonella outbreak in multiple...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Religion, Sci-Fi, and Conspiracy Theories
In reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood in my science fiction class this semester, one of the topics that it raised pertains to conspiracy theories. How do we avoid the shoddy thinking that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Skepticism, Science, and Scholarship
P. Z. Myers has seen the dark side of skepticism, the fact that its tools can be applied not just to fringe bunk but to anything and everything. And so he has written in an effort to distinguish...
View ArticleValerie Tarico’s Historical Denialism
In a recent online article, Valerie Tarico suggests that “a growing number of scholars” are concluding that there was no historical Jesus.It isn’t clear to me that Richard Carrier, Robert Price, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Doubt and Conspiracy
A couple of posts struck me as insightful and quotable, and related to the same theme, so I will share links to and quotes from them together. First, Carson T. Clark wrote about doubt as a Christian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Creationism, Mythicism, and University Conspiracies
Creationism says: universities are so much under the grip of atheism that creationism cannot get a fair hearing.Mythicism says: universities are so much under the grip of Christianity that mythicism...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Just Another Kind of Gullibility
“Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right, but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Americans – Prepare for Nonsense
Did you see the above advertisement in today’s USA Today? This quote from an article by Quassim Cassam on conspiracy theory thinking:It is in the nature of many intellectual character traits that you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Obama’s Texas Invasion Plans Revealed
Greg Carey made this image and shared it on Twitter, and a lot of people have found it entertaining. And so I thought I would share it on the blog for more people to enjoy. There is actually serious...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Conspiracy Theorists
A conspiracy theorist is someone whose circumstance has conspired to make fantasy preferable to reality. They are unlikely to abandon their alternate reality until we can show them some alternate to...
View ArticleProving the Illuminati is Real
Click here to view the embedded video.This video offers a great treatment of how conspiracy theory thinking works, and has a superb punny ending. Enjoy!
View ArticleClik here to view.
Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories
Commenter Bilbo raised an excellent question about what distinguishes a conspiracy from a conspiracy theory. There have been real life conspiracies, and people conspire together for all sorts of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mythicism, Creationism, and other Conspiracy Theories
I was made aware of a post by John Anthony Dunne, asking whether there is any parallel in Judaism for what Richard Carrier and other mythicists claim that Paul believed, namely that a celestial being...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Governments and Conspiracy Theories
Neil Carter shared the image above, and wrote a whole blog post on a topic which is summed up well in this tweet of his: “It’s not that I trust the US government, it’s just that Truthers seem to have a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Strange Mix of Narcissism and Paranoia
A nice quote from the Alison Bernstein, better known as “MommyPhD.”
View Article