Category Archives: Fact-Based Thinking

Fear of Irrelevance

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Fear of death gets a lot of attention. Fear of irrelevance mostly doesn’t. Yet if you look at how humans actually behave, that quieter fear—the dread that when we are gone it will be as if we never existed—seems to drive much of the machinery. It is this fear that religion, spirituality, secular philosophies, and even celebrity culture all, in their different ways, are built to soothe.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued in The Denial of Death that human civilization is essentially a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. We are the animal that understands we are going to die, and we find that fact intolerable, so we build stories that insist our lives have enduring significance. Terror Management Theory (TMT), a later development in social psychology, puts this into experimental form: awareness of death creates deep anxiety, which we “manage” by embracing cultural worldviews that tell us what the universe is about and how someone like us can count as a person of value within it. Self‑esteem, in this framework, is not just a pleasant feeling; it is the sense of being significant in a meaningful world, and studies suggest it helps buffer us against the distress of mortality reminders.

From this perspective, the key human problem is not simply that we die. It is that death threatens to expose our lives as negligible. To counter that, TMT distinguishes two broad strategies: literal immortality and symbolic immortality. Literal immortality is religion’s core promise: the soul survives and goes on to Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, the next incarnation, or some all‑embracing oneness. Symbolic immortality takes over when that story no longer convinces; in that mode, we “live on” in children, nations, artistic or scientific work, institutions, or the memory of our name. Becker called these “immortality projects”: efforts to secure the sense that we were not just biological accidents but contributors to something enduring.

Once you see this, religion stops looking like a separate mental category and starts looking like one point on a spectrum of answers to the same question: “How do I matter?” At one end are formal doctrines of Heaven and Hell. Moving along the line, you encounter looser spiritualities in which “the universe has a plan for me” or “everything happens for a reason.” Farther still are nationalistic stories that promise relevance through being part of a chosen people or a “great nation,” and activist narratives that promise a place on “the right side of history,” another way of saying one will not be erased. Even overtly secular philosophies can function as immortality projects by promising that one’s work contributes to progress or to humanity’s “march forward.”

This is why simply stripping religion away and expecting rational enlightenment to flourish is naïve. The underlying need—to feel connected to something larger and more lasting than a single nervous system—does not vanish with doctrinal belief. Becker and TMT theorists are explicit on this point: the urge to secure meaning and symbolic permanence is built into our condition and cannot simply be “given up.” Secular people and atheists are not exempt; if anything, they are under more pressure to find non‑supernatural ways to meet the same need. Remove religion “cold turkey” without offering better ways to manage fear and irrelevance, and people are likely to trade familiar myths for newer ones: New Age movements, conspiracy cults, political messianism, or other systems that again place them at the center of some cosmic or historical drama.

The chapter “The Tao of Science” in Pandemic of Delusion addresses one common objection: that religion has a monopoly on the feeling of being connected to something greater. Classical Taoism, as described there, seeks oneness with the universe by suspending reason, treating rational thought as a barrier to harmony. Science takes the opposite route: it insists on reason and evidence, yet if that path is followed as far as knowledge allows, the sense of connection it delivers can be at least as powerful—and, crucially, grounded in fact.

Carl Sagan’s remark that “to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe” stands as a compact expression of this scientific “Tao.” It compresses 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution into an everyday act, reminding us that the ingredients in a pie are the products of a long chain of natural events: post‑Big‑Bang matter condensing, stars forging heavy elements, planets forming, life evolving, agriculture emerging, and human culture inventing recipes. In that story, flour and sugar are star‑stuff, and the baker is a temporary arrangement of atoms produced in stellar interiors, briefly self‑aware, rearranging other atoms into dessert.

Science shows that the universe has a history and a kind of life cycle; it has been evolving in structure and complexity and will eventually “grow old and die.” Human evolution is not separate from that story but contiguous with it: atoms now organized as human bodies were forged in stars and cycled through countless organisms before taking this form, and they will return to the larger system. In that sense, we are not guests in the universe; we are the universe, in a particular configuration, looking back at itself. Recognizing this does not require any supernatural additions, yet it can provide precisely the sense of oneness and embeddedness that religious and spiritual systems promise.

Seen this way, science and fact‑based thinking do not leave a person forlorn and disconnected; they offer a way to feel relevant and connected without pretending the universe is designed around us. Our existence becomes meaningful not because a cosmic plan singles us out, but because a 13.7‑billion‑year chain of events has produced beings able to understand and influence a small part of that chain. For many, that realization can be not only intellectually satisfying but emotionally sustaining—an honest alternative to the fake constructs that proliferate when the need for relevance is denied rather than redirected into more grounded perspectives.

Modern culture adds its own twists to how we seek permanence. Contemporary information systems make it easier to spread comforting falsehoods and harder to maintain a disciplined, fact‑based view of the world. The same networks that propagate conspiracy theories and miracle cures also propagate stories about personal significance: follower counts, likes, and shares become continuous, numerical feedback on “do I matter?” in an attention economy. Celebrity culture intensifies this further. Commentators have noted that celebrities often seem to inhabit a kind of secular afterlife; their images and narratives remain visible and emotionally potent long after their deaths, sustaining fantasies of immortality for those who identify with them. Fame becomes a form of symbolic immortality in which the worst fate is not moral failure but obscurity.

If irrelevance is the real terror, this makes celebrity an especially seductive immortality project. It reframes significance as visibility: to be constantly seen is to count; to be forgotten is to vanish in a deeper sense than physical death. In that environment, it is unsurprising that many people’s immortality projects center on building a “personal brand,” collecting followers, or “going viral” at least once—even when these projects rest on distortion or spectacle rather than substance.

Donald Trump is a vivid example of a particularly toxic part of this spectrum. Over decades of interviews, his comments regarding an afterlife have been all over the map. What has been consistent is not any theology but an intense focus on visibility, branding, and ratings. His preoccupation is marking every enduring structure of society with his name. He wants history to remember him, and one is justified in concluding that, if given the choice of being remembered for a hundred years as a good president, or a thousand years as an infamous one, he would choose the latter.

In one reported exchange about Washington, D.C. monuments, he remarked that a previous leader “should’ve put his name on it” because “you’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” That line could serve as a plain‑language gloss on symbolic immortality: physical objects and institutions become canvases on which to inscribe “I was here” in as durable a way as possible. From a TMT standpoint, this is not mysterious pathology but an especially visible form of the same underlying process: the self turned into an immortality project, seeking not divine approval but inescapability in the human story.

Becker and TMT theorists are clear that this drive to secure meaning and permanence cannot simply be relinquished. The question is not whether people will engage in immortality projects, but which ones they will choose, and with what consequences. Religion, nationalism, celebrity worship, and various spiritual or ideological movements can all function as such projects—some relatively benign, others demanding denial of evidence or hostility toward those who threaten the story. Fact‑based thinking and science do not abolish the need but they do offer a way to satisfy it in ways more compatible with reality and with living alongside others.

From this vantage point, the most constructive stance is not simply “against religion,” but “for fact‑based thinking.” If habits of evidence, critical self‑correction, and scientific curiosity are cultivated, the appeal of fake constructs tends to weaken on its own, because it no longer feels necessary to sustain them. A person who understands themselves as a conscious fragment of a 13.7‑billion‑year‑old universe, embedded in networks of ancestry, ecology, and culture, does not need a fabricated cosmic destiny to feel that life matters; they can locate meaning in contributing to understanding, reducing harm, and leaving behind structures—ideas, practices, institutions—that continue to function after they are gone.

The call to action, then, is both personal and social. Personally, it is to recognize the fear of irrelevance in one’s own life—not as a flaw to be ashamed of, but as a feature of being a symbolic animal that knows it will die—and to choose, deliberately, which stories will be allowed to answer that fear. Socially, it is to build cultures, institutions, and educational practices that direct our hunger for significance toward projects that are reality‑based and humane: science, art, honest public service, durable communities, and fact‑anchored inquiry.

No one gets to opt out of the need to matter. But it is possible to decide that the ways we seek to matter will not be based upon delusions. In that sense, advocating for fact‑based thinking is not about taking away people’s sense of meaning; it is about offering a way to secure it that does not require golden idols, invisible plans, or committing mass shootings. Taking joy in being a brief, conscious expression of a very old universe is already a remarkable kind of relevance; the task is to let our stories, and our actions, appreciate and take comfort in that fact.

Trump Believes

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Classic newswriting practice discourages the use of subjective words like “believes,” “thinks,” and “feels” because they imply an inner state of mind that cannot be independently verified by reporters. Instead, journalists are generally advised to rely on neutral attribution verbs such as “said,” “stated,” or “told reporters.” When distance or skepticism is warranted, words like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “suggested” can signal that the outlet is reporting an allegation or interpretation rather than endorsing it as fact.

Yet in normal political coverage, “believe” is frequently used. Writers routinely say things like “Democrats believe” or “the mayor believes.” That isn’t normally a problem. Used this way, “believes” stops short of endorsing the belief as fact while still capturing that someone is expressing more than a single, isolated quote; it gestures at a broader worldview.

In the context of Trump, however, many otherwise reasonable norms become problematic. When the word “believes” is used to characterize assertions made by Trump or his administration, it becomes subtly misleading. Trump strains or breaks many norms, including the use of the word “believes” to describe his frequently shifting claims. If reporters use the word “believes” to suggest a coherent worldview, that framing is often inaccurate in his case.

Describing statements by Trump and his administration as sincere “beliefs” does more than attribute an inner mental state or suggest a worldview; it risks conferring a kind of moral and epistemic dignity. A belief can be wrong, even wildly wrong, but it usually suggests some sincerity, some continuity, and some relation to evidence as the believer understands it—some sense that, if the world looked different, the belief might eventually yield.

None of that is typically true with Trump. Few of the disingenuous claims he spouts at any given moment can be legitimately called beliefs, apart from some of his most openly spiteful or ideologically consistent ones.

To many readers, “Trump believes” often feels not merely imprecise but almost perverse. It sounds like a credibility upgrade, a quiet promotion from “he says this” to “this is how reality appears inside his sincere inner life.” Even when the rest of the sentence and the surrounding reporting are fully critical—fact-checks, counterevidence, context—the verb itself grates, because it conflicts with the reader’s core assessment: that Trump does not believe in the ordinary sense so much as deploy statements. In that frame, “believes” is not a neutral label; it is an inaccurate and undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The problem is compounded by how small words are processed as we read them. Readers rarely stop on “claims,” “says,” or “argues.” These are background verbs that their brains skip over. But “believes” stands out. It draws attention to itself because it imports psychology. This may help explain why journalists use it; it can subtly signal interpretive authority and make a piece feel more insider-informed.

Because “believes” stands out, once you notice its misuse in regard to Trump, it tends to keep surfacing. Each instance can leave the impression that the writer or outlet is softening or normalizing Trump’s unrelentingly false claims and arguments.

It is unfortunate that, like many things strained by Trump, we can no longer take for granted the otherwise benign use of a word like “believes.” News writers should be far more careful about describing claims by Trump or his administration as “beliefs.”

Sophisticated Arguments for Preposterous Propositions

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Intelligence does not immunize against delusion, and intelligent people can produce sophisticated sounding arguments to support their delusional claims. This has always been epidemic amongst the intelligentsia who believe in, and need to rationalize, the existence of a god that cannot and therefore does not actually exist.

The latest delusional religious reasoning comes from theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in a long New York Times interview (see here) where he announces that the only reason he is not an atheist is that “the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.” It’s an impressively confident conclusion, especially given how weak the actual arguments look once you strip away the prose and the piety. Underneath the erudite-sounding facade, what we are dealing with here is just more misrepresented and logically flimsy pseudo‑intellectual religious nonsense.

Hart warms up with a casual swipe at Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, dismissing it as “decades out of date” when it first appeared and a logical failure. That isn’t just wrong, it’s the kind of wrong you get when you start from “atheists must be idiots” and work backward. Whatever you think of Dawkins’s metaphors, the 1976 book was not peddling obsolete biology; the gene‑centric view it popularized is still one of the basic perspectives in population genetics, even though it has since been supplemented by multi‑level selection and systems thinking, and that’s exactly how its serious critics treat it. Biologists like Denis Noble argue that talking as if genes are little agents oversimplifies a complex causal web, and they argue for reframing and extending, but clearly not for declaring the whole thing “decades out of date” at birth. When Hart actually engages Dawkins elsewhere he mostly attacks the cartoonish way Dawkins talks about “selfish genes” and “lumbering robots,” that is, his metaphors and metaphysics, not the math or the lab work. At no point does he demonstrate that the science was obsolete; he just sneers at a popular book written by an atheist and hopes the insult will do the work of argument. If a Christian apologist wrote a lively popularization of cosmology and an atheist waved it away as “decades out of date” with no evidence, we’d call that what it is: rhetorical BS. If you want to claim modern science has destroyed materialism, you should at least show you can accurately summarize modern science.

The heart of Hart’s case is his insistence that a “mechanistic” view of nature can never explain consciousness, that the scientific picture of the world was built precisely by excluding mental properties, and that trying to add mind back in breaks the machine. He leans toward an idealist picture where consciousness, or “mind,” is fundamental and matter is in some sense derivative. There are at least three big problems with how he plays this. First, he treats “mechanistic” science as if we were still doing physics with brass gears and clockworks. He’s right about one historical point: early modern physics modeled nature as a soulless machine and bracketed talk of purposes and minds to get a clean method going. That was sort of a brilliant move. But he then writes as though that coarse mechanical picture is still the only game in town. It isn’t. Contemporary physics is explicitly non‑mechanistic in his sense; quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and information‑theoretic approaches do not imagine the universe as billiard balls banging around in absolute space. Contemporary biology is likewise not stuck in clockwork mode; it routinely analyzes feedback, homeostasis, regulatory networks, and even minimal forms of goal‑directedness at cellular and organismic levels without smuggling ghosts into the machine. So when Hart admits that “our sciences are not strictly mechanistic” and yet somehow uses that as a weapon against materialism, he’s trading on an equivocation. Materialism in 2026 does not mean “Descartes’s res extensa forever.” It means that whatever exists is ultimately describable in terms of physical fields, structures, and dynamics—even if those structures are richer than 17th‑century clockwork.

Second, Hart treats “no explanation yet” as if it means “requires a spooky extra force.” He is genuinely offended by the idea that a purely physical story could ever explain why there is “something it is like” to be you. Fine; lots of philosophers share that intuition. But “I don’t see how that could work” is not evidence that it cannot work. Physicalist theories of consciousness—from higher‑order thought theories to global workspace models and integrated information approaches—don’t invoke new metaphysical forces bolted onto physics; they identify consciousness with specific kinds of information‑processing and global availability in the brain. Even critics of those theories generally argue about their completeness or conceptual clarity, not about physics needing to invent some non‑mechanical pixie dust. So there is exactly zero empirical requirement for some mysterious non‑mechanistic “force” to explain consciousness; the conceptual puzzles are real, the data gaps are real, but the demand for a supernatural‑ish add‑on is not. Hart’s move is not “maybe we’ll need a modest additional ingredient.” He jumps from “current models leave an explanatory gap” to “the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material.” That’s not filling a gap with legitimate science; that’s exploiting any temporary gap to stuff an entire theology into it.

Third, he leans heavily on caricaturing “illusionist” talk about consciousness. Hart loves to quote people like Daniel Dennett saying that “consciousness is an illusion” and then pointing out, correctly, that if you take that literally you’ve sawed off the branch you’re sitting on: if there is no experience whatsoever, there is no one left to be “under an illusion.” But here again he stops at the cheap false victory. Most illusionist or deflationary physicalists mean something much more specific: there is experience, but our naive model of that experience—as a private inner theater with atomic, intrinsic qualia and a simple “self” watching the show—is badly mistaken. On that view, the brain builds a simplified, user‑friendly representation of its own activity and mistakes that representation for a little inner soul; the “illusion” is the brain’s self‑description, not the existence of experience itself. That is not “we gave up on explaining consciousness.” It’s one kind of mechanistic explanation of how an evolved biological control system might misdescribe itself. Saying that consciousness is “in some sense an illusion” is not a concession that mechanistic explanations failed; it is a mechanistic explanation. Hart either does not understand that distinction or finds it more convenient not to. This is not a case where illusion talk admits defeat; it’s a case where Hart is punching a straw man and declaring victory.

Once you clear away the rhetorical fog, the “unanswerable” anti‑atheist case looks very familiar and age old. The pattern goes roughly like this: define “materialism” as a crude, outdated, 17th‑century billiard‑ball picture plus Dennett at his most provocative; show—correctly—that this caricature struggles to account for rational thought, moral value, and consciousness; then declare victory for a vaguely classical‑theist or idealist picture where “mind” or “spirit” is metaphysically basic. The trouble is that many contemporary naturalists explicitly reject the crude “mechanistic” straw man he keeps fighting. They are physicalists, not cartoon mechanists, and they work within a physics that already moved past that picture. Non‑theist philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised similar worries about materialism’s ability to capture value and reason without concluding “therefore, theism,” and Nagel’s critics have shown in detail how you can respond to those worries from inside a broadly naturalistic framework. There is no valid path from “explaining consciousness is hard” to “the God of Eastern Orthodox Christianity exists,” any more than from “we have not yet fully explained crop circles” to “this proves that aliens created them.”

Hart’s move boils down to this: if he defines “atheism” as commitment to a simplistic metaphysics he dislikes, then his arguments against that metaphysics are “unanswerable,” and therefore atheism is irrational. Sure. And if I define “Christianity” as the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that God personally scripts every toddler’s cancer, I can prove Christianity is evil before lunch. Both maneuvers are lazy. If you want to refute atheism, you have to interact with the best naturalist positions on offer today, not with the weakest airport‑paperback atheism plus your favorite 17th‑century straw man.

None of this means Hart is stupid. He’s obviously not. He’s well read, rhetorically gifted, and very good at exposing shallow, popular atheist arguments. But brilliance in one direction doesn’t inoculate you against motivated reasoning in another. What shows through in that Times piece, and in the wider body of his work, is someone starting from a deep emotional and aesthetic commitment to a Christian‑Platonic picture—beauty as a transcendental, Jesus as uniquely “uncanny,” consciousness as a window into a mental foundation of being—and then retrofitting “philosophical arguments” to protect that picture from contact with a godless universe. Along the way he mischaracterizes contemporary science, caricatures naturalist positions he doesn’t like, and leans hard on loaded definitions (“God” as necessary being; “materialism” as crude mechanism) that atheists simply do not have to grant.

From the outside, this is not a rigorous refutation of atheism; it’s a very educated, very eloquent catechism for people who already want Christianity to be true but don’t want to sound naive. As an unabashed atheist, I have no problem with people finding Christianity emotionally or aesthetically compelling. Believe whatever myths get you through the night. What I object to is pretending that this is where logic forces us to go, that atheism has somehow been rendered philosophically childish by “unanswerable” arguments that fall apart as soon as you stop being impressed by the adjectives. If you want to believe in God, own it as a choice, an intuition, a story that works for you. Just don’t try to tell the rest of us that we’re being irrational for declining to share your delusion.

Staying Sane Is Hard Work

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Sliding down into delusion is seductive, easy, and fun. Modern information technology is making it ever harder to resist. Staying sane, on the other hand, is hard work—and it is getting harder every day.

The internet has made it possible for infectious ideas to spread faster than any physical disease. For a virus to circle the globe, you need mutations and air travel. To become infected by fake news and dangerous ideas, you need only a Wi‑Fi connection. Modern technology exposes us to vastly more information than ever before, much of it unhealthy, and every time our neural networks are exposed to bad information, it feels a bit more sensible to us—even if we know it is fake. Mere repeated exposure wears ever‑deepening grooves of familiarity into our brains. The more we see, hear, and click on a claim, the more reasonable it feels. Eventually, insidiously, it becomes self‑evident—common sense that seems inescapable.

In the past, news was filtered through human editors and gatekeepers. They certainly had their biases and blind spots, but at least someone was nominally responsible for quality. Today, sources like Facebook, Fox News, YouTube, podcasts, X/Twitter, and even our government have largely abandoned any obligation to fact‑check before amplifying. They create the illusion of informed reporting but are often almost completely untethered to reality. Their algorithms and personalities have one overriding job: keep you engaged. They notice what you watch or click and then say, in effect, “If you believe that, then check this out!” They do not care whether they are feeding you solid science or the latest conspiracy theory; they only care whether you will stay tuned in and click some more. The responsibility to sort out well‑supported information from unsupported claims, sound logic from specious arguments, is pushed entirely onto you.

That would be a tall order even if our brains were perfectly rational. They aren’t. Imagine you are curious about a fringe idea like Bigfoot. You type “proof of Bigfoot” into a search engine or social platform, intending to investigate skeptically. You will quickly find articles, videos, posts, and even reality shows arguing that Bigfoot is at least plausible or even real. Because you clicked, the algorithms learn that Bigfoot content “works” on you and begin to serve you more of it: more sightings, grainy photos, confident testimony. Before long, your feed is heavily populated by Bigfoot believers. From your perspective, it starts to look as if there is an enormous body of evidence out there. Everywhere you look, people treat the idea seriously. If so many people think there is something to it, there must be something to it.

In reality, you are being drawn out onto ever thinner and more dangerous limbs. The algorithm nudges you along in little steps, each of which seems perfectly solid and reasonable. This process does not just happen with Bigfoot. It happens with vaccine myths, climate denial, election lies, cultish political beliefs, and every other infectious or click‑inducing idea. The result is that many people come to feel they have made a careful, “objective” study of an issue when in fact they have been drawn, step by step, down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland alternate reality.

We cannot redesign the global information system by ourselves, but we can develop habits that make us harder to capture. One simple practice is to explicitly search for the reverse of whatever you are investigating. If you search for “proof of Bigfoot,” deliberately also search for “debunking Bigfoot claims,” and click on those results often enough that the search engines learn you will reliably choose that kind of content too. This at least gives you some exposure to different perspectives. Both sides might still be exaggerated, but you are less likely to be left with the illusion that everyone agrees with one side only.

Another, related technique is to always look back to first principles. If you only consider that next little step out along the branch, it will seem safe and sensible. But if you stop and look back at how far you have wandered from the solid trunk, you quickly realize that you are dangerously far out on a limb. Having acknowledged that we do occasionally discover new species, must really therefore admit that a hitherto undiscovered tribe of Bigfoot might actually exist?

It also matters where you spend your time. Just as like‑minded people congregate in person, different online communities attract and cultivate different kinds of thinkers. Choose to frequent healthy online environments. That is not to say you should avoid diverse ideas; but if rumor, outrage, and unvetted claims infect the community or the platform itself, you will become infected. Seek out vibrant but serious gathering sites where people demand citations, scrutinize sources, and correct obvious nonsense. If you stick to them, your own brain will become better at recognizing sound evidence and logic, as well as specious arguments. If the level of discourse on a trusted site degrades, you should leave and stop exposing your brain to it.

Given all the infectious information we are unavoidably exposed to, it is no surprise that people sometimes slip from belief into delusion. Beliefs, at least in principle, are subject to change. We might hold them strongly, but new evidence can persuade us to reconsider. When a belief becomes impervious to change—when no amount of contrary evidence, no matter how strong or consistent, is allowed to matter—it has crossed over into delusion. Using that word makes many professionals uneasy. In a clinical setting, “delusional” has a specific meaning and diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, in the generally accepted lay domain, delusion is the proper word to describe thinking patterns that have become impervious to evidence or reason.

When a person or a movement has fallen prey to delusional ideas, when contrary facts are dismissed out of hand or reinterpreted as attacks, we no longer function in the realm of honest disagreement. We are locked into a self‑reinforcing mental world that will not adjust to reality. In a culture where influencers dominate the discourse, the rest of us are put at risk. Delusions can be comforting, energizing, and politically useful, but facts always assert themselves in the end. Reality does not care if you believe in it.

As a result of so many infectious ideas being disseminated so quickly, we are currently suffering from a global pandemic of delusion. We cannot wipe it out, but we can protect ourselves and try not to contribute to its spread. We can monitor our own information diets, seek out counter‑evidence, choose better communities, learn to better assess claims, and be more precise in our language. We can and must resist being nudged toward delusion. As susceptible as our brains are to misinformation, they can also be trained to better assess the soundness of claims and to detect specious arguments.

The way repetition reshapes our memories and our very perceptions, the way algorithms exploit our pattern‑seeking brains, the way beliefs slide, inch by inch, into full‑blown delusion—all of these dynamics, and many others, are at work in our politics, our media, our religions, and our personal lives. In my book Pandemic of Delusion: Staying Rational in an Increasingly Irrational World (see here), I unpack those mechanics in much greater detail, with concrete examples and practical tools for recognizing when you, or someone you care about, is being nudged away from reality. If this short essay inspires you to want to bolster your defenses, the book will provide you with a practical field guide: offering insight as to why we are so susceptible to misinformation, how to recognize it, and how to immunize yourself against it. It will give you a fighting chance to stay sane when the world around you seems determined to drive you crazy.

Star Trek Reality Check

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Star Trek and Star Wars offer visions of the future that have become so familiar that it’s all too easy to over-credit the plausibility of the technologies they present. But how much of what they depict is plausible science fiction and how much is implausible science fantasy?

Modern physics is incomplete, but not in the sense that it’s going to casually overturn core constraints like the light‑speed limit, energy conservation, or causality. Any future theory will still be bounded by those hard limits where we’ve already measured them to absurd precision. So betting that some future “breakthrough” will make Star Trek‑style tech real is not cautious skepticism; it’s wishful thinking.

First and most fundamentally, let’s start with the Vulcans visiting Earth. As much as we like to fantasize about technologically advanced aliens visiting us now or ever, to help us or to destroy us, this is implausible. As I discuss in my book (see here) and in this blog article (see here), aliens certainly exist, but they can never visit us. There is only an extremely remote chance that we could ever even detect signs that they existed somewhere, at some time, in the distant past.

Yes, you can always wave your hands and say “maybe some unknown physics will let them come here,” but that’s not reasoning, it’s magical thinking. Given what we already know about distances, speeds, energy, radiation, and biology, the probability that flesh‑and‑blood aliens will ever cross interstellar gulfs and happen to visit us is effectively zero. Not small, not unlikely, but zero.

I wanted to communicate that most strongly as it is so critical to understand. And of course since no alien could possibly ever visit us, it is equally implausible that we could ever visit them. The only remote possibility could be sentient machines who could survive inhumanly long and dangerous journeys. In this sense, the Transformers franchise (those in which organic makers are canon) could be the most plausible science fiction. I also depict such a plausible “space travel” science fiction in my short story The Dandelion Project (see here).

So while virtually everything that follows in Star Trek cannot happen, let’s set aside the basic implausibility of interstellar space travel and look at some of the other fictions that writers concoct to make it all seem plausible once we grant the possibility of space travel.

First, there is warp drive which overcomes the inconvenient reality of time and space. This is science flavored magic. While the physics of faster than light travel may have some plausibility at the mathematical level, it has zero plausibility at practical scale. Faster‑than‑light travel isn’t just “very hard.” It clashes directly with the way spacetime is structured. To get around the speed limit you have to either break causality (allow time travel paradoxes) or rely on enormous quantities of exotic matter that may not exist in any usable form. When a “solution” demands both magic materials and broken causality, that’s not serious speculation, that’s fantasy dressed in equations.

This is similarly true of the magical energy sources that the science fantasy writers concoct to make the fantastic power requirements seem plausible. They construct anti-matter reactors stabilized in a dilithium matrix. Again, even where anti-matter technologies are theoretically plausible they are effectively hopeless in any practical sense. Antimatter is real and ridiculously energy‑dense, but producing and storing it in useful quantities is so far beyond plausible engineering that it may as well be sorcery. Talking about “antimatter reactors” powering star cruisers is like proposing a jet engine that runs on bottled lightning captured in jars. You can write that into a script and make it sound theoretically plausible but you simply cannot build it in this universe.

The implausible power requirements involved in fantasy space travel also apply to weaponry. Hand phasers and similar variations are simply implausible. Directed energy starship weaponry is somewhat plausible, but certainly nowhere remotely near the hull-slicing power depicted in the shows.

And speaking of weaponry, even if hand phasers were plausible, they would at best fire invisible millisecond bursts. Phaser gun fights would never happen. Advanced weaponry would have computer targeting and essentially never miss. One could certainly never “duck” out of the way of an energy beam. A hand‑held weapon that fires at or near light speed, with computerized targeting, does not produce Western‑style shootouts. Once the weapon can lock onto you, your chances of side‑stepping a beam that crosses the distance in microseconds are exactly zero. The only real “dodging” is not being targeted in the first place—and that’s a software and sensor game, not a reflex test.

The same logic destroys the idea of starship dogfights. If you ever had vehicles throwing serious energy around at interplanetary ranges, the fight would be decided by who detected whom first and whose fire control software shot first. It would last seconds, or less, and the human crew would learn the battle was over when the computer informed them that their enemy had been destroyed.

We don’t need to imagine futuristic AI to see the problem. Even today, guidance computers outclass human pilots in reaction speed, precision, and ability to juggle massive sensor inputs. Scale that up to space combat and the idea that a flesh‑and‑blood pilot is “flying” a starship in combat is as quaint as imagining a locomotive engineer sprinting ahead to lay track by hand.

In that vein, there would be no possibility of human (or any organic) navigators or tactical crew members. Computers would certainly handle all the piloting and targeting. There would be no time for a real-time Captain to shout even one order as he’s flung around the bridge. Han Solo would not be able to pilot the Kessel Run safely in even a fraction of the time it would take a computer-controlled ship, if at all. Operating any function of a star ship would not be a job for humans.

As to other technologies, transporters, replicators, “subspace” radios, and hard‑light holograms all have the same problem: each one quietly assumes away a core rule of the universe. They don’t just extrapolate technology; they ask you to believe that information, energy, and matter can be shuffled around with a casual disregard for limits that we’ve already measured in laboratories. That makes for great science fantasy, but it is not remotely plausible science fiction.

But there are a few places where I suspect they get the possibilities more right than wrong, even if only for practical production and storytelling limitations.

There is the plausibility that many alien planets would be so familiar to us. Given that life can only evolve in a very limited set of conditions, and that the rules of physics, chemistry, and evolution are the same throughout the universe, I don’t find it implausible that many environments, and even many alien species, would be quite familiar or at least quickly understandable to us, both morphologically and biologically (see here). Life that can build radio telescopes is probably confined to a very narrow zone of temperatures, chemistry, and environmental stability. Under those shared constraints, evolution is pushed toward a limited set of workable body plans—limbs, mouths, sensory organs. So yes, there are good reasons to think that intelligence elsewhere might evolve a shape that is surprisingly close to our own. That doesn’t mean “humans with cranial ridges,” but it does mean that “unrecognizable swirling gas entities” are probably rarer than TV’s familiar human-like bipeds.

Also, one thing that Star Wars got right was recognizing that in the future all medical diagnoses and procedures would be performed exclusively by medical droids. I can understand that it would take all the fun out of the fiction if they also admitted that Han piloting the Millennium Falcon or Luke manning the gun turrets would be just as obsolete, even with The Force assisting him!

There is a fashionable kind of optimism that treats science as an unbounded well that can eventually make anything possible if we just “don’t close our minds.” That’s not how science works. Science narrows possibilities by discovering hard limits. We don’t say “maybe one day we’ll find a way around conservation of energy” or “maybe light will decide to go faster.” We already know that won’t happen. The technologies I’m calling fantasy aren’t just impractical; they lean on the hope that the universe will overturn its own rules to realize our fantasies.

Just to say, I love these science fantasy shows. If they depicted a more plausible Sol-bound future with computers basically running everything they would be a whole lot less inspiring and engaging. But just as with a good horror or superhero movie, we can love the fantasy while still fully appreciating that it is mostly fantasy.

Often the distinction between science fiction and science fantasy becomes blurred in a world where science seems capable of such magical and limitless achievements, but it is still critical that we recognize science fantasy as just that. If we fail to do so, we become susceptible to imagining that some fantastical future science will save us from actual threats like climate change that demand real solutions right now.

Make AI Why Your New Pastime!

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When Ph.D. candidates near the end of their degree programs, they face a major hurdle: the qualifying exam, or oral defense. This is standard for most math and hard science fields, but is also often required in disciplines like history and English literature. During the defense, the candidate stands before a panel of professors, answers questions about their thesis, and then faces a battery of general questions designed to assess their depth and breadth of knowledge.

One tall tale of these oral defenses is the “Blue Sky” story. In these tales, the professors merely ask the candidate a simple question like “why is the sky blue?” After the student answers, they merely respond with “why?” After answering further, they just again ask “why?”

This isn’t just a campus myth, because a good Ph.D. Physicist friend of mine was subject to just such a grilling starting with “Why is the sky blue?” He told me that over the course of the next hour he ended up drawing upon a far wider and deeper range of physics knowledge then he ever realized he knew. All in response to repeated questions consisting of just “why?”

This is a game that confounds and exasperates parents all the time. We say something to our toddler, and they ask “why?” When we answer, they again say “why?” Parents usually give up after perhaps three iterations. A Ph.D. candidate would get through at least a few more iterations within their field of specialization.

It makes me wonder if a “Why-Q” would not be a great intelligence quotient for AI. If a normal parent can score 3, and a well-prepared Ph.D. candidate might score 6, what would AI score? Probably a much higher count reflecting deeper knowledge, and certainly its breadth of knowledge would be essentially unlimited.

Given that we now have essentially Ph.D. level intelligence in every field right at our beck and call 24/7 through AI, I want to suggest that you can play a game I call “AI Why” whenever you like. Take a break from endless YouTube or TicTok videos. Stop reading increasingly crappy articles because you’ve run out of anything actually worthwhile. Instead open your preferred AI app and pass the time playing AI Why.

Ask AI any question, serious or whimsical, even something like “Why is the sky blue?” Read over the answer, and then ask a follow-up question. You can dive deeper into the subject or go off an a different tangent. And you can continue on as long as you like. AI will never think your question is silly or get sick of your questions and it will always give you an interesting answer.

This is very different from simply surfing the Internet. Unlike the few Google or even Wikipedia links provided to you, you are not limited to clicking on a fixed number of links produced by algorithms to manipulate you. AI interaction is conversational. You can take your AI conversation anywhere you like and explore the vastness of human knowledge rather than get funneled down into rabbit holes.

Of course the AI system you use does matter. I would not go near anything under the control of Elon Musk for example. But not all AI systems are configured so that all paths lead you to the oppression of South African Whites. I use Perplexity (see here) because they are strongly dedicated to providing sound, fact-based information.

The other great thing about Perplexity is that it remembers threads of dialogue. That means I can ask Perplexity about a topic, and then come back to that thread days or months later to continue the discussion.

Just to give you a flavor of this great pastime, I asked Perplexity “Why is the sky blue?” It gave me a lot of interesting information to which I followed up by asking “Why does Rayleigh scattering occur?” After reading more about that, I asked “Why do refractive indices differ?” The answer led me to ask “Why is light an electric field?” And that led me to “Why is the self-propagating electromagnetic field of light not perpetual motion?“

To explain that last question a bit: light propagates forever in a vacuum. It seems counter-intuitive that something moving forever is not perpetual motion by definition. But Perplexity clearly explained that no, light may move forever, but does no work. That led me to ask the gotcha question, “How can electromagnetic radiation undergo self-propagation between electrical and magnetic fields with no loss of energy?“

At that point, it took me into Maxwell’s equations and lost me.

This hopefully illustrates how you can go as deep as you like in your conversations with AI. Or, I could have taken it down another path that led to the family life of Amedeo Avogadro. AI will accompany you anywhere you want to go. (And no, that is not to imply that it just agrees with anything you say. It does not.)

So, my message is to become discussion buddies with your genius AI friend. Learn from it. Expand your brain and have fun doing so. Don’t waste the precious opportunity we have to so easily learn almost anything about almost anything.

Make AI Why one of your favorite pastimes!

I Cannot Exaggerate Exaggeration Enough

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Although numbers vary day to day and poll to poll, about 97% of Americans support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes. About 52% support deporting immigrants who have committed nonviolent crimes. Only 32% support deporting all immigrants who entered illegally, and a vanishingly small number support expelling legal immigrants.

News and political commentators often cite these kind of numbers to point out that people simultaneously support the deportation of criminals but not the harassment of legal immigrants. But this sheds little light on the huge disconnect in public opinion over the wholesale rounding up immigrants by the Trump Administration.

I submit that the missing puzzle piece of our understanding is the role of exaggeration. In fact I cannot exaggerate the awful power of exaggeration enough.

The fact is that undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens. They are 4 times less likely to commit nonviolent crimes and 2.5 times less likely to commit drug-related offenses. These numbers hold firm across all geographical boundaries.

But when Trump talks about immigrants, he hyper-exaggerates the level of crime in that population far beyond what the data supports. To hear him talk, one would think that immigrants are running amok and causing mass havoc.

This incredible level of exaggeration, well beyond anything the actual facts support, creates the essential disconnect in our brains that allows people to both conclude that while they support legal immigrants but want to see “all those criminal illegals” deported.

Look at it this way. Just to take a number for illustration purposes, let’s say 5% of illegal immigrants are criminals. Trump makes it sound like 90% are criminals. Even if we are skeptical and fair-minded and allow for some exaggeration, we conclude that let’s say 25% are criminals that should be deported.

So when the actual number is 5% and Trump skews our perception to “feel like” it’s something on the order of 25%, what happens? We naturally expect and demand to see 25% arrested and deported. But there are not 25%, so to show it is meeting expectations the government rounds up and deports a whole lot of innocent immigrants in order to demonstrate it is doing it’s job to keep us safe. It must round up a whole lot of good, honest immigrants to satisfy the false perception it has created. We expect no less.

Using gross exaggeration to create unwarranted expectations is used, particularly by Trump, in a lot of other areas as well. Take Social Security as just one other example. The actual administrative overhead of managing our Social Security program is about 0.6%. This is a fantastically low amount of overhead that private companies and even non-profit organizations cannot come anywhere close to matching.

Yet to listen to Trump, you would think, even allowing for his characteristic hyperbole, that the Social Security system is at least somewhat bloated with waste and inefficiency. So say a 5% cut to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse might seem like a reasonable, measured, and warranted cost control measure. But if one made such cuts it could in reality only come from reducing legitimate benefits.

That is the power of exaggeration and it is perhaps one of the most destructive weapons that Trump wields wantonly with complete abandon. It dramatically affects how we perceive immigration, Medicare, Medicaid, tariffs, and most everything else that Trump chooses to rail about.

We need to call out Trump more strongly and more often for exaggeration, as well as others who grossly exaggerate, and not simply accept it as a personality characteristic or a legitimate rhetorical style.

Recognizing the destructive power of exaggeration is a first necessary step toward arriving at more sane and fact-based public policy.

And THAT is no exaggeration.

Our Automobile Obesity Problem

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In his “press conference” today, August 8th, Donald Trump regurgitated too may lies to reiterate here. And there is no need. Most of you are sane enough to know that virtually everything Trump says is either factually wrong or a bold-faced lie. However, I do want to talk about his particular lies regarding electric vehicles, as his stupidity or dishonesty on this topic may not be immediately obvious to everyone. Also, talking about these particular lies of his sets the stage to discuss the problem of automobile obesity.

This wasn’t the first time Trump has spread misinformation about electric vehicles (see here). He has been doing so for quite a while. Today he repeated false claims that electric vehicles are “twice as heavy” as comparable gas-powered vehicles. They are in fact a bit heavier because of the weight of current battery technology, but at most by only about 30%.

As one example, our family car, the all electric Mini Cooper SE, weighs 3,175 lbs. The otherwise identical gas-powered version weighs 2,813 lbs. This is a difference of under 13%. Cars with longer range are heavier, but the maximum difference is under 30%. For Trump to round that up to 200% is technically called a lie, whopper, or, colloquially, bullshit.

Moreover, the electric version is far cheaper to operate, has far lower maintenance costs, is far more convenient to charge up, performs far better, spew far less carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere, and can utilize far greener sources of electricity now and in the future.

But Donald never settles for just one lie about any given topic. He then went on to repeat his claim that if we “all” had electric vehicles we would have to rebuild “all” our bridges in the country lest they “all” collapse under the added weight of electric cars. This is, unsurprisingly, yet more nonsense. Our roads and bridges are built to support caravans of 80,000 lb semi trucks. The weight increase of electric vehicles would be relatively insignificant and responsible engineering organizations have tactfully characterized this claim as “massively overstated” (see here).

Trump assuredly did not come up with these bogus claims on his own, but he is clearly unable to assess the validity of wild assertions before he repeats them, or he just doesn’t care to do so.

But if we take Trump at his word, and take seriously his worry about all our bridges collapsing because of an added load of 20% or so, then shouldn’t Trump also be urging everyone to simply buy smaller cars to save our fragile bridges?

This transitions us to the topic of our big, fat, gas-guzzling American cars.

Have no illusions. American cars have gotten really fat and are only getting fatter. American cars have grown a foot wider, two feet longer, and much higher just over the last decade. Their average weight has increased over 1000 lbs since 1980.

In comparison, European cars are roughly 27% leaner than our fat American cars. This difference is on a par with the weight difference that Donald Trump is so concerned about in going to electric.

And let’s be clear, Europeans need, use, and love cars just as much as Americans. They just like them lean and mean, not fat and bloated. We don’t “need” big pickup trucks that we hardly ever carry anything in, or giant SUV’s to take that yearly trip to the mountains. We could buy small and rent to meet occasional needs. Overall that would be far more financially sensible than buying and maintaining a huge vehicle you hardly ever fully utilize.

The EPA estimates that for each 100 lbs added to a vehicle, the fuel economy decreases by 1-2%. That adds up to a lot of money.

But smaller cars are not only economically sensible, they are environmentally sensible. In fact, it’s hard to think of any single thing you could do as an individual to fight climate change more significant than to buy a smaller car, whether gas or electric.

Due to their greater size and weight, American cars consume from 11% to 23% more gasoline than do their equally satisfying European counterparts. That results in a literal ton of carbon dioxide. You could reduce your personal CO2 footprint by over a metric ton per year just by buying a lighter, smaller car.

Frankly, you are not doing much for the environment by buying an electric Hummer or Escalade or F-150, or even our new normal of ballooned up Civic. We should buy electric AND buy small to gain the most benefit not only for the environment but for our own finances. If you buy small and electric, I guarantee you will not miss your gigantic boat of a car for very long. You’ll quickly come to love your small athletic electric and will likely find that it meets all your needs very well.

Buying small also means not being so obsessed with range. Usage studies show that most drivers don’t actually need anything near the battery range they think they do and demand. That added battery weight only gets lugged around unused creating more CO2. Our Mini has a 100 mile range and that has been plenty for us and statistics confirm that it is plenty for most consumers. Again, if you need to travel farther you can easily rent or take mass transit.

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have given up on making smaller cars for our gluttonously upsized American car market. But if we create demand the supply will quickly follow. The government as well as environmentally responsible carmakers should do everything it can to incentivize a national automobile diet plan for America.

I know we’re addicted to our huge cars and we think we can’t live without them. But we can. I know we can. Believe me, you’ll feel so much better after you lose that extra 1000 lbs of car fat, and you’ll be helping save the planet to boot.

Hyperbolic Headlines are Destroying Journalism!

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In our era of information overload, most readers consume their news by scanning headlines rather than through any careful reading of articles. A study by the Media Insight Project found that six in ten people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week​ (Full Fact)​. Consuming news in this matter can make one less, rather than more well-informed.

Take, for instance, the headline from a major online newspaper: “Scientists Warn of Catastrophic Climate Change by 2030.” The article itself presents a nuanced discussion about potential climate scenarios and the urgent need for policy changes. However, the headline evokes a sense of inevitability and immediate doom that is not supported by the article’s content. These kind of headlines invoke fear and urgency to drive traffic at the expense of an accurate representation of what is really in the article.

All too typical hyperbolic headlines contribute to instilling dangerously misleading and lasting impressions. For example, a headline that screams “Economy in Freefall: Recession Imminent” might actually precede an article discussing economic indicators and expert opinions on potential downturns. Misleading headlines have an outsized effect in creating a skewed perception that can influence public opinion and decision-making processes negatively.

It often seems that headline writers have not read the articles at all. Moreover, they change them frequently, sometimes several times a day, to drive more traffic by pushing different emotional buttons.

Particularly egregious examples of this can be found in the political arena. During election seasons, headlines often lean towards sensationalism to capture attention. A headline like “Candidate X Involved in Major Scandal” may only refer to a minor, resolved issue, but the initial shock value sticks with readers. It unfairly delegitimizes the target of the headline. The excuse that the article itself is fair and objective does not mitigate the harm done by these headlines because, as we said, most people only read the headlines. And if they do skim the article they often do so in a cursory attempt to hear more about the salacious headline. If the article does not immediately satisfy that expectation, they become quickly bored, and don’t bother to actually read the more reasoned presentation in the article.

This headline-driven competition for clicks has led to a landscape where accuracy and depth are sacrificed for immediacy and sensationalism. Headlines are crafted to evoke emotional responses, whether through fear, anger, or salaciousness, rather than to inform. This shift has profound implications. When readers base their understanding of complex issues on superficial and often misleading headlines, they are ill-equipped to engage in meaningful discourse or make informed decisions.

Furthermore, the impact of misleading headlines extends beyond individual misinformation. It contributes to a polarized society where people are entrenched in echo chambers, each side reinforced by selective and often exaggerated information communicated to them through attention-grabbing headlines. This environment fosters division and reduces the opportunity for constructive dialogue, essential for a healthy democracy​ (Center for Media Engagement)​.

Consider the headline “Vaccines Cause Dangerous Side Effects, Study Shows.” The article might detail a study discussing the rarity of severe side effects and overall vaccine efficacy, but the headline fuels anti-vaccine sentiment by implying a more significant threat. Such headlines not only mislead but also exacerbate public health challenges by spreading fear and misinformation.

Prominent journalists like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post and Jay Rosen of NYU have critiqued the increasing prevalence of clickbait headlines, noting that they often prioritize sensationalism over accuracy, thereby undermining the credibility of journalism and contributing to public misinformation. Sullivan has emphasized the ethical responsibility of journalists to ensure that headlines do not mislead, as they serve as the primary interface between the news and its audience.

Unfortunately I suspect that journalists typically have little to no say in the headlines that promote their articles. The authors and editors should reassert control.

Until and unless journalists start acting like responsible journalists with regard to sensational headlines, readers should be wary of headlines that seem too dramatic, overstated, or that attempt to appeal to emotions.

And this is not a problem limited to tabloid journalism… we are talking about you, New York Times! Most people are already skeptical about headlines published in the National Enquirer. Tabloid headlines are not actually as serious a problem as the “credible” headlines put forth by the New York Times and other publications who still benefit from an assumption of responsible journalism.

The current trend of sensationalist online newspaper headlines is a disservice to readers and society. The practice prioritizes clicks over clarity, hyperbole over honesty, and in doing so, contributes to a misinformed and divided public. It is imperative for both readers and journalists to advocate for a return to integrity in news reporting – particularly in the headlines they put out. Accurate, informative headlines are not just a journalistic responsibility but a societal necessity to ensure an informed and engaged populace.

Footnote: Did I fool you??

Does this article sound different than my usual blog articles? Is it better or worse or just different? This was actually an experiment on my part. I asked Chat GPT to write this article for me. I offer it to you with minimal editing as a demonstration of what AI can do.

I’m interested in hearing what you think in the comments. Should I hang up my pen and leave all the writing to AI?

The Vatican Combats Superstition

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The Church has always worked tirelessly to portray itself as scholarly, rational, and evidence-based. Going way, way back, they have tried and largely succeeded in marketing themselves as a bulwark against false gods, superstitions, and dangerous beliefs.

In “The Demon-Haunted World,” Carl Sagan told about Jean Gerson back in the 1400’s who wrote “On the Distinction Between True and False Visions.” In it, he specified that evidence was required before accepting the validity of any divine visitation. This evidence could include, among many other mundane things, a piece of silk, a magnetic stone, or even an ordinary candle. More important than physical evidence, however, was the character of the witness and the consistency of their account with accepted church doctrine. If their account was not consistent with church orthodoxy or disturbing to those in power, it was ipso facto deemed unreliable.

In other words, the church has spent thousands of years fabricating pseudo-rational logic to ensure that the supernatural bullshit they are selling is the only supernatural bullshit that is never questioned.

Their pseudo-rational campaign of manipulation is is still going on today.

Just recently, the Vatican announced their latest marketing initiative to promote themselves as the arbiters of dangerous and confusing supernatural claims (see here). They sent their salesmen out in force promoting it, and if their claims were not accepted by the media with such unquestioning deference, I would not need to write this article.

Just as did Jean Gerson in 1400, the modern Vatican has again published revised “rules” for distinguishing false from legitimate supernatural claims. But unlike most of the media, let’s examine a few of these supposedly new rules (or tests) through a somewhat less credulous lens.

The first requirement, according to Vatican “scholars,” is whether the person or persons reporting the visitation or supernatural event possess a high moral character. The first obvious problem is that anyone, even those of low moral character, can have supernatural encounters. So what is this really about? The real reason they include this is because it’s so fuzzy. It gives them the latitude to dismiss reports inconsistent with their doctrine based on a character judgement, and it ensures that if they are going to anoint a new brand-ambassador, that person will not reflect poorly on the Church.

They include a similar criterion involving financial motivation. Again, while a financial interest should make one skeptical, it is not disqualifying. And the real reason this is included, I suspect, is to provide the same benefit as a moral character assessment. It provides further fuzziness to allow them to cherry-pick what sources they want to support, and which they want to disavow.

But the most important self-perpetuating rule is the next one. The Vatican explicitly gives credence to any claims that support church theology and the church hierarchy, and expressly discounts any claims that are not in keeping with Church doctrine as ipso facto bogus.

In other words, since Church doctrine is the only true superstition, any claim that is not in keeping with Church doctrine is logically and necessarily false. This is the exact same specious logic put forth by Jean Gerson in 1400. The Vatican clearly knows that a thriving business must keep reintroducing the same old marketing schemes to every new generation.

Rather than dwell further on the points the Vatican wishes us to focus on, let’s think one moment about what they did not include. Nowhere in their considered treatise on fact-based thinking do they ever mention anything remotely like scientific or judicial rules of evidence. Nowhere do they mention scientific-style investigation, scientific standards of proof, or any establishment of fact for that matter. They emphasize consistency with Church doctrine, but nowhere do they even mention consistency with known universal laws. And certainty nowhere do they suggest a sliver of a possibility that any of their existing beliefs could possibly be proven to be incorrect by some legitimate new supernatural phenomenon.

I won’t go on further as I like to keep these blog posts short, but I hope this is enough to help you see that everything in this current Vatican media campaign is more of their same old, “we are the only source for truth” claim. It’s the same strategy designed to hold an audience that has been adopted successfully by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and any number of cults.

The Church is essentially a money-making big-business like Disneyland, selling a fantasy experience built around their cast of trademarked characters with costumes and theme parks, and big budget entertainment events. Imagine if Disney spent thousands of years trying to retain market share by assuring people that they are the only real theme park and that all the rest of them are just fake. Then further imagine that Disney went on to promote scholarly articles about how they are the only reliable judges of which theme park characters are real. That’s the Church.

Disneyland and Universal Studios are just a feel-good entertainment businesses and they admit it. Disney doesn’t insist that Micky Mouse is real and Universal Studios doesn’t claim that only the Autobots can save us from the Decepticons. What makes the arbiters of truth at the Vatican either liars or delusional or both is that they never stop working to convince everyone that their divine mission is to protect us from – all those other – false beliefs.