I have a presupposition of my own, that essentially all people have equal capability and equal intelligence and equal intellectual processing power. We are all evolved to have these excellent, versatile computing engines in our skulls that are awesome in their ability to process inputs and draw conclusions and drive our behaviors as a function of those inputs. However, if these calculating engines are fed garbage, more garbage is what comes out.
One of the prime sources of garbage is religion. Take a young, naive brain and stuff it with lies and nonsense, and it produces even more nonsense, which we then feed to the next generation, and it gets worse and worse until you’ve got a population of gibbering slugs who can’t get anything right. We’ve got people who’ve been primed with a steady diet of bad Bible interpretations who struggle to analyze even the simplest phenomena.
Case in point: Perry Stone, a Pentecostal evangelist with a surprising number of followers for someone who is so thick. He has juggled together fantasies about the Rapture and UFOs to build an elaborate edifice of weird conclusions, none supported by any evidence.
I’m not going to go into great detail, but there were a large number of pastors that had been invited to go to a certain state to hear some men in the United States government and others share with them a concern that they had,said Stone, who did not identify his source in his April 27 YouTube video, but claimed the person hasa great church.Stone, whose YouTube channel has approximately 925,000 subscribers, said his friend told him that some of those in the meeting
were telling us as pastors, ‘You need to prepare your people, and you need to get ready to answer them for what you’re about to hear being released.’
And some of it has to do with crafts that have been discovered that are not allegedly a part of our planet, and the materials they’re made of are not a part of our planet. Very strange, reptilian-looking creatures and other things that almost sound like something out of a sci-fi movie or an [H.G. Wells] book,he added.
Groovy. It’s a real mish-mash of bad sci-fi movies and bad religion fermenting in that man’s brain. The problem here is that the foundations of his reasoning are all garbage.
Stone went on to place the extraterrestrial phenomenon within the framework of his dispensational premillennial eschatology that features belief in a pre-tribulational rapture, an Islamic Antichrist and a third Jewish temple purified by red heifers.
Stop right there, I would like to get off this train to crazytown. He goes much much further, though, and starts ladling the right-wing politics and racism on top of his already rancid trash salad.
Stone claimed the officials in the supposed meeting warned the pastors that disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrial existence will cause some Christians to question their faith and some non-believers to seek out pastors for an explanation.
Stone speculated that
government fabricationsregarding an alien invasion will eventually be used to explain away the rapture, attributing the theory to his son, Jonathan, who last year tweeted about former President Barack Obama beingan advanced humanoid AIwho used questions over his birthplace to hide thatthere was never any birth certificate at all.
This all supports my contention that these people have normal, healthy brains, but that their inputs are all garbled bullshit. It’s a real shame.
… these people have normal, healthy brains
Perhaps they had such brains at birth, but in practically all cases, incremental post-partum damage has reached irreversibility.
Purified by russet virgin cows? That makes perfect sense. I hope they don’t leave too many cowpats on the Temple floor before getting barbecued for the Blood God.
That seems too strong. Clearly there are differences there, with some young children very quickly being noticeably better at some kinds of reasoning than others.
That said you don’t need to demand perfect equality to imagine that some batshit preachers are actually reasonably intelligent — and simply wrong.
I find considering the state of their brains irrelevant. It may be damaged or perfectly fine. It’s quite possible that perfectly normal brains produce stupid shit, particularly if there’s money to be made off the shills or sex to be had.
I was just reading about Paul Pressler who was an important player in remaking the Southern Baptist Convention into an ultra-conservative instrument of political power. He was also diddling boys.
And yeah, he’s in the Epstein files.
Do you remember that religious Mel Gibson snuff-film? I don’t want to remember the name.
It was a topic of conversation with a coworker. She said, “I knew Christ suffered, but I didn’t think it was that much.”
My immediate thought was, “…and you still don’t.”
I held off on that one. She’s a good person.
Obviously, as one of our org. members sarcastically says, UFOs are circling our planet and spewing a virus into the atmosphere targeted at turning magat brains into mush!
Of course, tRUMP and his magats are throwing as much crap at the wall as they an as a distraction from their horrendous crimes. Welcome to tRUMPs gish gallop Death Spiral world. (80 year old rehashed UFO bullshit, WTF!)
As Karl Marx correctly observed: ‘Religion is the opium of the people’.
while i try to be less ableist than this blog, i profoundly disagree with you on this.
Here we go again.
God Awful Movies spent two hours dissecting this BS six years ago.
“Gam196 Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=llUWbX4M618
I like to think that we all have about the same capacity, it’s just used differently. Though some people seems to mainly excel at turning beer into piss.
That makes about as much sense as saying that essentially all people have equal muscular capability and equal strength and equal physical performance parameters.
(It is most evidently false — would be even were it restricted to potential instead of actuality)
The first sentence PZ quoted above is wrong.
It doesn’t get any better either.
This meeting never happened and Stone didn’t identify his source because there wasn’t one.
[meta]
It’s also grammatically wrong, raven: ‘was’ instead of ‘were’ would have been correct, since it refers to ‘a large number’ which is a singular thing.
“This all supports my contention that these people have normal, healthy brains, but that their inputs are all garbled bullshit. It’s a real shame.”
I have another contention that these people are the real AI, generated by the aliens to confuse us while they secretly take over the government. Occasionally the aliens slip up which explains RFK and some of the other clearly alien beings in the White House.
Between this sort of nonsense and the news of late, I’m begging the aliens to come take me. I won’t complain about the probes, either. I only draw the line at dinner.
Jack Van Impe leaned into demon UFOs decades ago. Even had a silly commercial for a book and VHS he was peddling (sadly I can’t find that now) warning of the invasion. This obit sanewashed him considerably.
Christianity Today – Jack Van Impe Obituary
Rando review of Impe’s book God’s Promises of Prophecy
*sigh* The reviewer was so close to getting it.
Over the course of a couple years, I watched an intelligent, reasonable family member develop the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Concurrently, he started believing in demons, visions, and all manner of supernatural stuff. These things coupled with a new sense of grandiosity and verbosity made him sound like an Old testament prophet. Within a couple years he had accepted Christianity, including transubstantiation and exorcism. I’m convinced there’s a lot we don’t know about how variations in our brains can make us susceptibility to religion and other nonsense.
RationalWiki – Crank magnetism
Wikipedia – Audience Capture
Yeesh. You’d think Obama being out of office for almost a decade now and being unable to prevent Trump from totally dismantling his legacy and taking the USoA backwards would be enough proof that Obama wasn’t the anti-Christ or some sort of alien or robot with special powers or whatevs. Hell, even Trump eventually accepted that Bitrtherism was wrong
Source : https://apnews.com/united-states-presidential-election-general-news-events-61f7085d848248cd98410027d33f2101
But, no, even now, they really cannot get over the fact that an African-American man was once POTUS can they?
[meta]
How so? That is an unwarranted inference.
Why could he not be the anti-Christ or some sort of alien or robot with special powers or whatevs even if he’s out of office for almost a decade now and unable to prevent Trump from totally dismantling his legacy and taking the USoA backwards?
(His legacy has been totally dismantled?)
—
Mate, when you do this ideological bullshitty vague stuff, it’s less than convincing.
Wishful motivated reassurance for the unthinking, that’s what I read. Feeble.
(About they, it is)
I don’t think it’s GIGO. We’ve all experienced this particular GI. Most of us reject the GO.
@John:
No, but 47 is working on it. That’s how I read what StevoR wrote. You could read it like that too, it just takes some comprehensive reading skils.
Just step away from the keyboard or phone or whatever you’re using to post so many replies and go outside, do something else than hanging around on Pharyngula. There’s more to life than splitting hairs and picking arguments all the time, you know.
M’thew, trying ever so hard to patronise me. Cute..
You seriously imagine I’m perpetually at the keyboard or phone or whatever?
Not one step! Sitting on a toilet, you imagine. Food ferried to me.
Heh. You do have quite the imagination.
So it’s a ‘no’, then. The total dismantlement, that is. Work in progress.
Amusing how, as usual, someone focuses on the parenthetical addendum, not the substance.
The bit that can be left out without changing the actual content.
Why could he not be the anti-Christ or some sort of alien or robot with special powers or whatevs even if he’s out of office for almost a decade now and unable to prevent Trump from totally dismantling his legacy and taking the USoA [sic] backwards? StevoR allegedly knows.
Do you?
Splitting hairs can only be done when hairs are there, splittable.
I mean, if it hasn’t yet happened, Obama perforce has hitherto been able to prevent it. Logic.
Sky Captain@18 at one point Van Impe seemed to be heavily into the idea that King Juan Carlos of Spain might be the Antichrist. And that the EU was developing a supercomputer that would be part of the Mark of the Beast somehow. This was in the ’90s, when the pathetic state of post Communist Russia made claiming Russia would play a big role in the End Times less credible. Did Jack and Rexalla believe that stuff, or were their changing storylines cynical attempts to retain their followers? If someone knows they haven’t talked.
If you want to see what a lot of the current UFO fandom is into just look at the UFO sections of Reddit. But you’ll see a lot of it is the same crap that’s been floating around from past decades recycled. For example lots of people still take George Adamski’s “Nordic” aliens seriously.
I wish the religious would at least be willing to follow what they say they believe when it’s not convenient. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to convince them of anything but to have my parents walk away from the requirement that they be willing to defend their belief with knowledge that they raised me with was painful. I wish they could see that they’ve all but admitted that what they believe is indefensible in multiple senses.
It’s hard being around them after they have sealed their delicate beliefs off from challenge. Avoiding anything that might contradict something and reveal the terrible things and people they have supported. There’s no communication about anything important or meaningful. I hope someone figures out the religious brain in a useful way here.