Reading Time: 11 minutes Scholars have long known that conservative politics and media distort and mischaracterize reality. This distorted reality insulates right-wing media consumers from contradictions and challenges to their beliefs. As a means to power, conservative politicians see this as a feature, not a bug.
Antiprocess
Posted inPsychology
With social media, agreement gets addictive
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the same way that religion hijacks the evolution of our minds, social media hijacks the evolution of group psychology.
Posted inCulture
The ‘Christian Love’ Flows for Deconstruction
Reading Time: 8 minutes This past year, toxic Christian leaders have finally come around to viewing deconstruction as a very serious threat to their power. (And it is.) They’ve been responding to that threat in the only way they know: with ‘Christian love,’ which as usual looks like cruelty, false accusations, and endless hateful screeching.
Posted inGeneral
Why Wingnuts Don’t Care About Real-World Evidence
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, let’s see how wingnuts like Patrice Lewis assess truth claims in the first place. They do it a lot differently from reality-based people.
Posted inReligion
CARM Apologetics Zingers (Are Absolutely Awful)
Reading Time: 15 minutes But I’m attached to this CARM post we’ll cover today. It’s just such a nonstop, rollicking Gish gallop of zinger attempts. Evangelicals greatly respect zingers, perhaps because they’re so unrelentingly bad at them. So this post promises us some entertainment.
Posted inGeneral
QAnon Lies, and People Die
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! News of the COVID-19 surge has been unrelentingly awful. One theme dominates that news, too: almost all of the people dying in this surge are unvaccinated. Sure, some of those unvaccinated folks just never got A Round Tuit. But a lot of others have turned out to be victims of the […]
Posted inReligion
Beach Reach: What It’s Really About
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, we’ll check out an overview of Beach Reach to see what it’s really about — and what it says it’s all about.
Posted inReligion
Deconversion: Brett McCracken gets it completely wrong
Reading Time: 11 minutes Sure, it might seem like Brett McCracken is just insulting his tribal enemies. And he is. But he’s actually not talking to us, not really. Let me show you what Brett McCracken is telling his tribemates under his breath, and what he accidentally reveals about his entire belief system.
Posted inReligion
How Christians Are (Not) Coping With the Rise in Churchless Believers
Reading Time: 8 minutes Recently, I showed you this new Gallup poll bearing yet more bad news for Christians (here’s the original story). In it, we learned that fewer than half of Gallup’s survey respondents said they belonged to a church. Church-belonging Christians now represent a minority in America. And you can guess that Christian leaders — especially from the really authoritarian, reality-challenged flavors — don’t like that poll at all. Today, let me show you some responses to the news, and what I discovered when I went to find out what Christians plan to do about it.
Posted inReligion, Science
It’s All in How You Ask the Questions: Christian Polls
Reading Time: 7 minutes How questioners phrase their questions really matters — and quite a few Christians very obviously do not want to gather accurate information.