Reading Time: 2 minutes It has so often been the case that politicians— especially fringe politicians— have sorely needed to be hit around the head by some serious truth. Too long have we allowed disinformation and conspiracy theories to permeate the information space and corrupt our political discourse. So it came with great joy that this literally happened to […]
truth
Posted inCritical thinking
Meet the Fab Five of misleading information
Reading Time: 8 minutes Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation abound in media, government, and everyday interactions, but they’re not the only misleading games in town. We also have to deal with truthiness and just-so stories. Together, this “fab five” of false forms can mislead us into thinking we have a greater lock on the facts than we do.
Posted inCrime and Punishment
Truth loses, capitalism wins in Fox News defamation settlement
Reading Time: 4 minutes The legal settlement in which Fox News this week agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million was a victory for profit-obsessed American capitalism, not journalistic truth. The irony is that bald-faced lying for profit at the expense of truth is what landed Fox News in court in the first place. The top cable-news purveyor […]
Posted inDeep Dive
How we create truth
Reading Time: 10 minutes White women have a storied history of fabricating assault at the hands of BIPOC men. On March 14, 22-year-old Eleanor Williams became part of a small subset of people to face legal consequences for false claims of abuse, which here sparked a season of hate crimes and drove three men to attempt suicide. Her elaborate […]
Posted inCritical thinking
‘Pluck yew’
Reading Time: 4 minutes Pluck yew. If you believe what you read on the internet and are a sucker for an amusing story, you might think that the most widely used curse in modern America—and its physical manifestation (i.e., “flipping the bird”)—evolved from this supposedly ancient, undecipherable epithet above and its accompanying obscene gesture. Indeed, “pluck yew” does sound […]
Posted inPsychology
Great lies of our time
Reading Time: 4 minutes As humans, we are “mediocre” at identifying when someone is lying. Professional lie detectors, like police officers, do not perform better. However, they believe they do, possibly due to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The worst lies, however, are the ones we tell ourselves. Here are some of them. “I’m a good and loyal friend.” You’re about […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Can we handle the truth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). That’s good news to anyone who wants to be free, which is probably everyone. But what does truth have to do with freedom? And I guess a more pertinent question is the one Pilate supposedly asked later in the same […]
Posted inReligion
How does Christianity decide the truth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes A worldview is important enough that it needs a rigorous critique. You don’t want to select one on a whim. How does Christianity decide what’s true?
Posted inCritical thinking
Discernment: The Pope keeps giving Christians this awful advice
Reading Time: 10 minutes Across the length and breadth of Christendom, discernment means the ability to tell if something is divine, earthly, or demonic in nature. As one might expect in an ideology consisting of nothing but false claims, Christian leaders all have their various ways of teaching this system to their followers. Pope Francis is no exception to […]
Posted inCritical thinking
What a skeptic is—and isn’t
Reading Time: 6 minutes Countless Herman Cain Award winners who died for a(n anti-vaxxer) lie. A YouTuber who leapt to the only logical explanation for a spooky clip: a ‘paranormal entity.’ And countless Christians giving their testimonies about converting to their religion through the usual logical fallacy-riddled bad arguments and emotional manipulation. They all have one thing in common: they all proclaim to be skeptics. They definitely want their audiences to think so, too. But they aren’t. In reality, they don’t even know what a skeptic is, nor how to think like one.