In the mid-to-late 2000's myself and small band of Twitter users united under the #atheist hashtag, to discuss the lies and misinformation being spread on that then relatively new kid on the social media block by conspiracy theorists. It was a more innocent time, when everyone knew Sarah Palin was mad, and anyone who said otherwise was just as easy to spot. Of these occasionally hilarious, often mind-numbingly incoherent exchanges, between those of us championing simple rationalism, versus those with a penchant for bullshit, grew a relatively popular podcast, called Fundamentally Flawed, and it's community of contributors organised via the now defunct Google Plus.
A firm favourite from the non-rational side of the equation was a self-styled biblical science communicator and spell-check averse man of Jesus named Joe Cienkowski. Joe was my first direct experience of someone so entrenched in the world of religion-based pseudoscience and anti-government conspiracy theories, at first, I simply refused to believe he wasn't a master of satire; playing everyone off each other to see who would crack a smile first. Sadly, it became increasingly obvious that he was all too real, when his soon-to-be ex-wife agreed to be interviewed for the podcast, revealing uncomfortable details of what it's like to live in the weird world which conspiracy theorists create around themselves.
Feedback on this and other interviews, from the growing Fundamentally Flawed audience, was broadly split into two camps. One argued that people of Joe's stripe should be left alone to believe whatever they wanted to believe, and the other argument went that it was right to shine a light on the activities of people like Joe, and more importantly the "preachers" and "educators" in the young earth creationist community from which he drew his inspiration.
One of the biggest frustrations in dealing with people of Joe's type — and we interviewed some of the craziest of crazies over the natural lifespan of the podcast — was their total disregard for the social contract which ordinarily exists between people of conscientious intention. They aren't interested in understanding things from someone else's perspective. That's something they're indoctrinated to believe leads them away from correct, bible based learning. And in that world, anything which questions the bible, much less demonstrates its weaknesses, is by definition something to be avoided — even if that means saying things out-loud, which attract the derision and condemnation of any right-thinking person who happens to be listening at the time.
It was going through the process of realising the intention of this contingent wasn't to inform or educate, or pursued with reasoned argument, but to frustrate and erect barriers to mutual understanding, which I personally found the most frightening aspect of the Fundamentally Flawed experience. There I was, sitting in my small one bedroom flat in the North East of England, in the incongruous position of talking to some of the most wilfully deluded people in the whole of the predominantly American, predominately right-wing conservative electorate — all the while, worrying out-loud, what would happen should these people ever actually enter the White House.
Fast-forward to 2016/17. The comparisons between the cast of characters we spoke to on the podcast, and the people who were now appearing in the mainstream news media, championing the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States were stark and chilling. Where the creationists had dismissed evidence and logic as mere piffling distractions from the more pressing matter of magical thinking and a belief in belief itself, so too the likes of Sean Spicer would, with similarly low to non-existent levels of embarrassment, take to the podium to assert Trump's inauguration drew larger crowds than that of Barack Obama, while decrying all photographic evidence to the contrary as "fake news". Another of Trump's surrogates, Kellyanne Conway, took to the airwaves to insist truth itself was flexible; that you can hold two perfectly contradictory beliefs in mind at the same time, so long as you choose to believe that both of them were as true and as false as the other at the same time. This appropriation of Orwellian newspeak is virtually indistinguishable in its from and cadence from the psychobabble masquerading as philosophy, spewed from the lips of Eric Hovind and Sye ten Bruggencate — those doll-eyed charlatans who, years earlier, had attempted to rebrand and repurpose Cornelius van Til's presuppositional Christian apologetic for the shopping channel demographic.
You can imagine, then, that those of us who were paying attention, while others were insisting these nut-jobs who hijacked Christianity should be left alone — felt a great degree of disappointment when our fears about where all of this could lead, turned out only a few short years later to be worse than we could have ever imagined. Simply put, none of us could have predicted that the President of the United States, and the fascists who enable him, could stoop so low as to claim that ingesting disinfectant might cure Covid-19 — the global pandemic which only three weeks earlier, Trump had insisted would be over in no time, while simultaneously insisting his own demonstrable inaction resulting from this simple lie was a media hoax, orchestrated by the Democrats.
But more frightening than all of that — more maddening still than the numbing predicability behind all of it — is the fact that none of this is even remotely close to being over. Indeed, the only thing which Vice President Mike Pence has to do now, is wait. Pence, let's not forget, is from a branch of the so-called religious right, which sees all of this confusion, all of this obfuscation and hatred, and everything which Trump has facilitated in the past 4 years, while being completely oblivious from one 24 hour period to the next as to the ultimate consequences of his own words and actions — all of this — is merely the next step towards the ultimate right-wing religionist's goal of fulfilling biblical prophecy, to usher in the end times.
I repeat, the END times. Pence genuinely believes, Jesus himself will appear in the sky and bodily take the true believers into heaven — a group which, you won't be surprised to discover, involves a lot of white people, guns, and their ensuant Lear Jet-owning televangelist chums. All Pence needs now, is a nuclear exchange in the Middle East — and the same electorate who continue to chant USA in the streets, while ignoring the scientific advice to social distance as readily as they ignored the scientific advice to never drink disinfectant — will demand that Trump himself pushes the button, live on Twitter, resplendent in his silly made in China hat, bearing a slogan literally taken from SS propaganda of the 1930's. This is where America is now. Get used to it. We're now entering the post-Covid reality. Buckle up. We probably don't have that long left.
A firm favourite from the non-rational side of the equation was a self-styled biblical science communicator and spell-check averse man of Jesus named Joe Cienkowski. Joe was my first direct experience of someone so entrenched in the world of religion-based pseudoscience and anti-government conspiracy theories, at first, I simply refused to believe he wasn't a master of satire; playing everyone off each other to see who would crack a smile first. Sadly, it became increasingly obvious that he was all too real, when his soon-to-be ex-wife agreed to be interviewed for the podcast, revealing uncomfortable details of what it's like to live in the weird world which conspiracy theorists create around themselves.
Feedback on this and other interviews, from the growing Fundamentally Flawed audience, was broadly split into two camps. One argued that people of Joe's stripe should be left alone to believe whatever they wanted to believe, and the other argument went that it was right to shine a light on the activities of people like Joe, and more importantly the "preachers" and "educators" in the young earth creationist community from which he drew his inspiration.
One of the biggest frustrations in dealing with people of Joe's type — and we interviewed some of the craziest of crazies over the natural lifespan of the podcast — was their total disregard for the social contract which ordinarily exists between people of conscientious intention. They aren't interested in understanding things from someone else's perspective. That's something they're indoctrinated to believe leads them away from correct, bible based learning. And in that world, anything which questions the bible, much less demonstrates its weaknesses, is by definition something to be avoided — even if that means saying things out-loud, which attract the derision and condemnation of any right-thinking person who happens to be listening at the time.
It was going through the process of realising the intention of this contingent wasn't to inform or educate, or pursued with reasoned argument, but to frustrate and erect barriers to mutual understanding, which I personally found the most frightening aspect of the Fundamentally Flawed experience. There I was, sitting in my small one bedroom flat in the North East of England, in the incongruous position of talking to some of the most wilfully deluded people in the whole of the predominantly American, predominately right-wing conservative electorate — all the while, worrying out-loud, what would happen should these people ever actually enter the White House.
Fast-forward to 2016/17. The comparisons between the cast of characters we spoke to on the podcast, and the people who were now appearing in the mainstream news media, championing the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States were stark and chilling. Where the creationists had dismissed evidence and logic as mere piffling distractions from the more pressing matter of magical thinking and a belief in belief itself, so too the likes of Sean Spicer would, with similarly low to non-existent levels of embarrassment, take to the podium to assert Trump's inauguration drew larger crowds than that of Barack Obama, while decrying all photographic evidence to the contrary as "fake news". Another of Trump's surrogates, Kellyanne Conway, took to the airwaves to insist truth itself was flexible; that you can hold two perfectly contradictory beliefs in mind at the same time, so long as you choose to believe that both of them were as true and as false as the other at the same time. This appropriation of Orwellian newspeak is virtually indistinguishable in its from and cadence from the psychobabble masquerading as philosophy, spewed from the lips of Eric Hovind and Sye ten Bruggencate — those doll-eyed charlatans who, years earlier, had attempted to rebrand and repurpose Cornelius van Til's presuppositional Christian apologetic for the shopping channel demographic.
You can imagine, then, that those of us who were paying attention, while others were insisting these nut-jobs who hijacked Christianity should be left alone — felt a great degree of disappointment when our fears about where all of this could lead, turned out only a few short years later to be worse than we could have ever imagined. Simply put, none of us could have predicted that the President of the United States, and the fascists who enable him, could stoop so low as to claim that ingesting disinfectant might cure Covid-19 — the global pandemic which only three weeks earlier, Trump had insisted would be over in no time, while simultaneously insisting his own demonstrable inaction resulting from this simple lie was a media hoax, orchestrated by the Democrats.
But more frightening than all of that — more maddening still than the numbing predicability behind all of it — is the fact that none of this is even remotely close to being over. Indeed, the only thing which Vice President Mike Pence has to do now, is wait. Pence, let's not forget, is from a branch of the so-called religious right, which sees all of this confusion, all of this obfuscation and hatred, and everything which Trump has facilitated in the past 4 years, while being completely oblivious from one 24 hour period to the next as to the ultimate consequences of his own words and actions — all of this — is merely the next step towards the ultimate right-wing religionist's goal of fulfilling biblical prophecy, to usher in the end times.
I repeat, the END times. Pence genuinely believes, Jesus himself will appear in the sky and bodily take the true believers into heaven — a group which, you won't be surprised to discover, involves a lot of white people, guns, and their ensuant Lear Jet-owning televangelist chums. All Pence needs now, is a nuclear exchange in the Middle East — and the same electorate who continue to chant USA in the streets, while ignoring the scientific advice to social distance as readily as they ignored the scientific advice to never drink disinfectant — will demand that Trump himself pushes the button, live on Twitter, resplendent in his silly made in China hat, bearing a slogan literally taken from SS propaganda of the 1930's. This is where America is now. Get used to it. We're now entering the post-Covid reality. Buckle up. We probably don't have that long left.
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