3 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I think that is a rather different aspect of human nature, though, isn't it? Televangelists are not setting out to be contrarian, I'd have thought. They probably have a complex set of motivations. They may (mostly?) be genuine in the beliefs they preach, but they also love performance, showmanship, the adulation of crowds and, in all too many cases, the money they can rake in. So they may start out more or less genuine and get corrupted by success, as so many do in so many walks of life.

But certainly I would agree a lot of conspiracies are peddled with a view to gaining adherents in order to serve some ulterior motive. We see a lot of that in populist politics.

I was talking about how followers might believe even if the leader doesn’t, regardless of the leader’s motivation. (Though it’s possible some religious leaders start as believers and only get corrupted later)

10 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

I learned all of the creationist arguments and how to dismantle them.

Is it fair to say they all boil down to one? Never saw one that wasn't some form of "explanatory gaps." Unless it was a really silly one, like "Jeff had a vision, and he is wise," that sort of thing, which is more on a lower tier of arguments that you don't see in science circles so much.

12 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Is it fair to say they all boil down to one? Never saw one that wasn't some form of "explanatory gaps." Unless it was a really silly one, like "Jeff had a vision, and he is wise," that sort of thing, which is more on a lower tier of arguments that you don't see in science circles so much.

There are also attempts at logic, e.g. the fine tuning argument or the (idiotic) entropy argument. Though you don’t often see the latter these days. It seems they’ve mostly worked out that one doesn’t fly.

We may be unable to change the fanatics' minds but it is probably a good thing that they know what they believe is not universally believed and why we disagree.

If that makes us an enemy of their faith/ideology in their eyes it is useful to know that. Where their fanaticism comes with belief that 'promoting and defending The Faith' trumps society's laws - where insist their beliefs should be society's laws and seek to confine the holding of societies Offices of responsibility and power to those who share their 'belief' - it is useful for them to know we do not think their beliefs put them above the law and they will face opposition and legal action.

20 hours ago, swansont said:

Ancient civilizations did.

According to the "QI elves" there's no evidence of that.

20 hours ago, swansont said:

Lady Elizabeth Blount led an organization that did, ca 1900.

I guess the troll is much older than I thought. 🙂

14 hours ago, TheVat said:

Is it fair to say they all boil down to one? Never saw one that wasn't some form of "explanatory gaps." Unless it was a really silly one, like "Jeff had a vision, and he is wise," that sort of thing, which is more on a lower tier of arguments that you don't see in science circles so much.

No there were quite a few, some to do with physics, some to do with Abiogenesis, occasionally some to do with Evolution or the Theory of Evolution.

Most were low hanging fruit that were just repeated creationist garbage.

1 hour ago, pinball1970 said:

No there were quite a few, some to do with physics, some to do with Abiogenesis, occasionally some to do with Evolution or the Theory of Evolution.

Most were low hanging fruit that were just repeated creationist garbage.

Low hanging fruit, the easy target's to feel so much better than I am,

Ask not for whom this bell tolls, perchance it tolls for thee.

IOW, every coin has a dark side.

What makes you the arbiter of truth?

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

What makes you the arbiter of truth?

Uh... knowledge perhaps?

5 hours ago, dimreepr said:

According to the "QI elves" there's no evidence of that.

linking to bio pages with no information on the topic is not actually helpful. One might count it as just more trolling. IOW, who TF cares what you claim they think?

OTOH, the wikipedia page disagrees, with examples and lots of actual citations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

6 hours ago, dimreepr said:

I guess the troll is much older than I thought. 🙂

Looking for actual evidence is better than guessing.

14 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

there were quite a few, some to do with physics, some to do with Abiogenesis, occasionally some to do with Evolution or the Theory of Evolution.

Most were low hanging fruit that were just repeated creationist garbage.

Thanks, I guess there are some that aren't really "gap" arguments, though those tend to be the ones I hear the most over here. As @exchemist mentions, there are "logic" arguments like the fine tuning one, though even that sort of relies on a gap, where the strong anthropic principle is rejected because the proponent of the fine tuning argument assumes that we can never establish the reality of a multiverse (a multiverse which would then reduce the FT argument to a puddle argument - this depression in the pavement fits me ever so well!)

On 10/10/2025 at 7:32 PM, exchemist said:

I think that is a rather different aspect of human nature, though, isn't it? Televangelists are not setting out to be contrarian, I'd have thought. They probably have a complex set of motivations. They may (mostly?) be genuine in the beliefs they preach, but they also love performance, showmanship, the adulation of crowds and, in all too many cases, the money they can rake in. So they may start out more or less genuine and get corrupted by success, as so many do in so many walks of life.

Teleevangelists and cult leaders are either clinical narcissists or at least people with an above average concentration of narcissistic traits. You just won't have the motivation for so much self promotion if you don't have an unusually high opinion of yourself. Narcissists also love money since it validates their need to feel superior to others.

Edited October 12Oct 12 by Otto Kretschmer

50 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Teleevangelists and cult leaders are either clinical narcissists or at least people with an above average concentration of narcissistic traits. You just won't have the motivation for so much self promotion if you don't have an unusually high opinion of yourself. Narcissists also love money since it validates their need to feel superior to others.

I think there is a spectrum there, from the perfectly normal to the pathological. Consider anyone working in the performance arts, politics, legal advocates or even surgeons. Many people enjoy performing to an audience, without being narcissists. Many of the classical musicians I know are quite shy and retiring people but put a violin in their hands or sit them behind a keyboard and they are away. I myself have performed solo, which I found very stressful but compensated by the reception from the audience. Enough to persuade me to do it again, a year later.

But thinking more about this I suppose your point is that, with televangelists in particular, the performance often seems to be largely about them. There is more about them than about the gospels, even though the gospels are ostensibly the subject matter. That certainly does suggest narcissism.

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

Thanks, I guess there are some that aren't really "gap" arguments, though those tend to be the ones I hear the most over here. As @exchemist mentions, there are "logic" arguments like the fine tuning one, though even that sort of relies on a gap, where the strong anthropic principle is rejected because the proponent of the fine tuning argument assumes that we can never establish the reality of a multiverse (a multiverse which would then reduce the FT argument to a puddle argument - this depression in the pavement fits me ever so well!)

I don't myself think that consideration of a multiverse is required to dismiss the Fine Tuning Argument. It seems to me, rather, that the FT Argument rests on a misunderstanding of probability. Just because a particular outcome is one of millions does not mean that the outcome we observe is "impossible" and therefore must have been influenced in some way. After all, there has to be an outcome, which will be one of the millions of possibilities. For instance the probability of dying by being struck by lightning is vanishingly small, yet people do die that way.

Edited October 12Oct 12 by exchemist

21 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I think there is a spectrum there, from the perfectly normal to the pathological. Consider anyone working in the performance arts, politics, legal advocates or even surgeons. Many people enjoy performing to an audience, without being narcissists. Many of the classical musicians I know are quite shy and retiring people but put a violin in their hands or sit them behind a keyboard and they are away. I myself have performed solo, which I found very stressful but compensated by the reception from the audience. Enough to persuade me to do it again, a year later.

But thinking more about this I suppose your point is that, with televangelists in particular, the performance often seem

Yes and there is a scale measuring this - the modesty facet of agreableness in the big five personality model. If we assume a scale from 0 to 100 with Gaussian distribution and average score in the population being 50, teleevangelists as a group would likely score significantly below the population norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

16 hours ago, swansont said:

linking to bio pages with no information on the topic is not actually helpful. One might count it as just more trolling. IOW, who TF cares what you claim they think?

OTOH, the wikipedia page disagrees, with examples and lots of actual citations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

Looking for actual evidence is better than guessing.

This seems a bit of an overreaction, given the topic:

I initially agreed with your post and added an enquiry on the topic of FE, my anecdotal evidence of a trusted source (they explicitly said that on a QI show), your trusted source is just different to mine, I just don't have access to the elves workings.

Your style of debate often leaves me angry and I basically agree with you, not to mention my willingness to accept I'm wrong; imagine the effect on 'them'???

Edited October 12Oct 12 by dimreepr

1 hour ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Yes and there is a scale measuring this - the modesty facet of agreableness in the big five personality model. If we assume a scale from 0 to 100 with Gaussian distribution and average score in the population being 50, teleevangelists as a group would likely score significantly below the population norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Modesty is not mentioned in the Agreeableness category, as far as I can see.

My experience is that a lot of egocentric people can be socially very agreeable. It may be one of the things they use to dominate other people, being "the life and soul of the party" as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In fact I am always suspicious of "Hail fellow well met" types, as I've found in business they are often crooks, or out for themselves! But maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "agreeableness" in this categorisation.

25 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Modesty is not mentioned in the Agreeableness category, as far as I can see.

My experience is that a lot of egocentric people can be socially very agreeable. It may be one of the things they use to dominate other people, being "the life and soul of the party" as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In fact I am always suspicious of "Hail fellow well met" types, as I've found in business they are often crooks, or out for themselves! But maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "agreeableness" in this categorisation.

Big five agreeableness doesn't mean "outwardly agreeing with someone", it covers stuff like altruism, empathy, cooperativeness, trust, modesty and also straightforwardness with people scoring low on straightforwardness being more likely to project a false image of themselves for personal gain while high scorers are more authentic.

My educated guess about your experience is that people who are crooks might subconsciously or even consciously try to hide their vicious nature by portraying themselves in the best light possible and they actually overcorrect. Here in Poland several years ago we got a dude whose family (wife and kids, one kid survived miraculously IIRC) burned alive, he was crying on tv and wrote poetry about his family. Guess what? He was the killer. He set his house on fire to get money from insurance.

Edited October 12Oct 12 by Otto Kretschmer

20 hours ago, dimreepr said:

What makes you the arbiter of truth?

It was pretty basic stuff.

Evolution and The Theory of Evolution are not the same thing.

Theory and Scientific theory are different things.

Humans are animals.

The fossil record supports Evolutionary theory.

The DNA evidence supports Evolutionary theory.

Humans and dinosaurs did not inhabit the earth at the same time.

Life on earth evolved.

Like I said low hanging fruit.

On 10/10/2025 at 6:32 PM, exchemist said:

But certainly I would agree a lot of conspiracies are peddled with a view to gaining adherents in order to serve some ulterior motive. We

JW in the street do not speak, they just man a stand. Pretty harmless. There is a regular anti Vax stand in Manchester Piccadilly, the stand owner looks like a new age hippy. A conversation there would be pointless.

I did shout at anti Vax demo in Manchester, they threw insults at me because I was wearing a mask so I returned the favour.

A nasty aggressive bunch, I was glad to call out their vacuous arguments to their faces.

31 minutes ago, pinball1970 said:

It was pretty basic stuff.

Evolution and The Theory of Evolution are not the same thing.

Theory and Scientific theory are different things.

Humans are animals.

The fossil record supports Evolutionary theory.

The DNA evidence supports Evolutionary theory.

Humans and dinosaurs did not inhabit the earth at the same time.

Life on earth evolved.

Like I said low hanging fruit.

From your perspective, you're punching down; what do you think, they think about you???

31 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

This seems a bit of an overreaction, given the topic:

I initially agreed with your post and added an enquiry on the topic of FE, my anecdotal evidence of a trusted source (they explicitly said that on a QI show), your trusted source is just different to mine, I just don't have access to the elves workings.

The fact that you’re admitting it’s anecdotal evidence points to one issue. Also, you’re hardly the first person to be challenged to provide a better accounting than “I heard/saw it in a show” One reason people get called out for this is that it’s really easy to misremember the details or the context. There’s a decent chance the show was talking about people in the middle ages, because there’s a misconception that flat earth persisted as the prevailing thought persisted far longer than it did.

31 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Your style of debate often leaves me angry and I basically agree with you, not to mention my willingness to accept I'm wrong; imagine the effect on 'them'???

I made a statement and your response was that there was no evidence of it being true. I don’t see how that’s supposed to count as “basically agreeing”

Asking for better/proper support for your claim is supposed to be a message for you to improve the quality of your response. But you apparently decided that the real problem is that I pointed out the deficiency.

1 minute ago, swansont said:

The fact that you’re calling it anecdotal evidence points to one issue. Also, you’re hardly the first person to be challenged to provide a better accounting than “I heard/saw it in a show” One reason people get called out for this is that it’s really easy to misremember the details or the context. There’s a decent chance the show was talking about people in the middle ages, because there’s a misconception that flat earth persisted as the prevailing thought persisted far longer than it did.

I made a statement and your response was that there was no evidence of it being true. I don’t see how that’s supposed to count as “basically agreeing”

Asking for better/proper support for your claim is supposed to be a message for you to improve the quality of your response. But you apparently decided that the real problem is that I pointed out the deficiency.

Not at all, I'm just pointing out that there's more than one path to disseminate information, even if you don't agree.

15 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

From your perspective, you're punching down; what do you think, they think about you???

No idea, a godless atheist? Is that important to the thread?

If someone knocks at my door with a aim of converting me to Christianity, then they need to bring a decent argument.

I did not expect them to be scientists, that's fine but do not use scientific arguments in that case.

Also yes I was punching down in that case.

1 minute ago, pinball1970 said:

No idea, a godless atheist? Is that important to the thread?

If someone knocks at my door with a aim of converting me to Christianity, then they need to bring a decent argument.

I did not expect them to be scientists, that's fine but do not use scientific arguments in that case.

Also yes I was punching down in that case.

Seems arrogant to me...

3 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Seems arrogant to me...

Should I pretend to be ignorant instead? Or just convert because they were kind enough to come to my door?

I think it is highly unlikely that any of the JW that came to visit actually considered anything I said because my arguments went against their position.

Would they think twice before using those arguments again? because there maybe other people who could dismantle their arguments? More people like me? It is a possibility, they may thought about adjusting their script. Unlikely though.

That was a "nice" experience, there were more confrontational experiences with obnoxious people.

By that time I was well into Biblical criticism so we did not even touch on science.

That was another Gish Gallop extravaganza, two ladies, utterly awful, arrogant and self righteous.

One suggested I was never a true Christian because "I accepted atheism."

They gave up but not before I educated them on scripture, that felt good, they were loathsome.

I do think the 'drivers' for these ideological movements are different for the originaters than for the followers.

I hate to speak ill of the dead, but take Charlie Kirk for example.
I have never heard him, but by all accounts ( from people who have listened to him ) he was a lot more reasonable and not as extreme about 10 years ago.
And he did seem pretty quick witted in his debate style, so he was fairly intelligent. I would say intelligent enough to realize that if he put aside his morals, and took advantage of stupid people, there would be a sh*t-load of money to be made.
By going to extreme ideologies he founded TP and became a millionaire by a young age, without actually working.

It started with 'snake-oil' salesmen in travelling shows, then TV Evangelists, but the internet has seen a proliferation of such people who take advantage of the stupid, and those who refuse to think for themselves. Now the American Government is jumping in for their piece of the pie, and taking advantage of everyone, while supported by these these same people.

With AI compounding the problem ( due to Government/Billionaire control ) and even more people not thinking for themselves, I think we are doomed.

To find the "root cause' of all evil ... "Follow the Money"

Edited October 12Oct 12 by MigL

28 minutes ago, MigL said:

I hate to speak ill of the dead, but take Charlie Kirk for example.

Criticizing a public figure at the centre of a major political controversy is nothing to be ashamed of, even if said person is deceased. IMHO it actually needs to be done.