Australia Wants Troof
December 7th, 2009
|
| Share |
Australia has done a pretty good job recently when it comes to fighting the anti-vaccine groups and has a long history of skepticism, but it seems that the wackies down under are fighting back harder than ever. A good example: Truth Movement Australia. It’s a website that serves as a kind of one stop shop for all the crap people believe that isn’t actually “true” in the conventional sense of the word. It includes everything from 9/11 “truth” to vaccine “truth.”
It’s a little ironic that the “truth” movement and the term “truth” is now becoming associated with the opposite of what “truth” means by convention. Believe it or not, there was a time when true meant that something was actually real, factual, non-false. The site also carries posts directly from the Australian Vaccine Network and the links read like a whose-who in the world of crazy conspiracy theories.
It really makes me wonder how a person can manage to function in the world while believing all these things. From fluoride to chem trails, they’re constantly trying to poison you. Every corporation is an evil front and world governments are planning the mass extermination of most of the population, while the satellites and brain implants monitor everything you do or think. Yet somehow, the “truthers” are allowed to continue spreading what they consider the truth and have not had big brother knock on their door and pull a pistol with a silencer on them. Perhaps they spend their days worrying about this in their strange paranoid fantasy land.
(Note: No offense meant to Australia by this post. We have an enormous indigenous “truth” movement in the United States and so while this site is Australian, it’s hardly unique to that country. Stupid knows no borders)
This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Just LAME, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
December 7th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
This is kind of modern Animism, with evil spirits inhabiting everyday things in the environment. Just going to prove that ignorance begets fear.
Quote Comment
December 7th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
DV82XL said:
What do you think of the hypothesis that traditional religion, like Christianity and Islam and all the others, is not really the root of the problems in the world, because it is just a means of filling a deeper need to assign meaning to things and fill a need to understand? I know that the author has said things like that before, that if you were to somehow convince people to give up on religion, that the need it fills would be filled by other beliefs like conspiracy theories or UFO’s or something and these would function as religions even if they are really not.
Quote Comment
December 7th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Biff Henderson said:
This is a valid point, a flimsy one in my opinion, but a point nonetheless. My usual reply to it is that the work of the Rationalist is not going to be done if we push traditional religion out of the way. We are always going to have to fight this sort of idiocy, just like we have to continuously fight those pathogens that we have brought under control.
Outbreaks of imbecility will always occur and they will have to be cut down lest they take hold, it is an ongoing process.
Quote Comment
December 7th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Biff Henderson said:
That is not exactly what I have said. What I have said is that I think it’s an oversimplification and a narrow view of things to think that traditional religions are the root of all problems with understanding or lack there of and that simply by getting rid of those, progress will be unimpeded.
I’m not a fan of the traditional religions, but a non-religious society can be just as bad if it is full of homeopathy, conspiracy theories, mystics, psychics, quacks and so on. If you replace religion with that stuff, you don’t necessarily gain anything.
You have to replace it with the right thing and the right reasons. Go after the ignorance. Get people to appreciate the world for what it is and to understand what science is and why things are as they are.
I don’t really differentiate. I think they’re all cut from more or less the same cloth. They’re all invented and based on ignorance. Secular bull**** is bull**** too, and just as harmful.
Quote Comment
December 8th, 2009 at 3:43 am
Ignorance, magical thinking, logical fallacies, gullibility. Those are the problem. However they dress themselves, it comes down to the same thing.
DV82XL said:
A good analogy and a valid observation. We will never completely conquer ignorance and idiocy to the point that it has been eradicated. We will likely also never conquered infectious disease completely, but we have still conquered much of it, having lessened it signifficantly and turned it from the leading cause of death to one that is fairly uncommon.
Of course, some things are an ongoing battle. Never having an unconditional victory does not mean you’re not winning. Some things can, at best, be kept at bay.
Quote Comment
December 8th, 2009 at 4:01 am
I don’t really have a problem with religion, as long as it is not crammed down my throat. I would say the same about conspiracy theorists, but I’ve never met a conspiracy theorist who didn’t cram it down everyones throat.
Quote Comment
December 9th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Ray1952 said:
To me, religion is like measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough. Most of the time it doesn’t do anything critical and the only consequence is having to tolerate a lot of unpleasantness that come along with it. However, on occasion it causes some major problems and once in a while it kills.
We should still do what we can to prevent it, even if *most of the time*, it’s not fatal.
Quote Comment
December 9th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Biff Henderson said:
Yes, phony religions such as Gaia, which begat the deep belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now restyled as man-made climate change, etc. Good point. At least some established religions, such as Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, aren’t hellbent on meddling in people’s lives and trying to impose their views at the point of a gun and with the full force of government behind them.
Quote Comment
December 10th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I think it’s a big mistake to blame religion for all our ills, and certainly a mistake to liken it to infectious disease — usually survivable, never really good, sometimes deadly. This is because religion is a human construct reflecting our own human natures; tear it down, and you don’t address the root problem at all.
The root problem is a lack of critical thinking. It doesn’t come naturally, but it is extraordinarily useful, and compliments our natural curiosity very well. Rather than attacking religion, I think we will have much better results by promoting critical thinking. Religions often fear it because they don’t understand it; they often see it as an attempt to promote pride. They think it’ll convince people they’re too smart to need God. From a atheist perspective, it’s hard to see the problem with that, unless you realize that the religious types fear that not merely because it’s sort of obligatory to believe in God (from their perspective) but because it constitutes hubris. Most religions teach that it is dangerous to think you have all the answers, and that, I think, is where science and religion should have common ground, because that is precisely what the scientific method is all about (only in science it’s not so much about pride as it is about systematically eliminating bias).
Quote Comment
December 10th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Calli Arcale said:
I understand what you are saying Calli, but in this case often the symptom is part of the disease. As long as religion uses its influence to undermine the teaching of evolution, block sex-education, and interferes in the political process to prevent certain members of this society from exerting their basic rights as human beings because of whom they love, I consider it a legitimate target.
Also as much as you are correct in saying that most religions teach that it is dangerous to think you, as an individual have all the answers, it diverges from science in that it claims that it does. Science is far more modest than religion in this regard. in fact it has always been religion that has accused science of this arrogance, while they themselves assert that everything that anyone needs to know is contained in whatever texts that they claim, as a mater of doctrine, are infallible.
Science and religion have no common ground. Gould tried to establish boundaries with his ‘non-overlapping magisteria,’ but religion violated the terms of that offer for a ceasefire. This being the case it can claim no special treatment, and now falls in the same class as the anti-vaxers, the EMF paranoids, and any other group that seeks to effect changes on the body-politic, based on nothing more than their imagined beliefs.
Quote Comment