I came up to Manchester today until Sunday. :)

I was just reading some Fundamentalist Christian Armegeddon Muslim Israel Revelations Bush Syria website (I’m not even going to give you a link cos I don’t want to be an accessory)… Some people are totally whacked. The thing is their arguments can *seem* rational, only when you are in their world admittedly, but they have a veneer of rationality. Just like in Flatland – if you are a Flatlander your ‘universe’ seems to be the only way things can be… of course once you’re taken above it you can see that it’s incredibly simplistic and there is so much more to the Multiverse than your little 2D existence…So, with the whole Armageddon thing, once you take away, oh, let’s start with the impossibility of, say, seeing into the future… then the argument kinda falls flat….

And that’s how they catch them…

It’s exactly how you pull of a hoax. You’ve got to start with something that people believe without question – a lot of people believe in God without question (decades of indoctrination will do that). So the religious nuts start out with something easy ‘God is’… then they slowly throw in all these other things ‘If you believe that God *is* then you’ve got to believe he did *these* things.’ Then they push it a bit further ‘If you believe God *is* and he did these things then you have to believe that he told these people to write this Book.’ and then ‘ If you believe God *is* and that he did these things and wrote this book, then you have to believe that he’s told some people about what’s going to happen in the future at the end of the World.’ By this point you can’t think ‘Well, I don’t believe all that fire and brimstone stuff, that’s ridiculous. But if I don’t believe *that*, then I can’t believe *this* and …can I believe in *that* and then… can I still believe in God?? Ahhhhh!!!!! Yea, OK, I’ll believe in all that Revelations stuff… cos… well cos it’s easier…’

…than what? Thinking about things rationally?