Donald Trump, the Anti-Skeptic

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that last week Donald J. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States.

In this post I'm going to leave aside his racism, his sexism, his violent and fascist rhetoric, his endless lies, and even his complete lack of relevant knowledge or qualifications. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that he is a raving conspiracy nut and a gullible fool.

Climate Change Denier
Trump believes climate change is a deliberate hoax, and uses cold local weather as evidence.

• "Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!" Source
• "NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?" Source
• "This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice" Source
• "Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don't believe it $$$$!" Source

Trump called global warming a conspiracy created by China and perpetrated by scientists.

• "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Source
• Trump later claimed he was "being sarcastic" but also "a little bit serious." Source
• "It's a hoax. I think the scientists are having a lot of fun." Source

Anti-Vaxxer
Trump believes that "massive vaccinations" cause autism and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

• "I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future." Source
• "I'm not against vaccinations for your children, I'm against them in 1 massive dose. Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!" Source
• "No more massive injections. Tiny children are not horses—one vaccine at a time, over time." Source

Ebola Truther
Trump alleged a CDC conspiracy to minimize the danger of Ebola.

• "Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting. Spreading all over Africa-and fast. Stop flights" Source
• (Just 6 of Africa’s 54 countries had even a single Ebola case during the outbreak.) Source

Birther Movement Leader
Trump was a leader in the Obama "birther" conspiracy theorist movement.

• Trump repeatedly suggested Obama was born in Kenya and pushed him to release his birth certificate: "Well I've been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I've been told that it's not there or it doesn't exist." Source
• He claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii to look into his past. "I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding." Nothing came of the alleged investigation. Source
• He falsely suggested that Obama didn’t go to the schools he claimed to: "Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I'll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy." Source
• He falsely stated that Obama’s grandmother said he was born in Kenya: "His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth, okay?" Source
• Once Obama released his birth certificate, Trump claimed it was a forgery: "An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud." Source
• Asked in 2015 if Obama was born in the U.S., he responded: "No. I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, I don't know why he wouldn't release his records." Source

Trump has repeatedly implied that Obama is secretly a Muslim.

• "He doesn't have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that." Source
• On multiple occasions, he has not corrected supporters who claimed he is a Muslim. Source 1, Source 2
• When asked about a possible Muslim president, Trump said: "Some people have said it already happened, frankly. Of course, you wouldn’t agree with that." Source

Trump implied the Obama administration assassinated the woman who verified his birth certificate: 

• "How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s 'birth certificate' died in plane crash today. All others lived." Source

JFK Conspiracist
Trump bought into a National Enquirer story linking Ted Cruz's father to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination.

• "[Cruz’s] father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right, prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. What was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible." Source

Anti-Skeptic
Conspiracies aside, Trump believes just about any ridiculous thing that supports his views.

• Trump retweeted an obvious hoax that spouted racist homicide statistics. Most egregiously, it claimed that 81% of homicides against whites are committed by blacks. (The true number is 15%.) Source
• Trump tweeted a hoax video tying a protester to ISIS. When it was pointed out to him as a hoax, he doubled down: “He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS. Now, I don't know. What do I know about it? All I know is what's on the internet.” Source

I think all of this makes it clear that Trump is no friend of the skeptical movement. In fact, he's nearly as far from a skeptic as it's possible to be.

As president of the United States, Trump would have to make difficult, critical judgments based on complex information from a variety of sources. Sometimes the trustworthiness of those sources can be difficult to discern. Based on Trump's many credulous statements, he absolutely be entrusted with this crucial task.

For this and countless other reasons, Donald Trump has no business getting anywhere close to the office of the presidency.

San Diego New Atheists & Agnostics Meetups

Over the past few weeks I've been to a couple of events hosted by the Meetup.com group San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics. One was earlier this evening: an informal five-on-five soccer match for which I was tragically unprepared. My lack of endurance running ability aside, though, I had a great time.

Nonbelievers of all stripes showed up, but what struck me about the meetup was how little about nonbelief it was. We had a short chat, warmed up a bit, and got right down to playing. In other contexts it might have been nice to talk at length about our common views on religion and theism. But in a way it was refreshing to see us come together, get some exercise and have some fun without having to frame it in terms of belief or lack thereof.

You can read a summary of the other event, a presentation by Secular Coalition for America's executive director Edwina Rogers, in my guest post over at The Lucky Atheist. I've written a bit about this blog before, but to summarize, Mike Caton runs the only other active San Diego-based atheist/skeptic blog that I'm aware of, and he puts out good stuff. Hopefully we'll see a guest post from Mike over here at some point in the near future.

Electoral Prediction and Cognitive Bias

Over the past couple of weeks, a startling number of pundits and commentators have been relentlessly attacking political statistician Nate Silver and his blog FiveThirtyEight. Why? Because his electoral prediction model, which uses a mix of national polls, state polls, demographic information and economic data, calculates that Obama's chances of winning the election are slightly better than the convention wisdom suggests. At present, they're hovering at a little below 75 percent.

Nate has a great track record when it comes to predictions: In 2008, he called all 35 Senate races right, as well as 49 of 50 states for president. In 2010, he correctly called 34 of 37 Senate races and 36 of 37 governors' races. When he was wrong, the outcome was usually decided by a razor-thin margin. And his reasoning for this year's prediction is simple: Obama holds small leads in enough crucial swing states (e.g. Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa) to get him to the needed 270 electoral votes.

But the critics dismiss all that, declaring in a textbook case of 20–20 hindsight that those other predictions were a cakewalk, and this time is different. They whine that Nate's biased because he's rooting for Obama (which never shows in his incredibly calm and even-handed commentary). They complain that his poll weighting system is subjective and introduces bias (even though it's actually based on objective measurements of poll recency, methodology and track record). And when all else fails, they mock him as puny and effeminate.

It would be one thing if Nate was alone in making the forecast that he does... but he's not. The various prediction markets, which despite their flaws are usually pretty accurate, tend to mirror his probability estimate very closely. And it turns out that his model is actually quite generous to Romney compared to other competing models of the same type.

So why have Nate's projections been subjected to such merciless criticism? For several reasons, none of which have anything to do with the merits of his model.

One is that the media has an incentive to portray elections as close—in this case, a virtual dead heat—so that people get excited and tune in for more coverage. So when someone comes along claiming that one candidate actually has a small but substantial lead, the public and the less-savvy pundits are naturally skeptical.

Another reason comes down to the fact that people do a very poor job of grasping probabilities. Commentators hear Nate estimate a 75% chance of Obama winning and think, "Wow, he must be really sure of himself." That's certainly the impression Joe Scarborough gave when he insisted that Obama's chances were at 50.1%. But Nate's prediction isn't all that dramatic. What many fail to understand is that if you assign Event X a 75% probability of occurring, it means you expect it to not happen 25% of the time. In fact, if such events occur more often than three out of four times in the long run, you've made a very real error.

The third and most glaring reason is a combination of wishful thinking and confirmation bias. Conservatives want very badly for Romney to win this election (or more to the point, for Obama to lose), so some will do anything to interpret the data as favorably as possible. Their most common defense is an allegation that the pollsters are (intentionally or not) oversampling Democrats—a claim based on the faulty assumption that party identification is static, rather than fluid and subject to change in response to current events. Another is to hold polls favoring Obama to a higher methodological standard, while clinging uncritically to those favoring Romney, such as the overly volatile Gallup tracking poll. Still another is to ignore polls altogether and point to less direct indicators, like an alleged closing of the gap between male and female voters or the candidates' favorability ratings. Yet one more is to claim, baselessly, that undecided voters break dramatically against the incumbent. Anything to keep the dream alive.

Meet the man who thought Bush's response to Katrina
would be his crowning achievement.

Finally, the more cynical conservative pundits may be consciously biasing their predictions. They have an incentive to tell their audience what they want to hear—Republicans who want to be reassured will look to them for certainty. Dick Morris, for instance, has such a catastrophic track record of predicting GOP victories that it's hard to imagine he's anything but an opportunist looking to get more attention and sell more books.

Now, before any staunch liberals out there get too cocky about the follies of their counterparts across the aisle, I should point out that this mindset is by no means limited to one party or ideology. In 2004, Democrats were guilty of groundlessly criticizing poll oversampling just as Republicans are today. And a quick perusal of the comments on Nate's blog posts will reveal many left-leaning readers expressing far more confidence in Obama's chances than is warranted by the data. Many of his acolytes also seem to follow the blog just to pacify their anxieties rather than to follow the data wherever it leads. So no matter what your politics, beware of how your biases influence your views and expectations.

Now I leave you with one final prediction. If Romney wins, you can bet that all the critics will be crowing with triumph and declaring the demise of FiveThirtyEight. But if Nate turns out to be right, you can bet those same critics will brush it off as a fluke, blaming voter fraud or Hurricane Sandy or anything else they can think of to resolve their cognitive dissonance, in much the same way that a cult will rationalize its failed doomsday predictions.

Political Sites for Skeptics, Part 2

I forgot a few key resources in my previous post about neutral and/or skeptical political sites. So, without further ado...

Two of these sites are On The Issues and ProCon.org. These resources list the political stances of politicians and commentators in a simple and straightforward way. To do so, they use their legislative voting record as well as direct quotations from speeches and books. Here are On The Issues' pages for Obama, Biden, Romney, his newly-selected VP candidate Paul Ryan, and the main third-party candidate, libertarian Gary Johnson. ProCon compares six presidential candidates' answers to 61 questions in this handy chart. (They also have some good, even-handed information on other controversial issues at their main page.)

Then there are the "transparency" sources. Most people lump politicians in with the likes of lawyers and used car salesmen in terms of honesty and integrity, but it's often hard to know exactly where their loyalties lie. OpenSecrets goes a long way toward solving that problem by posting detailed information about what special interest groups are donating to whom—for example, SOPA author Lamar Smith's media-based donors. Their side-by-side comparison of the two presidential candidates is also quite nice. GovTrack is useful for keeping track of the voting records of various legislators—Paul Ryan's, for instance. MapLight is another potentially useful site that combines the latter two.

Finally—and I have no idea how I could forget this one—there's Snopes. Sure, they tackle every subject under the sun, but they have a specific page dedicated to politics, and even separate subsections for Obama and Romney. There are a ton of rumors about Obama that have bubbled up over the past five or so years, and the vast majority of the ones tackled here are exposed for the sensationalist nonsense they are. Barbara and David Mikkelson do a great job researching and running the site, and their work in these areas mainly serve to highlight how immensely unreliable political chain emails tend to be.

Politics today is so vicious and partisan that finding reliable, neutral information is nearly impossible. It's hard for me to form opinions when so many sources present their information through the lens of their personal worldviews. With the help of the sites I've covered here, though, I feel like I have a fighting chance of distinguishing vested narrative from objective truth.

Political Sites for Skeptics

I'm not going to delve too far into political issues with this blog. But since skepticism is a big part of what I write about here, I thought I'd take a few minutes to present some of the online resources I would recommend for skeptics to use when following politics.

If verifying political claims is your goal, both PolitiFact and FactCheck are invaluable resources. I especially like PolitiFact for its quick Truth-O-Meter ratings. Both parties tend to champion the sites when it supports them or attack them as biased when it doesn't—in other words, politics as usual. I won't claim that these sources are "true neutral," as that's difficult if not impossible to come by, but if they have a secret plot to further one side over the other, they've done a great job hiding it. Unfortunately, the sites are far from comprehensive. Apparently thorough, balanced reporting actually takes some time and effort—who knew?

As far as political discussion forums go... well, there's a subreddit for everything these days. I generally steer clear of the hard-left sensationalism of r/politics, in favor of smaller and more thought-provoking places like r/2012elections, r/PoliticalDiscussion, r/ModeratePolitics and r/NeutralPolitics. The first is highly topical, while the second is an open space for talking about every political idea under the sun. Even if you're not a moderate, chances are you'll still enjoy the latter two, as the focus is on civil discussion instead of creating an echo chamber. I like to view these four in unison as a single multireddit.

Want predictions and polling numbers? RealClearPolitics does a decent job of compiling the national figures, but FiveThirtyEight is the best source for polling data and data-driven political analysis I've found. It's run by Nate Silver, a professional statistician with an amazing track record of correct election predictions—49 of 50 states in the 2008 elections, for example. His model for predicting the 2012 outcome pulls in (among other things) virtually every state poll in the country and even corrects for systemic biases (e.g. registered versus likely voters). And his daily blog posts probe the nuances of political science in a completely detached, non-partisan tone. If you want to know who's going to without all the wishful thinking and daily gossip, this is your place.

Finally, I'll end with a decidedly partisan source: RightWingWatch. While there are unquestionably plenty of fringe wingnuts on the left (and let me know if you know of any reputable sites that compile madness on that side of the aisle), I'm including this one mainly due to its exemplary coverage of the extreme religious right. There are people in relatively influential positions who say things which are absolutely bonkers, but would fly under everyone's radar if RWW didn't cover it. They'll have a sensationalized headline now and then, but on the whole their reporting is an accurate portrayal of just how radical the fundamentalist faction of politics can be.

Being a skeptic with regard to the supernatural is relatively straightforward—it's just a matter of waiting until some phenomenon with sufficient evidence comes along. With politics it's a lot harder. To take a proactive stance on positions that have real impacts on millions of people is no small task—especially when the few objective facts available, are massaged and twisted beyond recognition. It's such a vicious and insular culture that keeping up can be exhausting, but with the help of these resources, I can at least be confident that I'm not completely in the dark.

No Religious Test

The No Religious Test Clause of the U.S. Constitution says that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Yet remarkably, no less than eight of our state constitutions either give theists preferential treatment or single out atheists to deny them the right to hold office:

Arkansas – Article 19, Sec. 1:

No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any Court.

Maryland – Article 37:

That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God[.]

Mississippi – Article 14, Sec. 265:

No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.

North Carolina – Article 6, Sec. 8:

The following persons shall be disqualified for office: Any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.

Pennsylvania – Article 1, Sec. 4:

No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.

South Carolina – Article 17, Sec. 4:

No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.

Tennessee – Article 9, Sec. 2:

No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.

Texas – Article 1, Sec. 4:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.

There are a few things worth noting here. One is that Maryland and South Carolina have overturned their clauses (although they're still on the books). Another is the bias toward classical monotheism baked into the wording: in most of these clauses it's taken for granted that one god exists who's superior to all other beings. A third is that Pennsylvania and Tennessee also focus on belief in "a future state of rewards and punishments"—which throws deists out in the cold along with Taoists, Shintoists and many Jews. Finally, Arkansas' constitution doesn't even allow atheists to testify as court witnesses. But this is Arkansas we're talking about, so maybe we're just lucky there's no law saying we need to be shot on sight.

As bigoted as these provisions are, they're thankfully superseded by the federal Constitution. But that doesn't mean they've never caused any harm. In 1961, Roy Torcaso's appointment as a notary public was revoked after he refused to declare a belief in God. The case of Torcaso v. Watkins went all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously struck down Maryland's religious test clause. But that was 50 years ago. Surely we've grown as a nation since then, right? Well, virtually the same thing happened in 1992 when Herb Silverman crossed "so help me God" off of his oath to become a notary in South Carolina. And in 2009 Cecil Bothwell was elected to the city council in Asheville, North Carolina—but not without a group of vocal opponents trying to bar him from office and sending out fliers fearmongering over his unbelief.

It's important to remember, too, that highly-publicized prejudice is not the only form of harm that can come from clauses like these. Although they have no real legal weight, fundamentalists can still use them as ammunition to intimidate would-be public servants. For every atheist who runs for office, how many aspire to but decide against it due to a wall of opposition that's both institutional and societal? Striking these intolerant words from our governing documents wouldn't instantly erase the deep-seated prejudice that Americans have against atheists in politics—but it would be show that we're ready to give them a chance.

A Look at Rick Santorum's Madness

Rick Santorum probably isn't going to win the Republican nomination, and he definitely isn't going to win the presidency. But at the moment this poster child for the Religious Right enjoying co-front runner status along with Romney, and that's incredibly scary in itself. It means that hundreds of thousands of people either haven't heard the appalling statements he's made on everything from evolution to gay marriage, or they don't mind. You may have seen some of these before, but I wanted to round up some of his worst quotes for a closer look.

On Sexuality
Santorum has had an obsession with sexuality throughout his political career, and the words that come out of his mouth are often laced with bigotry that might have been better-suited to cultural attitudes a century ago. For example, on gay marriage:

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge include homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing." —Santorum

"When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what's left is the French Revolution. What's left is a government that gives you rights. What's left are no unalienable rights. What's left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you'll do and when you'll do it. What's left, in France, became the guillotine." —Santorum

The comparison of gay marriage to pedophilia and bestiality is what earned Santorum the Google campaign to associate his name with a certain unpleasant substance. The comparison of repealing California's gay marriage ban to the violence of the French Revolution just earned him blank stares of disbelief. On sodomy laws, he's said:

"We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does." —Santorum

"The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that." —Santorum

This man wants to be the leader of the free world, and he doesn't believe you have the right to consensual sex within your own home. Unless you're a 16th-century Puritan, I don't think anything else needs to be said. Finally, on contraception and Don't Ask Don't Tell:

"One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that's okay. Contraception's okay.' It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." —Santorum

"I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they're making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to—to—and removing "don't ask/don't tell" I think tries to inject social policy into the military. ... I would just say that, going forward, we would—we would reinstitute that policy, if Rick Santorum was president, period." —Santorum

Notice the stammer after he says removing DADT gives gay people a special privilege. It's as though he's sure they must get something he doesn't want them to get, but he's not quite sure what. The word he's looking for is "equality."

On Science
Virtually all the GOP candidates reject established science in some respects, but Santorum goes a bit further than most.

"One of the issues that I always got hammered for was the issue of evolution. I was the guy who actually put words in the No Child Left Behind Act ... I had an amendment, it’s a great story, I had this language, because what’s taught in our school system as a result of liberal academia, is evolution is an incontrovertible fact. ... I obviously don’t feel that way. I think there are a lot of problems with the theory of evolution, and do believe that it is used to promote to a worldview that is anti-theist, that is atheist." —Santorum

The added language he's referring to here is the Santorum Amendment, which advocated "teaching the controversy" and promoted intelligent design in public schools. On environmentalism:

"Speaker Gingrich has supported cap and trade for more than a dozen years. ... Who is he or who's Governor Romney to be able to go after President Obama? I've never supported even the hoax of global warming." —Santorum

"We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth's benefit." —Santorum

The second quote shows that Santorum's opposition to environmentalism stems directly from his religious beliefs. Specifically, he seems to be referring to God's command in Genesis 1 to "fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." There can hardly be a better demonstration of the harm religion can cause in the realm of politics.

On Christianity
Wait, I spoke too soon. Santorum has also made some terrifying statements about Christianity itself.

"The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom." —Santorum

"This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America." —Santorum

"[America] is given rights under the god, under god, not any god, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, and that God that gave us rights also gave us a responsibility, and laws, by which our civil laws have to comport with. A higher law. God's law." —Santorum

A higher law. God's law.

If there was any sanity left in American politics, those words would be echoing in the heads of every single GOP primary voter. But apparently they aren't. Rick Santorum wants to establish a theocracy, and a frightening proportion of the nation either doesn't know or doesn't care. Some may even welcome it. And while Santorum will never be president of the United States, the public's attitude toward him illustrates just how far we still must progress as a country.

Conservapedia

To say that Conservapedia is a conservative knockoff of Wikipedia would be technically correct, but it's so much more than that. Its members will take any topic and give it an ultraconservative, rabidly pro-American, literalist evangelical Christian, anti-science, anti-reality slant. (At right is their old logo, complete with hilariously ironic typo.) RationalWiki's page "What is going on at CP?" does a great job of documenting their most noteworthy antics.

The fearless leader of Conservapedia is Andy Schlafly, a home-school teacher and lawyer who has absolute authority over his domain. Say anything to anger him or any of his cronies? Insta-ban. They even have a habit of completely erasing embarrassing edits, but thankfully RationalWiki takes image captures to combat this (e.g. this bizarre speculation that Obama's birth certificate might reveal him to be an atheist). It's all very Orwellian and seems somewhat contrary to their supposed belief in small, unintrusive government. Andy himself has also made some particularly crazy comments over the years. Among them:

• It's a good thing when bookstores close, because most books other than the Bible are liberal "claptrap."
• Having the female main character in a Disney film aspiring to run a restaurant is outrageously feminist and anti-conservative.
• Liberals ought to criticize... the Great Wall of China... for some reason.
• Earthquakes occurring on fault lines is a liberal dogma.
• Atheists can't explain why fish died en masse, so we should look to the Bible for answers. (Nevermind that we can explain it.)
• Aha! It was unusually cold in North Carolina for a week. Global climate change must be a big lie!
• "Real" humor (whatever that means) didn't exist until the birth of Christianity.
• He apparently really hates soccer. It's an unintelligent sport that requires little vocabulary and has strong ties to socialism.
• Gay marriage is partly to blame for high unemployment levels in Spain.

Of course, Conservapedia's insanity isn't limited to a few offhand comments from its founder. Here are some of the site's silliest projects and articles:

• They believe that modern translations of the Bible have a pro-liberal bias, so they launched the Conservative Bible Project. It consists of replacing any words and phrases from the King James Version that they don't like.
• They suspect that Obama is secretly a Muslim and was born in Kenya. And his main article is named "Barack Hussein Obama" for good measure.
• According to their Best New Conservative Words page, the number of "conservative" words is magically doubling every century. Most of the listed words have little or nothing to do with conservatism.
• They have long lists of supposed counterexamples to evolution and an old earth, ranging from the merely wrong to the laughably ridiculous.
• They're convinced that Einstein's theory of relativity is somehow related to moral relativism, so they've produced a page of "counterexamples to relativity." Jesus instantly healing a man from far away is one of the listed disproofs.
• In the infamous Lenski dialogue, Andy Schlafly demands to see the "raw data" from Richard Lenski's landmark E. coli evolution experiment and gets a well-deserved smackdown.
• All manner of strange and irrelevant articles about atheism. Why are atheists so fat (*cough*)? Does Richard Dawkins have machismo? Why doesn't he appeal to Asian women? Inquiring minds want to know!

I fully realize that not all Christian conservatives think and act this way—I was one for a few years, and am living with a few currently. Even so, Conservapedia is an endless source of unintentional humor and a great example of how irrationality can pervade every aspect of a person's thinking, from religion to science to politics.