Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainI got an e-mail from a Neural Gourmet reader whose wife is a middle school librarian. It seems a teacher at her school has been sending kids to her library to investigate the paranormal (one assumes to evaluate paranormal claims critically). Our librarian thought it a fun way of helping kids to learn critical thinking about woo would be to direct them to parody and/or hoax sites. Yes, yes, I know -- they're all hoaxes but which ones are deliberate hoaxes?
I thought it'd be even more fun if Neural Gourmet members and readers got in on the act. So, what parody or hoax sites featuring paranormal claims can our Neural Gourmet readers recommend?
Our reader mentioned the http://www.dhmo.org site in his e-mail (Dihydrogen monoxide can kill you!). I always like to show people to Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Time Cube. Though it's over-the-top, and I'm not even sure if the author is publishing parody or if he's really this nuts, I think it certainly highlights a certain, umm, breathless quality that underlies almost all paranormal sites.
Sock it to me gang. Let's compile the biggest list of parody and hoax paranormal sites this side of Atlantis.
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
is, I think, the best parody site there is, of any kind - http://objectiveministries.org/ . It gets the tone so right - earnestness, 'outreach' to 'Kidz' and 'Christian Rock', a campaign against Landover Baptist, things that backfire when you examine them properly (like the children's quiz on who was married to who in the Bible, which would be bound to end up with the question "but why was Jacob allowed 4 wives at once, mummy?"
, and the campaign against triclavianism. Until today, I wasn't entirely sure if they made up that word, and had just planted a few references to it around the Web, or if it really was talked about in an 1838 book, as the Wikipedia entry for it claims. But the theological argument seems real - there's a reference to "3 or 4 nails" as a point of theology in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Either way, it's real genius to be able to work it into the parody. In fact, I've just looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary online (at last, my local library has proper links to online references you otherwise have to subscribe to), and the 1838 quotation is absolutely true.
But sometimes I find something that I'm convinced is a parody, and it turns out to be sincere - such as the Rapture Ready website. 'No way', I thought, 'would someone seriously produce a scorecard for the End of Times'. Sigh. I'm still convinced a lot of people on their forum are still trolls, because they are so dumb, or joyfully bloodthirsty, that they couldn't survive in real life without being locked up. But they have just the same theological arguments that Objective: Ministries (don't you love that colon?) parody - I think they had to move "pre-trib vs. post-trib" arguments to their own special dungeon.
I saw that a couple of years ago and really struggled with whether or not it was real or parody. Their kids section really blew me away.
(as proved in The Bible - where else?) http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw/square_earth.html . You have to give them credit for considering an isosceles concave quadrilateral shape for the earth, before carefully discarding it due to another bible verse. Their final proof:
We know that God is perfect. God would, therefore, have created the Earth in the most perfect shape possible. As I've already proven, we know from Rev 7:1, Isaiah 11:12, and Job that the Earth must be a rhombus of some sort. It makes good Biblical sense that God would have created Earth to be the most perfect kind of rhombus possible. The most perfect kind of rhombus is the square. Its rectilinear corners perfectly match the rectitude of God. Therefore, the Earth must be square.
And if that's not enough to convince you, consider this: Of all the nations on Earth today, God most loves the United States of America. (This is evident from songs like "God Bless America," and from the fact that Pat Robertson, God's chosen spokesman, lives in the U.S..) America's national pastime is the game of baseball. Baseball is played on a "diamond", which is perfectly square in shape — and which, I might add, has its corners oriented to point toward the four compass points. God would not have made baseball into the national pastime of His favorite nation if He didn't have a higher purpose in mind for it. Clearly, His higher purpose is to show us the True shape of the Earth. The Earth must be perfecly square, just like the diamond-shaped field in God's Chosen Sport is square.
(More evidence for the God/Baseball/Square-Earth connection can be found in the shape of the base bags, which are also perfectly square and oriented with their corners facing the same compass points that the diamond as a whole does, and in the fact that baseball's most sacred ritual is called the World Series. And lest you doubt that Baseball is a divinely inspired game, I remind you that Charley McDowell has noted that the 90-foot distance between home plate and first base, which is just the right distance to make the game exciting, "was a pick from heaven."
