PreachGPT

AI systems like ChatGPT have a lot of people worried, but I just bumped into a story about a group who wouldn't have occurred to me -- pastors.

Apparently, there's been a sudden spike of interest in (and concern over) the use of ChatGPT for sermon-writing.  As you might imagine, the uneasiness creative people feel about AI producing prose, poetry, art, and music is amplified a hundredfold when the issue starts to encroach on religion.

The article is well worth a thorough read, and I won't steal the writer's thunder except to mention a handful of quotes from pastors to give you the all-too-predictable flavor of their responses to AI-generated sermons:

• It lacks a soul -- I don't know how else to say it.  (Hershael York, Southern Baptist)

• ChatGPT might be really great at sounding intelligent, but the question is, can it be empathetic?  And that, not yet at least, it can’t. (Joshua Franklin, Orthodox Jewish)

• While the facts are correct, there’s something deeper missing.  AI cannot understand community and inclusivity and how important these things are in creating church.  (Rachael Keefe, United Church of Christ)

• When we listen to the Word preached, we are hearing not just a word about God but a word from God.  Such life-altering news needs to be delivered by a human, in person.  A chatbot can research.  A chatbot can write.  Perhaps a chatbot can even orate.  But a chatbot can’t preach. (Russell Moore, Southern Baptist)

To make my own stance clear right from the get-go, I'm what the philosophers call a de facto atheist -- I'm not a hundred percent sure there's no higher power (mostly because I'm not a hundred percent sure of anything), but the complete lack of hard evidence tilts me in the direction of disbelief.  As far as spiritual concerns, like the existence of a soul (or at least "something more" than our physical being), I'm an agnostic.  There is a great deal of weird shit out there that might be explainable by virtue of some sort of non-materialistic model -- but it might just as well have to do with a combination of our own flawed cognitive processes and incomplete understanding of science.  (If you have five minutes, watch this video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about why quantum wackiness doesn't support the existence of souls.  I'm not as convinced as she is, but wherever you're starting, belief-wise, it'll get you thinking.)

Apropos of AI, this lands me squarely in Alan Turing's camp.  How on earth am I supposed to judge if a particular AI system "really is intelligent" other than its output -- given that I don't have any access to the inner workings of another human's brain, and barely have access to my own?  The only way to judge intelligence is by what you see externally.  So is ChatGPT intelligent?  In my opinion, the question is honestly not so much difficult as it is meaningless.  It implies that intelligence is some kind of either-or, a threshold that you cross irrevocably, whereas it really seems to be more like a gradually-shifting gray area.  Coming up with a final answer regarding ChatGPT (or any other AI) is drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and then arguing over which side of that line something falls.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons mikemacmarketing, Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning - 30212411048, CC BY 2.0]

Interestingly, one person on the r/atheism subreddit asked ChatGPT if it wanted to buy his soul.  Here's how it responded:

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have the ability to buy or own anything, including souls.  Moreover, the concept of selling one's soul is often used in literature or mythology, but in reality, it's not a valid transaction that can be made.  Your soul is a metaphysical concept that is not subject to exchange or monetary value.  It's important to focus on living a meaningful and fulfilling life rather than trying to sell or trade something that's intangible and invaluable.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or shudder.

In any case, you can understand why the pastors are concerned, given that they don't share my agnosticism over souls and spirits and whatnot, and the prevailing attitude is that there is a qualitative difference between human intelligence and any potential artificial intelligence, no matter how clever it gets.  They're backed into a corner; presented with a sermon written by ChatGPT, they have no choice but to claim that it "lacks a soul" -- because, after all, they think the computer it came from lacks one, too.

Me, I wonder how accurate that view would turn out to be.  It'd be interesting to run a Turing-test-style experiment on some pastors -- give them a bunch of sermons, half of them written by qualified pastors and half written by ChatGPT, and see if they really could detect the lack of soul in the ones from AI.  I suspect that, like all too many other AI applications, we're getting to the point that it'd be a damned difficult determination.  And if they couldn't figure it out, what then?  I'm reminded of the quote from Spock in the James Blish novel Spock Must Die: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."

Given the rate at which this is all moving forward, we're embarking upon an interesting time.  Although I'm not religious, I empathize with the pastors' dismay; I have a strong sense that the fiction I write has some ineffable something that an AI could never emulate.  But how much of that certainty is simply fear?  I'm not sure my "oh, no, an AI won't ever be able to write a novel like I can" is any different from Reverend Moore's statement that "a chatbot can't preach."  We all get territorial about different things, perhaps, and fight like hell to keep those boundaries secure.  Maybe at heart, the fervor of the religious and the passion of the creatives are really manifestations of the same thing.

I wonder what ChatGPT would have to say about that.

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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Soul singer

A couple of days ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "I thought I'd seen it all."

Well, I can say from painful experience, never give the universe an opening like that.  Every single time I think I've found the weirdest, goofiest claim ever, people take it upon themselves to come up with something even loonier.

This is why today we're looking at how Lady Gaga's announcement that she has fibromyalgia was her way of admitting that she'd sold her soul to the Illuminati.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That, at least, is the contention of a group of people who evidently have been doing sit-ups under parked cars, as reported by Mariel Loveland, writing for Ranker.  These folks claim that the documentary describing the singer's chronic illness, Five Foot Two, was filled with hints about the real cause of the disease.  Loveland writes:

According to Anonymous, at one of these very same Lower East Side Clubs she sold her soul to the Illuminati for fame and fortune.  But Gaga, always one to push the envelope, reportedly went about "donating" rather than selling her soul to the organization.

Which is pretty darn generous.  I know I'd want something in return for my soul, and more than just membership in the Illuminati.  I mean, don't they have some kind of signup bonus?  Like back in the day, when you'd sign up for a checking account, the bank would give you a toaster or something.

So according to Loveland's informant, the Illuminati were waiting for her after a concert, to make her an offer she couldn't refuse.  Here's her alleged account of what happened:

…This man, a strangely ageless man in a suit, spoke to me.  He was leaning against the wall smoking, and he said to me, "I think you've got what it takes. Do you want it?"...  I asked what 'it' was I thought he was coming onto me, but he smiled and said, "Everything.  Success.  Fame.  Riches.  Power.  Do you want it all?"

Kind of tempting, that would be.  So she went for it, and sure enough, she became famous and rich and so on and so forth.  But like Faust and so many others have discovered, you can't just sell your soul to the devil and expect to get off with a slap on the wrist:

[T]his chronic pain is caused by conflicting forces battling for supremacy inside herself...  The singer allegedly wants to "rid her body of the dark spirituality" that she welcomed via "Satanic rituals early on in her career."  These dark forces allegedly cause her chronic pain...  They may give you special powers, outer beauty, talent, and wealth for a while, but it doesn’t last.

And of course, no claim of the Illuminati would be complete without a contribution from Alex Jones.  About a concert where she appeared to float upwards, followed by some flashing lights, Jones said:

They say she’s going to stand on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling everyone in a big swarm.  To just condition them to say "I am the Goddess of Satan" ruling over them with the rise of the robots in a ritual of lesser magic.

Which, I think we can all agree, is the only possible explanation for a pop singer doing something flamboyant.

Then we get to hear all about how Gaga's actual name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, contains an anagram of the name Lina Morgana, a different pop singer who Gaga supposedly murdered, and how Gaga keeps flashing the All-Seeing Eye symbol during her concerts, either as a sign of her soulless condition or as a desperate plea for help from her fans.  The upshot is that we should all either boycott her concerts, or else rescue her from the Forces of Evil, whichever version you decided to go for.

At that point, my eyes were crossing, so I didn't get any further in the article.

I think what bothers me about all of this is not that loony people have come up with conspiracy theories.  That, after all, is what loonies do.  But here we have this poor woman, who through no fault of her own has contracted a debilitating disease, and she makes a documentary going public with her struggles, and she's repaid by raving wackazoids like Alex Jones claiming that she got her just deserts for taking up with the Bad Guys.

The object lesson here is that fame comes at a price, and I don't mean "your soul."  It means your privacy, and in a lot of ways, your chance at being treated compassionately and empathetically.  All the more reason why I'd never want to be famous, not that it's all that likely in any case.

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Stephen Hawking said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Stephen Hawking was wrong in the realm of abstruse quantum phenomena, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.  Expertise is worth something, and Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. in physics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.  And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:

Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness. While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:

(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people.  It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.   

In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways. 

Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.

Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that's all it does.  Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:

(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.

But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right.  q.e.d. and ha ha ha."

Proof, souls, skepticism, and being wrong

I think one of the problems with scientists and non-scientists not understanding each other revolves around the meaning of the word "proof."

I ran into two interesting instances of this in the last couple of days.  One of them was a response to my post last week about the conspiracy theorist conference that's being held next Saturday in my home town, in which I wrote (amongst other comments) a rather snarky paragraph about people who believe in chemtrails, anti-vaxx propaganda, and so on.

Well, that sort of thing always upsets some readers.  "I hate these damn skeptics," wrote one commenter, "who think they have everything proven!  The world always has to be how they see it!"

First off, in my own defense, I've never claimed that I was infallible; only that the evidence very much supports the contention that (1) chemtrails don't exist, and (2) vaccinations are safe and effective. And just because I'm pretty certain to be right about these two things doesn't mean that I think I'm right about everything.

But the more interesting thing is the use of the word "proof."  Because in science, disproof is usually far easier than proof.  If you have a model of how you think the world works, you design a test of that model, and see if the results are consistent with what the model predicts.  If they are not -- assuming that nothing was wrong with the research protocol -- then your model is disproven (although scientists generally prefer the word "unsupported").

Of course, the problem is that in this context, you never really "prove" your model; you simply add to the support for it.  Nothing is ever proven, because additional experiments could show that your model hadn't predicted correctly in all cases, and needs revision.

But still the sense persists out there amongst your average layperson that scientists "prove their theories," and that all you need is some hand-waving argument and a few fancy-looking diagrams to accomplish this.

As an example of the latter, consider the site that is making the rounds of social media with the headline "Scientists prove the existence of the soul!"  Of course, when I clicked on the link, I was already primed to view the whole thing with a jaundiced eye, because it's not like I don't have my own biases on this particular topic.  But I'm happy that in this case, I wasn't off base in my skepticism, because this link turned out to be a wild woo-woo claim par excellence.

The whole thing is based upon the "research" of a Russian scientist who claims to have photographed the soul leaving the body as someone dies.  Here's a pair of his photographs:

And here is the accompanying explanation:

The timing of astral disembodiment in which the spirit leaves the body has been captured by Russian scientist Konstantin Korotkov, who photographed a person at the moment of his death with a bioelectrographic camera.

The image taken using the gas discharge visualization method, an advanced technique of Kirlian photography shows in blue the life force of the person leaving the body gradually.

According to Korotkov, navel and head are the parties who first lose their life force (which would be the soul) and the groin and the heart are the last areas where the spirit before surfing the phantasmagoria of the infinite.

In other cases according to Korotkov has noted that "the soul" of people who suffer a violent and unexpected death usually manifests a state of confusion in your power settings and return to the body in the days following death.  This could be due to a surplus of unused energy.

Well, first, those doesn't look to me like Kirlian photographs.  Kirlian photography is a way of capturing an image of the static electrical discharge from an object, and shows distinctive bright "flame" marks around the object being photographed.  Here, for example, is a Kirlian photograph of a leaf:

What Korotkov's photograph looks like to me is a false-color photograph taken with an infrared camera, which colorizes the regions of a human body (or anything) based upon its temperature.  So naturally the heart (positioned, as it is, in mid-torso) and the groin would tend to be warmer.  I don't think it has anything to do with your soul sticking around because it's especially attached to your heart and your naughty bits.

I also have to wonder how Korotkov was able to study people who experienced "violent and unexpected deaths."  It's not as if you can plan to have a scientist around for those, especially the unexpected ones.

But in the parlance of the infomercial -- "Wait!  There's more!"

The technique developed by Korotkov, who is director of the Research Institute of Physical Culture, St. Petersburg, is endorsed as a medical technology by the Ministry of Health of Russia and is used by more than 300 doctors in the world for stress and monitoring progress of patients treated for diseases such as cancer.  Korotkov says his energy imaging technique could be used to watch all kinds of imbalances biophysical and diagnose in real time and also to show if a person does have psychic powers or is a fraud.
This technique, which measures real-time and stimulated radiation is amplified by the electromagnetic field is a more advanced version of the technology developed for measuring Semyon Kirlian aura.

Korotkov observations confirm, as proposed by Kirlian, that "stimulated electro-photonic light around the tips of the fingers of the human being contains coherent and comprehensive statement of a person, both physically and psychologically."

In this video interview Korotkov speaks of the effect in the bioenergy field with food, water and even cosmetics. And emphasizes one umbrella drink water and organic food, particularly noting that the aura of the people in the Undies [sic] suffers the negative effects of nutrients as technologization distributed in this society.

Korotkov also speaks of their measurements in supposedly loaded with power and influence that people have in the bioenergy fields of others. Checking Rupert Sheldrake's experiment of the feeling of being watched : Because a person's bioenergy field changes when someone else directs his attention, even though it is backwards and not consciously perceived. Also a place fields are altered when there is a concentration of tourists.

Well then.  We have "electro-photonic light" (is there another kind?), "bioenergy fields" (sorry, Sheldrake, but there's no evidence they exist), a reference to "real" versus "fraud" psychic powers, and a contention that tourists affect a person's soul.  Not to mention the thing about "undies," which I sincerely hope was a typo or mistranslation, because I would hate to think that my boxers are somehow creating negative effects in my spiritual nutrients.

And this is what people read, and say that it "proves the existence of a soul?"

Of course, what we have going on here is confirmation bias -- when you already believed something, so a tiny piece of sketchy evidence is all you need to shore up that belief.  I think I can state without fear of contradiction that no one who didn't already believe that souls exist would be convinced by this article.

So that's the problem, isn't it?  And not just in this admittedly ridiculous claim that equates dead bodies cooling off with their souls escaping.  Think of people who listen, uncritically, to "news" about their favorite controversial story -- evolution vs. creationism, the safety of vaccinations, the role of human activities in climate change, whether the public school system is headed for disaster.  If you uncritically accept what you're hearing as proof, just because it supports the contentions you already had, you'll never find out where you've got things wrong.  And that, to me, is the heart of science -- and the only way to lift yourself above your biases.

If you have fifteen minutes, and want to listen to someone who demonstrates this point brilliantly, take a look at the TED talk by Kathryn Schulz called "On Being Wrong."

I can honestly say that watching this short video was to me an eye-opener to the point of being life-changing.  She asks us to shift our viewpoint from trying to "prove" what we already believed to be true, to thinking seriously about the possibility of our being wrong -- and frames it in a way I had honestly never considered.  I think that the first time I watched it, I spent the last half of it listening with my mouth hanging open in sheer astonishment.

You have wonder how much pain and suffering could be averted in the world if more people would entertain the possibility of their being wrong.  Right now, there are hostages being held in a mall in Kenya (and 68 known dead in the incident) because of men who are so convinced that their worldview is right that they are willing to slaughter innocent people in its name.

Maybe we have been, as a species, looking at things the wrong way round.  Maybe we shouldn't constantly be looking for proof for what we already believed.  Science (at its best) approaches the world tentatively, testing, probing, and wondering -- and constantly asking the question, "what if this model is wrong?"  I know we can't all be scientists, and that not all problems are scientific in nature, but the general approach -- always keeping in mind our own fallibility -- has a lot to recommend it.

Gulag Earth

As I've mentioned before, teaching a class in Critical Thinking means that I have a perpetual source of weird stories to write about.  Properly trained and motivated, high school students are outstanding at ferreting out bizarre news, crazy websites, and insane YouTube videos -- and (which should be cheering) are quite good at recognizing nonsensical beliefs for what they are.

It was an alert student who found a site two days ago entitled, "Is the Earth a Prison For Your Soul?"  Just from the title, I guessed that it was going to be a Christian website, and the "prison" idea would be a metaphor for our being stuck here because of Adam and Eve believing the talking snake and eating the Evil Apple of Doom and all, and how we can be paroled if we just accept Jesus as our personal savior.  I've seen lots of those sorts of websites before, and if that's all it had been, I wouldn't have thought it merited a post.

It turns out I was wrong.  The originator of this post thinks that the Earth is a prison.  Literally.

Are we condemned to a sentence of solitary confinement within our own cell like body's [sic]?

Condemned, not only to be trapped here on earth, but to never know our true nature,or even our alleged crime. To know nothing from start to finish...

We are all as surprised to be alive as the next person, not knowing death, it is as if we have all found ourselves here and no-one really has any experience of anything other than being alive here on earth. No real knowledge of a 'before' or an 'after'.

It is like a global case of amnesia. If we only know life what do we really know of death?...

It is interesting to think that the Van Allen belt provides an excellent barbed wire enclosure to us on earth, a planetary force field keeping us in... Our moon is a handy guard house.

Perhaps 'aliens' exist as a kind of 'drone maintenance crew' keeping our prison functioning and making sure we can't escape. Perhaps that explains their 'lack of empathy' perceived by many alleged insiders like 'Mad man across the water' and others.

Oooookay.

My first reaction is that if you spent your entire life in Newark, you might be justified in concluding that we live in a penal colony; but if not, you have to admit that there are lots of nice places down here.  Cozumel, for example, has way too high a proportion of bikini-clad women and fruity drinks with umbrellas to qualify for "gulag" status.  And if the Van Allen belt is a "barbed wire fence," it's a pretty flimsy one, given that satellites pass across it on a daily basis, and every space mission that's gone more than 60,000 kilometers from the Earth's surface has successfully gone right through it.  And that includes the ones that landed on the "guard house" moon, and found that there were no security guards, or even night custodians, up there.

So, okay, he got a few details wrong, but let's give him a chance.  Maybe he can tell us why we got sent to prison in the first place.  After all, there has to be a reason that our souls have been exiled here, right?  Well, it turns out that it's because we're kind of... dumb:

If aliens exist then is their 'not contacting' us a kind of cruelty ? After all these alleged sightings and contacts, the fact that we have been treated with such contemptible disdain perhaps points to our guilt in their eyes ?... They don't save us from our hellish ignorance because that is what they think we truly deserve ? Perhaps our lesson is 'cooperation'...

Is communicating with 'off world entities' really communicating with the 'before and after' ? If we truly got to talk with an off world entity wouldn't we then know who we were and what we are doing here... Perhaps we will never communicate off world until we have worked out these things for ourselves ? Perhaps no communication to and from our prison is allowed.

So... the reason that the aliens won't get a hold of us is because they're giving us the silent treatment?  That explains so much!  All the absence of evidence in the woo-woo world is deliberate!  The ghosts are refusing to show up whenever skeptics are around in order to make laughingstocks of true believers; Bigfoot runs away shouting "neener-neener-neener" every time someone brings out a camera that is not set on "blur;" the Loch Ness Monster dons a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak every time the underwater sonar is turned on.  It's all a deliberate campaign to frustrate the absolute hell out of humans, to teach them a lesson!

The writer ends with the following chilling thought:

 Perhaps if we really knew who we are and where we are we'd be more cooperative with each other less inclined to follow the bankers usury system of citizen slavery. Perhaps we are all still just mining gold for the Annunaki.

Ah, those damn Annunaki.  I shoulda known they'd be behind all this.

So, anyhow, there you are.  You are actually an alien convict, in a world where everything is set up to be as frustrating as possible in order to teach you a lesson.  I guess this does explain a few earthly phenomena, such as the IRS, tailgaters, slow internet connections, the DMV, spam email, Justin Bieber, annoying commercial jingles, and people who read over your shoulder.  There are some holes in the theory, which include pleasant things like chocolate, red wine,  mid-afternoon naps, and sex, and why if this is a prison colony no one ever gets time off for good behavior.  But I guess that not even the best model ever explains everything.