Apocalypse ongoing

A while back, I wrote about the strange and disheartening research by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, the upshot of which is that frequently when there is powerful evidence against a deeply-held belief, the result is that the belief gets stronger.

It's called the backfire effect.  The Festinger et al. study looked at a cult that centered around a belief that the world was going to end on a very specific date.  When the Big Day arrived, the cult members assembled at the leader's house to await the end.  Many were in severe emotional distress.  At 11:30 P.M., the leader -- perhaps sensing things weren't going the way he thought they would -- secluded himself to pray.  And at five minutes till midnight, he came out of his room with the amazing news that because of their faith and piety, God told him he'd decided to spare the world after all.

The astonishing part is that the followers didn't do what I would have done, which is to tell the leader, "You are either a liar or a complete loon, and I am done with you."  They became even more devoted to him.  Because, after all, without him instructing them to keep the vigil, God would have destroyed the world, right?

Of course right.

The peculiar fact-resistance a lot of people have can reach amazing lengths, as I found out when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago having to do with the fact that people are still blathering on about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse.  Remember that?  Supposedly the Mayan Long Count Calendar indicated that one of their long time-cycles (b'ak'tuns) was going to end on December 21, 2012, and because of that there was going to be absolute chaos.  Some people thought it would be the literal end of the world; the more hopeful types thought it would be some kind of renewal or Celestial Ascension that would mark the beginning of a new spiritual regime filled with peace, love, and harmony.

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- the fact that if you talked to actual Mayan scholars, they told you that the interpretation of the Long Count Calendar was dependent not only on translations of uncertain accuracy, but an alignment of that calendar with our own that could have been off in either direction by as much as fifty years.  Plus, there was no truth to the claim that the passage into the next b'ak'tun was anything more than a benchmark, same as going from December 31 to January 1.

Mostly what I remember about the Mayan Apocalypse is that evening, my wife and I threw an End-of-the-World-themed costume party.

Although the party was a smashing success, what ended up happening apocalypse-wise was... nothing.  December 22, 2012 dawned, and everyone just kept loping along as usual.  There were no asteroid impacts, nuclear wars, or alien invasions, and the giant tsunami that crested over the Himalayas in the catastrophically bad movie 2012 never showed up.

Which is a shame, because I have to admit that was pretty cool-looking.

So -- huge wind-up, with thousands of people weighing in, and then bupkis.  What's an apocalyptoid to do, in the face of that?

Well, according to the article my friend sent -- their response has been sort of along the lines of Senator George Aiken's solution to the Vietnam War: "Declare victory and go home."  Apparently there is a slice of true believers who think that the answer to the apocalypse not happening back in 2012 is that...

... the apocalypse did too happen.

I find this kind of puzzling.  I mean, if the world ended, you'd think someone would have noticed.  But that, they say, is part of how we know it actually happened.  Otherwise, why would we all be so oblivious?

The parallels to Festinger et al. are a little alarming.

The mechanisms of how all this worked are, unsurprisingly, a little sketchy.  Some think we dropped past the event horizon of a black hole and are now in a separate universe from the one we inhabited pre-2012.  Others think that we got folded into a Matrix-style simulation, and this is an explanation for the Mandela effect.  A common theme is that it has something to do with the discovery by CERN of the Higgs boson, which also happened in 2012 and therefore can't be a coincidence.

Some say it's significant that ever since then, time seems to be moving faster, so we're hurtling ever more quickly toward... something.  They're a little fuzzy on this part.  My question, though, is if time did speed up, how could we tell?  The only way you'd notice is if time in one place sped up by comparison to time in a different place, which is not what they're claiming.  They say that time everywhere is getting faster, to which I ask: getting faster relative to what, exactly?

In any case, the whole thing makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So that's our dive in the deep end for the day.  No need to worry about the world ending, because it already did.  The good news is that we seem to be doing okay despite that, if you discount the possibility that we could be inside a black hole.

Me, I'm not going to fret about it.  I've had enough on my mind lately.  Besides, if the apocalypse happened eleven years ago, there's nothing more to be apprehensive about, right?

Of course right.

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Woolly dogs

When I lived in Olympia, Washington, I knew a woman who was a professional spinner and weaver.  She made beautiful wearable items as well as decorative wall hangings, throw rugs, and blankets.

What's unusual about her is that among the many kinds of fiber she used was dog hair.  She owned three enormous (and extremely friendly and exuberant) Great Pyrenees, a breed with huge quantities of silky white hair, and she'd periodically brush their coats, wash the fur that came out, and spin it into thread.  She showed me a knit hat she'd made entirely from dog fur -- it was softer than angora.

Turns out, that region of the world has a long history of doing this.  A paper last week in Science looked at a legend amongst the Coast Salish, especially the Sto:lo, Skokomish, and Snuneymuxw tribes, of "woolly dogs" whose soft fur was spun, dyed, and woven into ceremonial rugs and cloaks that were a symbol of authority.  (My weaver friend in Washington didn't belong to this tradition -- she was from Luton, England -- although she may have gotten inspiration for it from Indigenous sources.  Or, maybe, she just owned three gigantic hairy dogs and came up with a way to use the copious fur they produced.  I'm not sure.)

In any case, the people of European descent who settled in the Northwest thought this was just a legend -- that any dogs belonging to the Coast Salish were very recent imports, possibly the descendants of dogs brought in by whalers and explorers from Japan or Russia.  In any case, the woolly dogs of the Salish had completely vanished by 1900, so it seemed like there was no way to be sure.  But there was one hard piece of evidence to study -- the pelt of a dog named Mutton who had been acquired as a puppy by an ethnographer in 1859.

Artist's rendition of what Mutton looked like [Image courtesy of Science and artist Karen Carr]

DNA analysis of Mutton's pelt showed something fascinating -- he wasn't closely related to Japanese breeds like the Akita or Shiba Inu, nor to northern European breeds like the Spitz and Samoyed.  Mutton's DNA showed his lineage had diverged from all other known dog breeds at least four thousand years ago, so very likely he and the others of his breed had been brought over from Siberia by the ancestors of the Coast Salish many millennia ago.

"It’s nice to hear Western science say this is how long you’ve had a relationship with woolly dogs," said study co-author Michael Pavel, a knowledge keeper of the Skokomish Nation.  "Often we are the subjects of research, but in this case, we were able to weave our considerable knowledge together with a Western scientific perspective."

Which is a polite way of saying, "we freakin' told you so."  Non-Indigenous American and European anthropologists have a long and sorry history of paying little attention to the cultural memories of Indigenous people, of dismissing their oral history as little more than a curiosity.  Time after time there's been vindication of the accuracy of these histories -- a recent example we looked at here at Skeptophilia is the tale, also from coastal tribes of the Northwest, that there'd been a monstrous earthquake and tsunami one midwinter night around three hundred years ago, which turned out to be right on the money.

Maybe the anthropologists are finally starting to take the traditions of Indigenous people more seriously.  One can only hope.

The ultimate story, though, is a sad one.  Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere generally did their damndest to eradicate any traces of Native beliefs and practices, especially ones that were involved in prestige and authority.  In the Northwest, that included forbidding the keeping of woolly dogs and the weaving of their fur into ceremonial garments.  Ultimately, the entire breed went extinct, and other than some woven pieces that have survived, knowledge of the practice itself died as well other than a cultural memory that it had once been done.

The men and women who contributed to the article in Science, though, by and large put a happier spin on it.  "All we knew was that the dogs were all gone, and [we had] just that -- stories," said Sto:lo Grand Chief Steven Point.  "Nobody knew what happened.  The woolly dog became a casualty of colonialism.  But the woolly dog is part of who we are, and it feels like a link to our past is being filled in.  It’s a good news story."

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He sees you when you're sleeping

Ever heard of a tulpa?

I wrote about this (alleged) phenomenon a while back, so long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that it is when a bunch of people believe in a fictional character with sufficient fervor that said character becomes real.

Well, in some sense.  Even most true believers don't think they end up as flesh-and-blood, more that they can appear in spirit form (whatever that means when applied to a character that is fictional in the first place).  It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me, although as a fiction writer, I can say with some certainty that I would very much rather the characters in my books not come to life.  There are a few I'd like to have a beer with, sure.  But most of them?  Nope.

Lydia Moreton from In the Midst of Lions, for example, can stay safely in the realm of the unreal, thank you very much.

Be that as it may, apparently there are now people who think that there's a tulpa who is around mostly at this time of year.  So I'm sure you can predict that who I'm talking about is...

... Santa Claus.

No, I'm not making this up.  In an article over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells us about a number of alleged sightings of Jolly Old Saint Nick.  And not to beat the point unto death, but these people do not believe that they're seeing someone dressed up as Santa Claus; they think they've actually had a close encounter with the real guy.

The word real, of course, being used advisedly.  Here's one such account, just so you can get the flavor of it.  A woman named Ana says she saw Santa when she was five years old, and the encounter was not exactly heartwarming:

He must have felt my presence because he turned around and looked at me.  He didn’t look jolly or kind and happy like you would expect Santa Claus to look.  He looked kind of eerie like he was staring into my soul.  Automatically, I ran into my parents’ room and hid under the covers.  I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but I wrote it off as a dream for a while before I forgot about it completely.  Years later, I remembered it.  I thought it could have been a burglar, but when I asked my parents, nothing was ever missing from that apartment.  The only time we were ever robbed was when we moved later on.  The only explanation I have now is that it was some kind of apparition.

Of course, that's not the only explanation, but you knew I'd say that.

His eyes, how they twinkled!  His dimples, how merry!  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jackie, Evil clown Santa Claus, CC BY 2.0]

Loyd Auerbach, a "professor of parapsychology" over at Atlantic University, used similar verbiage to describe the accounts:

I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa.  The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.  The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.  We can’t investigate that.  There’s nothing we can do with that.

Um.  We could investigate it if it was the Grim Reaper, but not if it's Santa?  Or if it's not actually Santa, our only options are that it's an alien or a ghost impersonating Santa?

I think these people need to review the concept of "only possibility."

So anyhow, I think the main issue here is that if it were true, it doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture of Santa Claus.  In fact, it gives sinister overtones to lines like "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," not to mention, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."  It also gives me pause when I hear the stanza from "Up on the Housetop" that goes:

Next comes the stocking of Little Will
Oh, just see what a glorious fill
Here is a hammer and lots of tacks
Also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Is it just me, or does it sound like Little Will made his Christmas list to fill out the equipment in his My Very Own Li'l Tots BDSM Dungeon?

Myself, I find the whole thing vaguely terrifying.  It's a good thing I think it's all a myth.  On the other hand, even if I'm wrong and Sinister Santa is real, he's still better than Krampus or the Giant Icelandic Christmas Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who comes out on Christmas Eve and eats bad children.

Which, for the record, I also didn't make up.

So I'd like to wish a lovely Christmas season to all who celebrate, and best of luck avoiding evil Santas or humongous child-eating cats.  Also the Grim Reaper, for what it's worth.

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The hidden fault

Between December 16, 1811 and February 7, 1812, a series of four earthquakes -- each estimated to be above magnitude 7 -- hit what you might think is one of the most unlikely places on Earth; southeastern Missouri.

The fault (named the New Madrid Seismic Zone for the county right in the center of it) is located in the middle of the North American craton, an enormous block of what should be old, stable, geologically inactive rock.  But even so, the biggest (and final) earthquake of the four was powerful enough that it was felt thousands of kilometers away, and allegedly rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina.  The shift in terrain changed the course of the Mississippi River, cutting off a meander and creating horseshoe-shaped Reelfoot Lake.

It's well known that most of the world's earthquakes take place along the "Ring of Fire" and other junctions between tectonic plates, but it's not always so.  The New Madrid Fault is thought to be either a failed rift zone -- when a convection current in the mantle tried, but failed, to split the continent, but created a weakness in the middle of the plate -- or else the rebound of the crust from the passage of the Bermuda Hotspot, which is also one possible explanation for the process that created the Ozark Mountains.

The point is, earthquakes don't always occur where you might expect, and sometimes fault lines can stay hidden until suddenly they slip and catch everyone off-guard.  This is the situation much closer to where I live; the Saint Lawrence Rift System, aligned (as you'd expect) with the Saint Lawrence River, is an active seismic zone in northern New York and southern Canada, and like New Madrid, is very far away from any plate margins.  Here, the weakness is very old -- geologists believe the fault actually dates to the early Paleozoic, and may be related to the Charlevoix Asteroid Impact 450 million years ago -- and has been reactivated by something that is causing super slow convergence on opposite sides of the fault (on the order of 0.5 millimeters a year).

What that something might be, no one is certain.

The reason the topic comes up is a paper in the journal Tectonics this week that I found out about because of my friend, the wonderful author Andrew Butters, who is an avid science buff and a frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia.  It describes a newly-discovered 72-kilometer-long fault that runs right down the middle of Vancouver Island -- passing just northeast of the city of Victoria.

To be fair, British Columbia isn't exactly seismically inactive; as I described last month, it's in the bullseye (along with the rest of the coastal Pacific Northwest) of the horrifyingly huge Cascadia Subduction Zone.  But even so, the discovery of a hitherto-unknown fault right near a major city is a little alarming, especially since the southeast corner of Vancouver Island is actually pretty far away from Cascadia.  The authors write:

Subduction forearcs are subject to seismic hazard from upper plate faults that are often invisible to instrumental monitoring networks.  Identifying active faults in forearcs therefore requires integration of geomorphic, geologic, and paleoseismic data.  We demonstrate the utility of a combined approach in a densely populated region of Vancouver Island, Canada, by combining remote sensing, historical imagery, field investigations, and shallow geophysical surveys to identify a previously unrecognized active fault, the XEOLXELEK-Elk Lake fault, in the northern Cascadia forearc, ∼10 km north of the city of Victoria...  Fault scaling relations suggest a M 6.1–7.6 earthquake with a 13 to 73-km-long surface rupture and 2.3–3.2 m of dip slip may be responsible for the deformation observed in the paleoseismic trench.  An earthquake near this magnitude in Greater Victoria could result in major damage, and our results highlight the importance of augmenting instrumental monitoring networks with remote sensing and field studies to identify and characterize active faults in similarly challenging environments.

So that's a little alarming.  Another thing to file under "You Think You're Safe, But..."  I've frequently given thanks for the fact that I live in a relatively calm part of the world.  Upstate New York gets snowstorms sometimes, but nothing like the howling blizzards of the upper Midwest; and we're very far away from the target areas for hurricanes, mudslides, wildfires, and volcanoes.

But the scary truth is that nowhere is natural-disaster-proof.  As New Madrid, the Saint Lawrence Rift System, and -- now -- Victoria, British Columbia show, we live on an active, turbulent planet that is constantly in motion.  And sometimes that motion makes it a little dangerous for us fragile humans.

The Earth is awe-inspiring and beautiful, but also has little regard for our day-to-day affairs.  You can do what is possible to minimize your risk; forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying goes.  But the reality is that the natural world is full of surprises -- and some of those surprises can be downright dangerous.

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A traveler's tale

Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek polymath who was born in what is now Marseilles, France in around 350 B.C.E., making him a generation younger than Aristotle, and an almost exact contemporary of Alexander the Great.  When I tell you about what this guy did, you will (I hope) be shocked that his name isn't as familiar to students of history as the other two gentlemen I mentioned.

The reason for his relative obscurity is one that is all too common; he is known to have written a single book, Τὰ Περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ (On the Ocean), possibly supplemented by a second work, Περίοδος Γῆς (Around the Earth), although some scholars believe those were two alternate titles for the same account.  In any case, nothing of his writing survives except for excerpts and references to him and his accomplishments in other writing, most notably in the books of such luminaries as Strabo and Pliny the Elder.  Sadly, like so much of the brilliant work of antiquity, all the copies of Pytheas's book (or books) have fallen prey to the ravages of time.

What Pytheas of Massalia recorded in his writings would have been an incredible feat for anyone, and nearly beggars belief for someone in the fourth century B.C.E.  He'd heard that there were these islands off the northwest coast of Gaul, inhabited by some curious folks called the Celts, and he decided to go see for himself.

How he started his travels is uncertain.  At this point in history, the Carthaginians had control of the Straits of Gibraltar, and the hostilities between them and damn near everyone else in the region would have made passage a dicey affair.  There's a possibility that he crossed Gaul overland and launched from the mouth of either the Garonne or Loire River into the Bay of Biscay.  In any case, once he got into the Atlantic, it was off to the races.

He sailed up the west coast of England, stopping to do considerable travel on foot, up through the Irish Sea, past the Isle of Man and the Hebrides.  He is the first to note that the natives called the main island Prydain -- Romanized to Britannia -- which is where we get the modern name Britain.

Then, amazingly, Pytheas kept going.

Marble sculpture of Pytheas by Auguste Ottin (1860)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rvalette, Pythéas, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There are credible claims that he made it as far as either Iceland or the Lofoten Islands -- which it was is uncertain.  He reports being in a place "six days north of Britain," an island of "perpetual frost and snow" where, nevertheless, "the Sun never sets" -- the first known Greek to realize what happens to day length when you're above the Arctic Circle.  Not content even yet, he began to head east, making his way into the Baltic Sea.  There, he met a people he called the Gutones (almost certainly the Goths), who made their living trading amber, which is abundant in what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.  From there he went inland, possibly traveling along the region's many navigable rivers.  It's thought that he made it all the way to what was then called Scythia, along the north shore of the Black Sea.

One of the most remarkable things about Pytheas and the others who traveled with him is how well received they were.  Despite the reputation for hostility that the ancient Celts, Norse, Teutons, Baltics, and Scythians all had, there's no indication Pytheas ever had any trouble -- just showing that for the most part, if you treat people with kindness and respect, they reciprocate.  Even the "barbarians."

Pytheas also had a couple of striking scientific achievements -- using the changing elevation above the horizon of familiar stars as he went north, he tried to estimate the circumference of the Earth using a sextant.  His measurements were off -- Eratosthenes of Cyrene did way better a hundred years later -- but still, it was a creditable attempt.  Second, he is the first person known to have associated the tides with the position and phases of the Moon, a remarkable idea during a time when the celestial objects were supposed to be gods of various sorts, and there was no inkling of a law of gravitation.

Finally, Pytheas made his way back home to write his book(s), and lived the rest of his life in comfort in his villa in Massalia.  But can you imagine what he must have seen and experienced?  Meeting the people of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltic lands, and Scythia before they'd had much chance to contact people from other cultures.  Seeing the enormous expanse of the oceans and the pack ice of the Arctic from the deck of a simple sailing ship.  What an adventure -- and what extraordinary curiosity, drive, and courage.

It's such a tragedy that Pytheas's original manuscript(s) have been lost; imagine what more we could learn from his voyages by reading a first-hand account.  Regardless, he was an extraordinary person, someone determined to see as much of the world as he could, and who amazingly (considering the times) lived to tell his traveler's tale to the astonishment of his friends back home.

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Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000, or about 0.632.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen. In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or a seemingly unusual pattern.  Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other ordered pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first one looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't. 

The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

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The outrage machine

As of this morning, I have now seen the following post five times:

It seems like it should be obvious this can't be true, because if there was a rule banning the posting the Lord's Prayer on Facebook, this post and the hundreds of others like it would have been deleted, which they weren't.  Apparently, that line of reasoning doesn't seem to occur to people, because instead, the whole thing elicited a chorus of "Amens" and lots of middle fingers raised by the members of the Religious Outrage Machine toward everyone they think is oppressing them, which is pretty much... everyone.

It's so widespread it made it to Snopes, which (of course) found there's no truth to it at all.  There is no prohibition against posting religious material on Facebook, as long as it doesn't involve hate speech.

So let's get something straight, okay?  You Christians in the United States are not a persecuted minority.  Estimates from polls in 2021 show that about 63% of Americans identify as Christian.  There is no basis whatever for the claims made in sites like TruthOnlyBible, which stated that there's a push toward conservative Christians being "[excluded] from basic services, such as air travel, hotel, cell phone, banking, internet shopping, and even insurance."

Seriously, considering how loud the conservative Christians are about airing their grievances at every possible opportunity, how long do you think an airline would last if they said "I'm sorry, you can't purchase a flight to Cancun with us because you're a Christian"?

The most bizarre thing about this claim is that in a lot of the United States, the opposite trend is true.  Despite the "no religious test" clause in the Constitution, in many parts of America it'd be flat-out impossible to get elected if you're not a Christian (and in some of those places, you have to be a particular sort of Christian).

Hell, the second in line for the presidency is an ultra-conservative, anti-LGBTQ, fundamentalist young-earth creationist.

Remind me again how embattled y'all are?

The fact is, no one is trying to stop people from praying, posting Christian stuff online, wishing people Merry Christmas, or going to church.  No one.  You're just as free to be religious as you ever were.  Maybe more people these days are willing to say, "You can't force your religion on me," but that does not equate to "And I'd like to force my lack of religion on you."

But people aren't galvanized by messages like "we're all just trying to get along, here."  Despite my frequent bafflement at why people seem to enjoy feeling indignant, I have to admit that feeding the outrage machine works.  It's why the imaginary "War on Christmas" absolutely refuses to die.  You'd think that twenty years would be enough to convince everyone that no one, not even an Evil Atheist like myself, is trying to kill Christmas, but another thing that comes along with this mindset appears to be a complete resistance to facts and logic.

If you convince people they have something to be scared and mad about, they act.  Which is why fear-mongering is all over the news.  It's why politicians are experts in stoking anger.

"Vote for me, I'll fix what I just made you afraid of" is a mighty powerful message.

But as far as Facebook and prayers -- as I've said more than once here at Skeptophilia, if you're trying to persuade someone of something, blatantly lying about it does not make your case stronger.  And while it might be easy to take advantage of people who can't be bothered even to do a thirty-second Google fact-check search, ultimately what it does is blow your own credibility to smithereens.

So please, please stop reposting bullshit like this.  Can I get an amen to that?

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