{"id":38445,"date":"2016-10-09T10:28:58","date_gmt":"2016-10-09T14:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=38445"},"modified":"2016-10-08T21:18:57","modified_gmt":"2016-10-09T01:18:57","slug":"how-mythicism-can-lead-to-trump-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2016\/10\/how-mythicism-can-lead-to-trump-support.html","title":{"rendered":"How Mythicism can Lead to Trump Support"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Before anyone suggests otherwise, let me emphasize that I am not claiming that mythicism always or even regularly leads to support of Trump. Most people manage to keep their problematic reasoning compartmentalized.<\/p>\n

But as William Clifford warned long ago<\/a>, once one believes something on insufficient evidence in one area, one is setting oneself up to do so in others.<\/p>\n

And so it is no more of a surprise to me that Robert M. Price, the mythicist, is also a Trump supporter<\/a>, as he indicated both on Facebook and in a recent YouTube discussion which you can listen to here:<\/p>\n<\/iframe>\n<p>Price\u00a0has not merely\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.secularhumanism.org\/index.php\/articles\/3767\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">aligned himself on the Right politically.<\/a>\u00a0He has done so because he <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=49617\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">accepts the conspiracy theories propounded on that side of the ideological spectrum<\/a>, such as that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centerforinquiry.net\/forums\/viewthread\/8869\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">climate change is a hoax<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>While certain kinds of shoddy thinking tend to be more popular at one end or the other of the ideological spectrum, the truth is that, once you are open to explaining things in terms of conspiracies and cover ups\u00a0when the evidence points to a simpler explanation, there is nothing to stop you from embracing conspiracies of any sort.<\/p>\n<p>The important lesson here is not \u201cdon\u2019t become a mythicist, you might end up voting for Trump.\u201d That combination is pretty rare. The point is not to\u00a0embrace\u00a0<em>any<\/em>\u00a0sort of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/11\/further-history-denialism-from-jerry-coyne.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">denialist<\/a> viewpoint that appeals to conspiracy to support it, since whether you follow up with still more conspiracies on this or that side of the aisle, you\u2019ll be promoting <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/12\/mythicists-gain-nothing-by-exaggerating.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">problematic approaches<\/a> to knowledge, society, learning, politics, and much else.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-38452\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/719\/2016\/10\/Robert-Price-Climate-Change-Facebook.png\" alt=\"Robert Price Climate Change Facebook\" width=\"487\" height=\"160\"><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-38451\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/719\/2016\/10\/Robert-Price-Trump-Facebook.png\" alt=\"Robert Price Trump Facebook\" width=\"499\" height=\"467\"><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before anyone suggests otherwise, let me emphasize that I am not claiming that mythicism always or even regularly leads to support of Trump. Most people manage to keep their problematic reasoning compartmentalized. But as William Clifford warned long ago, once one believes something on insufficient evidence in one area, one is setting oneself up to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":38451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,75],"tags":[871,1948,2591,2592,2795,4677,7853,7856,10467],"class_list":["post-38445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mythicism","category-politics","tag-atheist","tag-climate-change","tag-denial","tag-denialism","tag-donald-trump","tag-hoax","tag-mythicism","tag-mythicists","tag-robert-m-price"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>How Mythicism can Lead to Trump Support<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Before anyone suggests otherwise, let me emphasize that I am not claiming that mythicism always or even regularly leads to support of Trump. 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