Truth and Fake News
I'm reading an article about archeologists who are studying the birthplace of Jesus, and they have uncovered evidence that a particular stone house was probably the home of Jesus' family. About 1/3rd of the way into the article, there is a survey question that asks if you believe that they found Jesus' house or if you totally don't believe that it's possible.
Since when do we have to "believe" or "not believe" in facts? Why aren't facts just FACTS!? If you are writing an article presenting the scientific discovery of FACTS, why is it necessary to poll readers to see if they "believe" in the facts before you've even finished presenting them? This is maddening!
In this age of politics, there has been so much fake news, and so much positioning, and skewing, and "alternate facts", and propaganda, and political spin, that the basic underlying facts are disputed by simple unfounded belief now.
Cases in point: Climate change. Literally thousands of scientists have given crystal clear evidence of climate change and documented their findings and in some cases their projections of trends, etc.. We even see massive chunks of glacier ice breaking off in Greenland in the arctic and the Antarctic as the polar areas warm and the ice sheets shrink, and here in the US, forest fires every year on the west coast, and massive flooding on the east coast, polar vortex freeze conditions in the north where Chicago was literally colder than the North Pole and the South pole on the same day, more hurricanes and more serious hurricanes than in the past, and getting worse each year, etc. And yet there is a large portion of the population that simply don't believe any of it - because they've been told not to believe it by political powers that be with vested interests in the businesses that are impacted by the scientific findings.
Covid 19 virus. The FACTS are that over 13 million Americans have contracted the virus so far, and about 300,000 have died just in these last 9 months or so. It's a massive death toll and not over yet, with about 2,000 new deaths every day. We are seeing another American dying about every minute of the day now. All our hospitals are full to capacity, and there is another wave within the wave of new cases hitting - and yet we have people walking around in denial, saying that it's all fake. They don't need to wear masks. They don't need social distancing because it's not real and it is just some sort of liberal hoax designed to make trump look bad. It doesn't seem to occur to them that this isn't an American problem, that it's all over the world in every country around the globe. And none of them care whether the president of this country is Donald Trump or Donald Duck. The virus is killing people everywhere on the planet and it's very serious. But these people watch fox news and assume it's all blown out of proportions merely for political purposes.
Another case: New scientific analysis of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid at Gisa in Cairo have determined through analysis of water erosion and other geological evidence, that these two monuments are much much older than Egyptian culture, by many thousands of years. In fact, despite earlier suggestions by Egyptologists that they are 3,000 years old or so, they are now shown to predate the ice age BEFORE the last ice age (because they were underwater during the time of the inland sea that existed in that area between the last 2 ice ages of 12,000 years ago and 30,000 years ago). Yet people simply refuse to believe it, presumably because they were taught something different when they were younger and now are incapable of adjusting their knowledge to match the latest facts. Or possibly it might be because we don't have records of the people that lived in that region at that time before the Egyptians.
Why is it that a significant percentage of the population believe that the Apollo missions to the moon were all just faked? Why is all the evidence like physical samples of moon rocks and moon dust, etc. ignored? Why do some people think that thousands of workers at NASA, including all the former astronauts, are all lying when they say they went to the moon? Why does unsubstantiated doubt and baseless denial outweigh actual facts, proof, and logic? We even have the equipment still on the surface of the moon TODAY, 51 years later, to bounce our lasers beams off in order to calculate precise distances, and STILL these people do not believe that any of it happened.
Why is baseless skepticism enough, but provable facts, evidence, and logic are not?
When reporters relay the news, they now relay things starting with "67% of people surveyed believe that..." rather than simply reporting the scientifically proved FACTS. Why?
It's like the facts don't matter anymore.