By Bob Zhermuther-Zpruther
(second cousin of Robert Zherunkel)
Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah;
Protestants don’t recognize the Pope;
And Baptists don’t recognize each other at the liquor store.
—dumb old joke that makes me chuckle every time.
The less that is known about something, the more there can be to say about it. It is for this reason that religious conflicts can be so intense: there are often no actual facts of the matter to consider. There are only untestable hypotheses, baseless presuppositions, unverifiable stories, conjectures, fantasies, and speculations.
Human beings are uncomfortable with the uncertainty of not knowing; they would prefer anything to fill in the gaps of their knowledge, rather than allowing the blanks to stay blank. (With the previous sentence, I just explained the appeal of 90% of the conspiracy literature on the Internet.)
Certain ideas gain traction just because there is so little data in play. Which means supporting evidence for your hypothesis is slim. But also means that the ammunition for a clear rebuttal is absent as well. For such ideas, amazing intellectual houses of cards can be built, piling one unsupported conjecture on top of another to form a (seemingly) erudite megatheory.
Frequently the cornerstones for house-of-cards megatheories are parallelomania and hyperdiffusionism: these are, respectively, the insistence that vaguely similar things are in fact one and the same thing, and the insistence that vaguely similar things come necessarily from a single common source and do not arise independently. Parallelomania and hyperdiffusionism are, for example, the stock-in-trade of the New Chronology schtick, along with cherry-picked data. Such theories have any plausibility among the average reader only because he doesn’t know all there is that he doesn’t know, and so has no inkling of the profusion of counter-evidence that is being swept under the rug. Nor is he aware that mere conjectures are being touted as certainties.
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