moon landing hoax?

[Angrboda]

I would agree with the analogy to religion on certain points. Like religion, conspiracy theorism is a self-contained, internally self-consistent and self-validating worldview. I've suggested in the past that it may even border on a thought disorder, but perhaps I was projecting because of my own biases in the same way that I might attribute dishonesty or stupidity to a religious person. In that sense, it's perhaps futile to challenge the worldview, for many reasons. And I'm not sure it's a useful goal. The beliefs themselves are really not important; perfectly sane people believe crazy or unsound things all the time, it's more the patterns of thought and the consequences for their social functioning and so on. And trying to change other people is usually a frustrating and unproductive exercise that can cause more problems than it solves. I don't know that I have a point here other than that it may be more useful, ennobling, and character building to learn to accept them as they are than to see them as a problem to be solved. (On the other hand, a fellow moderator turned out to be a truther, and I hardly get one sentence into a conversation with him before I start swearing like a banshee, so I certainly sympathize.)