Atheist Memes

In the 1970s, the show That's Incredible showed plenty of evidence that ghosts haunted places like the Winchester House. In the 1990s and even the aughts, ghost-hunting shows were popular on television. But since then, when someone is able to posit accidental camera effects were responsible for a given image, that information spread worldwide like a California wildfire.

When I was growing up, it was common knowledge that the Bermuda Triangle mysteriously ate planes and boats for reasons we couldn't quite fathom. Nowadays, we can look up and find that the rate that they get lost to common elements is exactly what can be statistically expected for seas with treacherous elements. While some favored incidents might have required a combination of unfortunate conditions, they became unlikely misfortune rather than supernatural misfortune.

When the documentry Chariots of the Gods came out, we didn't have the direct access to reports by people who actually study the origins of hill figures, carved caves and the heads on Easter Island, so when someone told us it's aliens, we couldn't just look up a report by a cultural anthropologist who studied the things. Now, in this age, we can, and reports of aliens, ghosts and feats of engineering done with paleolithic technology are so routine that skepticism is the norm when someone suggests an unusual hypothesis.

It's not perfect. Some people still believe a toxoplasma gondii infection makes a human really, really fond of cats (it doesn't, but strangely it does have a consistent symptom of desiring and enjoying high-speed travel) but now we have the capacity to look it up, and so when urban myths become a topic in a group, commonly someone will get curious enough to see if someone published a report.