“The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all those votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.” https://t.co/oSIosDdLAi
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 14, 2021
Apart, of course, from the persistent Repub claim of ‘massive voter fraud’…
An @AP review of six battleground states found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a number so small it would have had no effect on the results.
Here are the details of @AP's review in each of those states: https://t.co/WSLkfTnUQ6
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 15, 2021
In Wisconsin, five people have been charged with fraud out of nearly 3.3 million ballots cast.
“I would have to venture a guess that’s about the same odds as getting hit by lightning,” said George Christenson, an election clerk in the state. https://t.co/PF3kf1Brfa pic.twitter.com/fKOcZAdmTm
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 14, 2021
Baud
Aren’t they all Republican too?
Ken
@Baud: Don’t ask impolite questions.
Hungry Joe
Trumpers will of course interpret the AP report as yet another coverup — further evidence of the Deep State’s hand in The Big Steal. It’s damn near impossible, at this point, to imagine a conspiracy theorist, or even someone Just Asking Questions, reading the report and saying, “Huh. I guess the election was legit after all.”
New Deal democrat
Pew updated their polling on the religious affiliations of Americans:
https://www.pewforum.org/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/
Only 63% of Americans identify as Christians (Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox), while. 29% say they have no religion. For the past 15 years, the former has declined, and the latter increased, by about 1% a year. If the trend continues, by about 2038 there will be more nonbelievers than Christians.
I have to believe this is a big reason why the Evangelicals are going so crazy – that they see they are on the cusp of being a minority in “their own” country.
Two things I didn’t see in the report (yet):
1. Much of this is progress being made one funeral at a time. Past reports indicated that the young are much more likely to express non-belief than older Americans.
2. Politics is probably driving religious choices rather than the other way around. “Conservatives” are attracted to evangelicalism (the big giveaway being how many are unaffiliated with any particular church). Meanwhile that very reactionary-ism is driving away their more socially liberal children.
Brachiator
@Hungry Joe:
Big Foot. Flat Earth. Loch Ness Monster. US election voter fraud.
Hungry Joe
@Brachiator: Hmmm … you left out Roswell. I wonder why. Were you by any chance in New Mexico when the E.T. craft was found?
Just asking questions.
Eunicecycle
I thought one of the interesting things, if I read the report correctly, is that most if not all of the fraudulent votes were not counted in the final count.
stinger
@New Deal democrat:
Don’t materially disagree with anything you said, but I will point out:
Evangelicals have ALWAYS been the minority. Evangelicals don’t count Catholics and Orthodox (most don’t even know what Orthodox are) [ETA: or members of mainline Protestant denominations] as Real True Christians. Evangelicals take pride in their minority status and quote Scripture to prove that Real True Christians are and always must be a minority.
Living in a country that is culturally a “Christian nation” — yes, losing that is adding to their craziness.
cain
@Hungry Joe:
They can’t back out now – same with vaccines. They are going to continue to go down the rabbit hole till they’ve hit the yummy molten center of the earth.
cmorenc
A core element of evangelical Christianity is the martyrdom and persecution of Christ at the hands of both secular and hostile religious factions, which evangelicals see reflected in a modern, secular-trending society. A repeated theme of their sermons and Bible studies is the need to resist against doubt and disapproval of the surrounding secular, morally unsound society, which easily feeds into RW political appeals playing on their sense of insecurity.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Brachiator: Don’t forget anti-vaxxers
cain
@New Deal democrat:
Probably because they are batshit and make no logical sense. But Covid will continue to prey on these conservatives and probably speed up the demographics.
When you are religious but it’s all based on hate – that doesn’t really bode well for your own spirituality. I suspect that 24% of those who are religious are all performance artists and crises actors.
Hungry Joe
@New Deal democrat: I wonder how big a slice of the 29 percent who claim “no religion” are in fact Christians who don’t identify with any particular sect/denomination, or maybe call themselves Spiritual. Because polling (not this poll, maybe) consistently shows the percentage of self-identified atheists and agnostics in the U.S. to be five to ten percent.
Hungry Joe
@cain: Exactly. As the saying goes, it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.
guachi
@New Deal democrat:
Pew does great research on religion. The big drawback of the 2020 and 2021 surveys are the far lower number of people surveyed. Prior surveys would have 35,000 participants and the last two were only about 3,500. There isn’t the granular look at religion, though the top line numbers are still there. And they aren’t good for Protestants.
tom
@New Deal democrat: it is said that people will change their church due to their politics, but few will change their politics due to their church.
My mainline, progressive congregation has seen this as more have left due to our support for LGBTQ+ rights, same-gender marriage, BLM, and so forth, than have joined.
Matt McIrvin
@Eunicecycle: One of the main rhetorical tricks played in these discussions is to assume that any sort of irregular registrations map 100% to fraudulent votes in the actual margin.
But usually even fraudulent votes are detected, and the other things usually do not result in fraudulent votes in the first place.
topclimber
@Hungry Joe:
AP still retains a level of credibility for many Americans. And they sure as hell have outlets, as in every newspaper, radio and TV station in America that runs their stuff.
They are crappy (a Village prerequisite) with much, but not all, of their political analysis. But they do actual investigative reporting and I have seen no reason to fault this aspect of their coverage. Willing to be educated, of course, but I suspect they still practice what used to be called journalism.
They won’t sway Trumpers but WTF will? I look forward to AP running with the 1/6 hearings and boosting Dem chances with the 10% of the electorate who don’t obsess like we and the GQP do.
Matt McIrvin
@Hungry Joe: Yeah, there’s a big difference between atheist and “no religion”. Also, high-profile atheists in recent years have frankly not done atheism’s public image a service, but atheism does seem to be very slowly increasing anyway.
(weirdest fact from the Pew survey I just looked up: about 7% of self-identified atheists say they believe in God, 2% with absolute certainty.)
guachi
@Hungry Joe: The “nones” are a large category that, at least in the Pew survey, only breaks out atheist and agnostic. Many of the rest are all over the map – ex-Christians, “spiritual” people unaffiliated with an organized religion, etc. And many others are people who just don’t really think about it. It has little bearing on their day to day lives. It doesn’t matter whether they are an atheist or a theist because either label would have no real meaning.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Maybe they said Baud! and were misheard.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: In Catch 22, two atheists argue about the kind of god they don’t believe in.
Hungry Joe
@Matt McIrvin: The seven percent of atheists who say they believe in God are probably also vegetarians who like mint jelly with their lamb chops.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s a fact. I’ve been an atheist since I was a teenager, but if asked, now I add “but not one of those atheists.”
Kent
@New Deal democrat: It’s not just that they are afraid of becoming a minority in their own country. I think a big part of it is that so many older evangelicals are lashing out because they are becoming a minority in their own families. I see it in my giant extended family. The olds get more and more desperate and frantic when their own younger generations reject all they stand for. Since they can’t actually control their own kids and grandkids, they vote for authoritarians who promise to do the whole country.
Tony Jay
I don’t know what you mean.
The inescapable fact that even Big Conspiracy, with all of its fingers in all of the Deep State pies, couldn’t completely sweep all evidence of its organised fraud under the carpet clearly proves, beyond all shadow of a reasonable doubt, that the real number of fraudulent Democratic ‘voters’ is actually enormous, probably up in the millions, and so the only way to restore the confidence of Real Americans in the legitimacy of future elections is for the Supreme Court to immediately and unconditionally reinstate Actual President Trump to the Executive Office, from which he can begin the process of appointing the membership of an independent committee of Republicans authorised to investigate the circumstances, events, persons and bodies responsible for the January Usurpation.
Also, bring back Matlock.
Kay
Republicans are just bizarre:
Remember this?
Sure Lurkalot
@Matt McIrvin: I’m curious about the “high profile atheists”. Bill Maher has become a parody of himself and didn’t Dawkins find religion recently? I’ll stick with Ron Reagan…simple, direct, logical messaging.
Brachiator
@Hungry Joe:
I was not thinking of an exhaustive list. But you could easily add ET and as noted by someone else, anti-vaxxers.
Also, Elvis, dead Paul McCartney, JFK Jr, and for those with long memories, Judge Crater.
Jay
@Brachiator:
don’t diss BigFoot, the 2020, 2021 reigning Social Distancing Champion, a shoo in for 2022 in the contest,……
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
I seem to recall many of those atheists gaining popularity because it was a alternative way to attack jihadists in the 00s.
Kay
I was a pollworker in the last cycle and the GOP pollworkers made fun of the Trumpists who came to vote and talked about voting machines and voter fraud. I was surprised in a 65% Trump county. Of course pollworkers are just a tiny portion of the GOP base and anyone who actually works in elections figures out quickly that it’s a boring, nitpicky, rule-bound recording process and not a true crime story of international intrigue but it was heartening to hear. They’re annoyed by them and have real contempt for them.
Matt McIrvin
@Sure Lurkalot: Maher, Dawkins, Sam Harris, Hitchens back when he was alive… all these guys who seem to regard atheism as primarily a vehicle for bashing Muslim immigrants.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
RE: Also, high-profile atheists in recent years have frankly not done atheism’s public image a service, but atheism does seem to be very slowly increasing anyway.
I always believed that the best part of being an atheist was that I didn’t have to belong to any group or organization, wear a uniform or attend meetings.
ETA: Actually, I am probably more a righteous agnostic. I don’t know whether or not there is a deity and don’t much care.
Or, as attributed I think to a samurai, “I respect the gods, but I do not depend on them.” Other people may believe, and that may be a delusion or consolation, but not much worth arguing about.
Baud
@Brachiator:
Ken
@Brachiator: Any time UFOs, Bigfoot, or any of a dozen other things are mentioned — including Elvis — I think of this xkcd.
Eunicecycle
@Tony Jay: I know you usually do what I would call snark, but you do know that is exactly what they say? Except the Matlock thing. Well, maybe that, too!
Ken
@Brachiator: The scariest kind of theists are the ones who say “But if atheists don’t believe in God, why aren’t they all murderers, thieves, and rapists?” Because apparently they don’t see any reason not to do all that, other than their fear of God.
q
I actually wish that all of the people who make noise about Massive Voter Fraud were just lying for performative reasons — because it’s just too depressing to thing that tens of millions of American are this innumerate. But — it’s massive stupidity combined with dishonesty. An awful lot of people just have no comprehension of numbers. Really, really dumb, awful people.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I call myself an atheist but truthfully I have absolutely no idea whether the universe was created by an intelligent, conscious agency. I do suspect that, on the basis of the universe we see, any such being would probably have values and thought processes so alien to ours that it would not be wise to treat it as a moral authority.
Brachiator
@Jay:
If it’s Bigfoot, that would be a size 30 shoe-in…
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: I think it’s not as scary as that–it’s just that they’ve been taught from childhood that all their best impulses come from their belief in God, so they can’t imagine it being otherwise.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
@Betty Cracker:
Beyond all the Islamophobia and misogyny exhibited by many of the high profile New Atheists like Dawkins, Hitchins, and Harris, I remember they (along with those like Stephen Pinker) all tend to push the “We’re living in the best moment in human history” argument; that we’re living in the most peaceful era in history.
I’m not sure this has aged well given recent events. It should come as no surprise that Pinker has argued before the World Economic Forum in Davos that “political correctness” is a serious problem
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I have never found any satisfaction in the idea that some Christians have of trying to determine God’s will and then doing it.
Even if there was a deity, we have free will and have to figure shit out for ourselves.
ETA: I have read some of the texts of various religions and mythologies, including numerous translations of the Bible.
I enjoy reading about the special relationship of gods and some heroes. I was explaining to a friend who was in a women’s reading group reading the Bible as literature that David was God’s boy. They were tight. Homies. Similarly, the goddess Athena was tight with Odysseus, and saw him through his travails in getting back home to Penelope.
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
@Hungry Joe:
Just so y’all know — Jim Morrison <i>proved</i> that Paul’s dead. And John isn’t.
Do your research, peopple!!1!
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): While Pinker is an annoyance and his Whig history is oversimplified, I do think that we overestimate the general violence of the current moment compared to previous ages.
The World Wars of the 20th century were so terrible that they’re hard for us to imagine right now. But, also, people with a Western-centric perspective tend to imagine that the situation immediately preceding them was some kind of halcyon era rather than an age of imperial/colonialist brutality.
What I don’t buy is that that’s not coming back in the future.
dnfree
@New Deal democrat: Evangelicals explain the decline in the number of Christians two ways. One is that most of the decline is in non-evangelicals, or has been until recent years. The other is that the Bible predicts that in the latter days, many will follow false prophets, and the number of true believers will be small.
Brachiator
@Ken:
Superficially, a fair question. But only superficially.
Not simply a matter of fear. Religious people believe that all morality proceeds from a deity. Otherwise they think that it is all arbitrary. They cannot imagine that non-believers could behave ethically, because the 10 Commandments and all that jazz come from God.
Oddly enough, the story of Cain and Abel is subtly about ethics:
Cain, the first killer of a fellow human, does not know that he has committed a crime. And one of the key questions of ethics is what do we owe to others?
Significantly, Cain is not judged or punished by other humans.
John Steinbeck’s great novel touches on and updates these themes: “And Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and dwelled in the land of Nod east of Eden.”
Kent
In my experience there is a big difference between not being religious and being an active atheist.
For example, I don’t believe in fairies. But I haven’t constructed a whole world view around the fact that I don’t believe in fairies. Some of the public atheism is kind of like the kid who constantly rebels against his parents. You are defining yourself in opposition to something else. I’m atheist but I don’t go around defining myself as such, any more than I define myself as anti-fairy or anti-ghost or anti-Bigfoot.
That said, I find atheism much more of a positive moral viewpoint than religion. If you are atheist then what you are saying is that religion is a human construct. Which means our ability to distinguish right from wrong and organize ourselves around basic principles like justice are inherently human traits. We don’t need religions to make our moral determinations, they are found within us.
Sure Lurkalot
@Brachiator:
And all the sex drugs and rock and roll along the way.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
Well, evangelicals do. For others it’s a lot more complicated.
There seems to be a Jewish tradition that it’s 100% allowed for humans to argue with God about morality and that it’s even possible for them to win the argument.
Some Christian traditions, including Catholic and Anglican ones from what I gather, resolve the Euthyphro dilemma– in modern terms, “are good things just defined as things that God loves, or does God love them because they’re good?” by taking the latter branch, and saying that goodness is not an arbitrary whim of God, but that scripture reveals God to be good and wise and therefore it’s right to follow his lead on the subject. I don’t really buy the last part of that but at least it’s coherent.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Everyone started carrying portable networked cameras, and suddenly the aliens went away but police brutality popped up out of nowhere.
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: I often find liberal Christian forums more congenial places to hang out than atheist ones. The thing the liberal Christians know is that they can’t just justify moral/political positions on scriptural grounds–even if they’re using a biblical example, there has to be that connection to something a person with different theology or none at all would accept. And they don’t treat the Bible as a disconnected collection of verses that you wave around as weapons.
Soprano2
He’s become the grandpa who yells at the kids to get off his lawn. He used to have on people who disagreed with him and would push back, but he doesn’t do that anymore. He never has anyone on to push against his “woke liberals are ruining America/universities/comedy/the Democratic Party” and “all the cancel culture people on the left are terrible” bullshit, plus he’s also obsessed with the idea that it’s too many obese people who cause so many Covid deaths in the U.S. No one who comes on his show ever argues against these things anymore. I think it’s mostly because he wants to keep telling the same jokes he’s used for 30 years, and he can’t because young people don’t find a lot of them funny. Strange how people like Stephen Colbert can find ways to be funny even now, but Maher and Seinfeld cannot. *rolleyes
Omnes Omnibus
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Maher was an alt-medicine crank with antivax tendencies from the beginning; I’m somehow not surprised that his take on COVID is “but what about obesity”.
Alison Rose
@New Deal democrat: My favorite thing in those surveys is always seeing how low the percentage is of Americans who identify as Jewish (1.7% in this case)………..yet we supposedly control everything. I mean, we must be hella fucking powerful then, so why is my life garbage?? Where’s my Jew-power?? Ell oh ell.
different-church-lady
We live in a post-record world.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
Same. Toxic male assholes, all of them.
Citizen Alan
@Hungry Joe: The thing of it is, IMO, is that to truly call yourself an atheist (or really an agnostic, which is an atheist who’s hedging his bets), you have to be committed to the idea that there’s no God and no kind of afterlife. And even if–like myself–you don’t want anything to do with organized religion, it’s still very comforting to cling to the belief that there’s something out there that can bring about some kind of justice in the next world if not this one. Personally, the only facet of Christianity I care about it the vague hope that there is actually a Hell for all the people I see about me who I now consider to be irredeemably evil.
Also, if (God forbid) Trump wins in 2024, I intend to spend the next several years loudly reminding evangelicals that his reelection after losing in 2020 fulfills the prophecy in Revelations 13:3 (“One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast.”) The Mark of the Beast came in the form of a Red MAGA hat, and 4 out of 5 Evangelicals took it.
geg6
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Stephen Pinker…good buddy and beneficiary of Jeffrey Epstein’s largesse, Stephen Pinker? Fuck him.
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: I find the idea of justice in the afterlife scary because of my suspicion that my accumulated sins would fry me.
Maybe that comes from early exposure to terrifying Protestant evangelical notions of how everyone really deserves infinite torture and it’s only undeserved grace that saves us, so what you do in life actually doesn’t matter at all, only faith does.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
If the Evangelicals are right, I would prefer to burn in hell for all eternity than spend eternity groveling in rapturous joy in the presence of an evil killer God who rules through fear. Both would be hells, but the former would at least let me suffer with self-respect.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I heard somewhere that Sarah never forgave God for demanding the sacrifice of her son, and that God understood and accepted this.
Of course, not a dilemma if you don’t care.
Hungry Joe
@Alison Rose: Apparently you haven’t heard about our Space Laser. Therein lies our power. You can sign up for a few minutes’ access, but unless you’re one of the Elders of Zion you can’t get a decent time slot or a setting above Stun.
Hungry Joe
@Citizen Alan: To me, “atheist” and “agnostic” are responses to two different questions — one of belief, one of knowledge. If you ask me if I believe in God, my answer is, No. If you ask me whether or not God exists, my answer is, I don’t know, because by definition — or by most definitions, anyway — God is unknowable, and thus unfalsifiable.
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
Nope. As I noted, I am probably an agnostic because I don’t find the question of whether there is a God to be meaningful. I just don’t care.
ETA: One a number of occasions, I have had people strangely get angry with me when I say that I don’t believe in God when asked about it. They ask something like “Don’t you want to go to Heaven after you die?” with urgency and anxiousness, as if an afterlife must be desired by everyone.
Chris Johnson
@Alison Rose: Hey, at least you have the space lasers :)
Geminid
@Hungry Joe: Deism is another belief system. Benjamin Franklin self described as a Deist. As a young man he was commissioned to write a pamphlet refuting Deism, but after researching this radical Enlightenment doctrine he found himself agreeing with it. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist, and Sir Isaac Newton was close to one.
Deism can be partly described by what it is not. There is no belief in the traditional, personalized Christian God- the guy with a big beard and bushy eyebrows that Michelangelo drew. There might not be a belief in divine intervention either
On the other hand, Deism is non-materialist. I would consider pure atheism as materialist- that is, a certainty that physical world which can be examined and measured by humans is the entire extent of reality. A Deist might say there are non-measurable forces at play, particularly at the creation of the cosmos, and maybe still. Late 16th century(?) philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote a logical proof, in outline form, of the existence of an animating spirit that created the world. Newtonians might describe this as the Prime Mover. Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew living in Antwerp(?), may have derived his system from Jewish mystical tradition.
Spinoza and Franklin seem to have shared a belief that their Creator is benign, and that humans are not on earth to suffer, but to help themselves and each other.
When asked if he believed in God, Albert Einstein said that he believed in the God of Spinoza.
dopey-o
I recently swerved just in time to avoid a pie fight on this very subject, on another progressive blog. I posited that atheists don’t exist, because humans are hardwired to believe.
People who call themselves atheists simply refuse to bow down to the tinhorn dime store god worshipped by Xtianist scum like Josh Duggar. Atheists worship an ungraspable deity who is far above the reach of grubby disease-ridden human hands.
Tony Jay
@Eunicecycle:
When I’m translating Wingnut into English I just think of the most stupid, credulous and bad-faith way of looking at an issue and simply express that in the most self- righteous way possible.
Turns out that works 99% of the time.
dopey-o
Alyosha Karamazov: “Will we go to Paradise when we die?”
Staretz Zosima: “”For all we know, we are in Paradise now.”
The book, condensed.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Which calls to mind a quote. (digs through files to get the wording correct)
“What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial – or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.”
– Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb
.
not_a_cylon
@Matt McIrvin: I’m of the same mind, and you described it well.
It tickles me that the most established religions lean toward deities that are so human-centric and apparently give a damn about the way we procreate, or voice ourselves, or the meat we eat, despite our planet being just a speck in the cosmos we won’t ever fully comprehend as a species.
not_a_cylon
@Kent: That’s the sort of “militant atheism” vibe I got from reading/watching Richard Dawkins. Like, you can be an atheist, but you don’t have to be such a tremendously loud asshole about it. You’re making the rest of non-believers look bad.
Brachiator
@not_a_cylon:
And lo, humankind said to one another, “Let us make God in our own image.”
And so it was done.
Geminid
@not_a_cylon: A couple years ago I caught a conservative talk show I thought was comical, as they often are. It being the season of “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men,” the host was trying to get his audience to hate on athiests who were suing to stop Christmas displays. He asked atheists to call in to defend “their” position. He put one on, and the atheist said, “We’re not all that way. I’m an atheist and I have no problem with my community having Christmas displays.” The host acknowledged him, cut him off and went to the next atheist on the call board. The second atheist said, “We’re not all that way. I’m an atheist and I have no problem….” The host cut the caller off. He figured he wasn’t going to get what he wanted, so he just griped some more and asked regular listeners to call in and gripe with him.
Anne Laurie
My personal belief? It’s like handedness: most people are hardwired to believe, but there’s a stubborn minority that isn’t. For most of human existence, ‘belief’ was a very useful social construct, so the 2-10% of ‘left-minded’ people learned to shut up and fake it. But that minority was always there.
These days, people are ‘allowed’ to be left-handed, and also to be atheists / agnostics. This is very upsetting to some believers! But there are still older people who are deeply suspicious about the increase of left-handness in ‘kids these days’, too…
Brachiator
@Geminid:
We can clip and paste on FaceBook and other social media. Just in time for this year’s War on Christmas.
Matt McIrvin
@dopey-o:
Yeah, no. This is actually pretty close to the evangelical-Christianist belief that everyone really believes in their God (because it’s impossible not to–he blasts the information directly into your soul); atheists are just pretending not to believe as an infantile gesture of rebellion.
If some ungraspable God exists, I don’t worship it. What would be the point?
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: The Christian God is a Jealous God. That quality always seemed to me to be incompatible with an omniscient Being.
Similarly, I think the Christian origin story of mankind is bogus. The most obvious tell is the attribution of all trouble and sin to Eve, a noncompliant woman.
Brachiator
@dopey-o:
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Humans may be hardwired to imagine.