In the video "Are Young Men Really Turning to Religion—or Is This Overhyped?" from the channel Friendly Atheist, host Hemant Mehta breaks down recent viral media headlines claiming a massive spike in religiosity among young men.
The video analyzes a recent Gallup poll that shows a dramatic rise in young American men (ages 18–29) stating that religion is "very important" in their lives—jumping from 28% in 2022/2023 to 42% in 2024/2025. While conservative media and church groups are celebrating this data as a spiritual revival driven by the "manosphere" and conservative influencers, Mehta argues that the narrative is highly overhyped. He points out massive hidden margins of error in the specific data point, a lack of replication from other major polling firms, and warns that the highly political, patriarchal nature of the religion attracting these men is structurally fragile and likely to backfire on churches.
The Media Narrative: Outlets (including Fox News) have heavily promoted a graphic showing a massive spike in young men valuing religion [00:18].
The Gender Flip: Historically, young women have rated religion as more important than young men. The Gallup poll suggests a total reversal: 42% of young men say it is very important, compared to only 29% of young women [02:06].
The Conservative Explanation: Commentators attribute this to young men seeking community, structure, and traditional male roles, often guided toward churches by conservative podcasters, the "manosphere," and figures like Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, or JD Vance [03:29].
Massive Margins of Error: Mehta scrolls to the hidden "survey methods" at the bottom of the Gallup poll [06:52]. The sub-sample for young adults was tiny: only 295 men and 145 women [07:24].
Statistical Noise: This resulted in a margin of error of ±7% for young men and ±10% for young women, making the data far too volatile to take at face value [07:43].
Flawed Questioning: The question "Is religion important in your life?" is ambiguous. Secular people whose lives are negatively impacted by religious laws might answer "yes" simply because religion dominates the cultural/political landscape [08:32].
Contradictory Sources: Other major polling institutions, such as the Pew Research Center and PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), report no evidence of a young male religious revival in their data [09:20].
Pollsters agree that the true, steady trend isn't men flocking to pews, but young women abandoning religion at historic rates [09:58].
Women are increasingly repelled by the patriarchal, anti-abortion, and anti-LGBTQ+ political stances heavily pushed by the Christian Right [04:37].
Toxic Motivations: The young men supposedly entering churches are being drawn by "alpha male" political rhetoric focused on dominance and control, rather than traditional religious values like helping the vulnerable [11:53].
The "Sinking Ship" Effect: Because this supposed religious uptick is tied entirely to partisan conservative politics (Trumpism), Mehta predicts it will backfire. When young people eventually burn out on or feel embarrassed by the political movement, they will abandon the churches that tied themselves to it [11:01].
The origin of this question for me has been a natural derivation from the online invalidation of Gabor Mate, a Canadian physician who has written a number of best-selling books and invited a lot of controversy for heavily focusing on early childhood trauma as being the cause for a lot of conditions such as ADHD. While not autism, ADHD is still a form of neurodivergence and Mate has generally said that a lot of such conditions are an early adaptation to adverse conditions (such as a volatile home environment where the helpless child who cannot flee or exercise self agency turns 'inward' to tune out the stimuli). He has been rightfully criticized by research experts such as Russell Barkley for not being an authority in neurodivergence research, but I've always felt that lack of expertise should not in and of itself invalidate an otherwise plausible hypothesis (and Mate does have extensive trauma/addiction field work experience, where patients have a high comorbidity of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions).
Some of the refutations of Mate's working model comes from evidence from twin studies showing a high etiological overlap in conditions such as ADHD as compared to siblings, as well as such conditions tending to run in family. However, the fact still remains that not 100% of identical siblings share etiological profiles, and that 'running in families = hardwired genetics' is an almost impossible dynamic to disentangle from environment since infants/children heavily mimic patterns from their environment, so certain neurodivergent profiles may be the result of genetics in the same way that being the child of a dysfunctional home can "genetically" wire someone to have anxious or disorganized attachments in relationships later in life. This is not to say that genetics don't factor strongly or even predominate; only that it's almost impossible to really separate nature from nurture in these kinds of studies due to possible multifactorial contributions to early cognitive development and limitations inherent to creating controlled scientific environments.
So in sum: I've always felt that while there's certainly strong evidence for heavy genetic contributions to neurodiversity, the environmental contribution, if any, has never been ruled out (to the extent that we can rule such things out, which is also questionable). I guess I just more broadly don't think all forms of neurodiversity are exactly a binary of 'having it' vs. 'not having it,' and I anecdotally have found it to be the case in my own family that there's essentially a direct correlation between the severity of ADHD and/or autistic symptoms and the level of childhood trauma we faced in early childhood (with that said, it could be that some basic core neurodivergence was genetically passed on to all of us, but the presentation was environmentally conditioned such that for some of us you'd barely notice any issues with daily life and others are lacking in key social skills like maintaining relationships, eye contact, touch aversion, poor social skills, etc.; I am hypothesizing that just like the spectrum itself can be socially influenced, the actual onset/emergence itself may be influenced by things like uterine environment, early childhood socialization, lack of adverse familial stimuli etc.).
Moreover, the few cases of actual feral child cases that appear in the historical record for the past few centuries seems to show essentially with no exception that such children lack the ability to learn basic things like language, normative mannerisms, intellectually advanced matters, etc. I understand the primarily-genetic-camp will argue that these children were perhaps abandoned to begin with due to being mentally disabled, but that itself is choosing an interpretation that is not demanded by the evidence since we don't really know those children's early background -- moreover, it's essentially universally accepted among child psychologists that there are critical windows of life for certain milestone developments that must be nurtured, and that missing these periods will essentially cause irreversible damage or at the least adversely impact later gains if any in those fields, so it sort of makes intuitive sense that [at least severe] neglect can cause outcomes that may be associated with autism: stunted language, sense of human touch, eye contact, etc.
In reading a lot of the online publications undermining Mate's hypotheses, some have (imo accurately) made the comparison to the "'since-discredited' refrigerator mother theory of autism." Which in fact made me curious, because absent evidence to the contrary, I would otherwise have a prima facie hunch that a mom having a chronically stressed pregnancy, early nurturing that avoids eye-to-eye contact and bodily touch, and not responding intuitively and empathetically to the infant's cues would be able to cause some form of a stunted neurological profile in an impressionable nascent brain. (After all, there's a reason experts recommend things like bonding, soothing, eye contact, hugging/kissing, 'smiling' with lighthearted facial impressions, etc. in child rearing.) And let's not forget, autism is a HUGE spectrum, so I'm not saying that the hunch I'd have in this regard applies to the severely autistic child in an otherwise well-adjusted NT family as much as that more 'mild' AuDHD person who has sensory and regulation issues but is otherwise 'normal.'
So I go do a preliminary search to see how the refrigerator mom theory was disproved, and I couldn't really find much on that front besides authors casually referring to it as discredited without exactly explaining WHY. If anything, lots of various subreddits have autistic/ND individuals anecdotally reporting having had refrigerator moms, although they may qualify this by saying that isn't at all the reason for their ND (or else they'd say that autistic people create autistic children, and because being autistic is essentially genetically hardwired, having a refrigerator mom is merely correlation instead of causation, since attributes of refrigerator mom profiles are essentially just autistic profiles -- and it's that hardwired autism which created both the parent's parenting style and the child's diagnosis in the first place). Now I'm not saying that none of these interpretations are possible, only that they're literally interpretations and that any other reading of such data is discredited as being out of line with professional consensus -- despite it being eminently reasonable (e.g., as mentioned, we know that infants and young children learn key skills during critical periods and that neglect of these leads to adverse consequences; and we also know that genetics doesn't neatly account for all cases of diagnoses, which proves that at least to some degree there are non-genetic / environmental / epigenetic factors at play... put two and two together, it seems a bit bizarre to flippantly dismiss early childhood neglect or disordered environment as essentially negligible to neurodevelopmental profiles).
TL;DR: What is the basis for the widespread claim that the refrigerator mom theory of autism has been entirely discredited?
Daily-refreshed feed of UAP news pulled from 14 sources (NewsNation, Liberation Times, Avi Loeb, war.gov releases, Metabunk, etc.). HN-style ranking, neutral framing — disclosure outlets and skeptic sources side by side. No signup, no ads.
I’ve seen a claim going around that wrinkles or uneven texture on NASA’s SLS rocket prove it was fake, inflatable, CGI, or some kind of prop.
To me, this seems like a good example of people treating a normal visual detail as evidence of fraud because they do not understand what they are looking at.
The SLS core stage is covered in orange spray on foam insulation. It is not supposed to look like polished metal. Foam insulation can have texture, seams, uneven surfaces, lighting artifacts, and shadows that look strange in photos or video. None of that means the rocket is inflatable or fake.
The skeptical problem here is not just the rocket claim itself. It is the reasoning pattern:
That logic shows up in a lot of conspiracy content. NASA claims, UFO videos, moon landing claims, flat Earth arguments, and even random viral “glitch” videos often use the same structure.
A better skeptical question would be:
What material are we actually looking at?
Is that appearance normal for that material?
Are there original sources or closer images?
Does the claim make a testable prediction?
What evidence would separate “fake rocket” from “normal insulation texture”?
I think this kind of claim is useful because it shows how misinformation can come from a tiny observation being stripped of context.
Curious how others here would explain this kind of visual misinformation pattern. Is there a name for this specific reasoning error, where “this looks strange to me” gets treated as positive evidence for fraud?
article text:
A two-year-old in my church died of pneumonia. The only treatment: being prayed over. Nobody called a doctor. Nobody took them to the hospital. It simply never occurred to anyone to do that.
That’s the world I grew up in.
I was raised in a high-control religious community that practiced faith healing. We were taught to put our trust in God to heal our diseases. As a child, I had never been to a hospital. My community believed that God heals, not man. Vaccines were a sin. All seven of my siblings and I were born at home, with the help of one older woman who had no real medical training. None of us had ever been vaccinated.
I suffered multiple vaccine-preventable diseases as a child. When I was three years old, I got whooping cough. I had coughing fits so severe I would fall to the ground, gasping for air. The only treatment I received: prayer by a church elder. The pastor poured a small amount of oil on my head, laid his hands on me, and asked God to reveal anything in my life that might be preventing healing. The prayer was simple, and rarely long. My community believed that God uses illness to show you ways in your life that you were meant to be closer to Him.
When I was nine, chicken pox spread through the small church school I attended. None of the children were vaccinated. Kids came to school clearly showing signs of chicken pox, and everyone treated the outbreak as something that just happens sometimes. It was a small school, but I remember everyone being out sick. I was the first in my family to get it, but my siblings soon followed—including my six-month-old sister. I remember her rubbing her arms and crying in constant pain. Nothing was done for her. Many of my siblings and I still have chicken pox scars.
As a child, I never thought any of this was strange. It was just life. Everybody I knew believed the same things. We weren’t allowed to talk to people “outside” our community, so I had no frame of reference. If somebody had told me they were vaccinated, I probably would have told them that was a sin. We knew our way of life wasn’t quite normal. We were told not to tell people that we weren’t vaccinated, and warned that the government could take us away from our families.
Many of the people in my church died. Looking back, I realize now that they probably died from preventable or treatable illnesses. I can’t know for sure, because we weren’t supposed to evaluate conditions, name sicknesses, or try to understand them. If someone fell ill, we would just say they were “tempted in body.” The church preached loudly against medical treatment, medicines, and vaccines. It wasn’t that people refused to go to the hospital. There wasn’t even a refusal, simply an acceptance that a hospital was not a consideration. It’s hard to explain, but when we were sick, going to the hospital wasn’t even thought of as an option. Only now do I understand how ignorant and uneducated the church’s arguments were.
When I was fourteen, my mother got very sick. I watched her die slowly while my siblings and I could do nothing but sit with her. It was a slow and agonizing process, but she never once thought of getting medical help. Her death certificate lists the cause as stage four breast lymphoma.
There was no diagnosis while she was alive.
Just prayer.
I credit the internet for my break from the church. As a young teenager, I started reading about women’s rights. What I learned made me question the church. One question led to another. Before I knew it, I had unintentionally deconstructed my entire belief system. Once I realized the church was wrong about some things, I began to see it was wrong about everything.
Leaving the church wasn’t simple. It still isn’t. I have young siblings; my father will prevent me from seeing them if I speak openly against the church. People who leave are shunned—talked about as if they were dead, judged for every decision they make afterward. If you seek medical help, people in the church often say you wouldn’t have needed any help if you’d stayed in the church. I haven’t told many people about my decision to leave. I have to protect my relationship with my siblings.
But I am quietly getting caught up on my vaccinations. Because I never had any vaccines as a child, I’m working with a doctor now to get on a schedule. I’m still young, but I’m making up for lost time.
I don’t have magic words to convince anyone to vaccinate. What I have is my life.
I had whooping cough at three. Chicken pox at nine, and watched my infant sister suffer through that disease with nothing but prayer to help her. I watched a two-year-old in my church die of untreated, preventable pneumonia. I watched my mother die slowly of treatable cancer. I grew up in a world where children were sick, and scarred, and sometimes died—and nobody called it preventable, because nobody knew any different.
It is disheartening to see people I know influenced by fear mongering. It is disheartening to see them so opposed to basic education. It is disheartening to see medical treatment discouraged.
Children cannot make these decisions for themselves. They cannot question what they’ve been taught. They cannot walk into a doctor’s office. They are entirely dependent on the adults around them—and when those adults believe that medicine is a sin, the children pay the price.
I was lucky. Not all children are.
I hope my words show you how important vaccination is. Without vaccines, children suffer.
So please, vaccinate to save your children and the children around them.
Mediums do work.
I had a reading a few weeks ago and they got a lot of stuff right just from a photo, all done online no face to face meets and no giveaways from myself.
There are admittedly a lot of fakes and charlatans but there are many genuine mediums and mediumship is a real thing.
I think I asked this question before. But I am not sure. How can a skeptic fear ghosts? Anyways what is the fear of ghosts? Why would we be spooked if we just saw a ghost? It means Nobel prize in physics. So why fear it? What is there to be scared of? Why don't we wish "please stand front of me and reveal yourself if you exist, so I can win the nobel prize for physics?". I don't kind of understand the fear of ghosts.
I have not done the math, but every intuition I have tells me that orbital data centers is a ridiculous idea unless they are to provide some computing power for other things in a near by orbit.
I am assuming that these are to be solar powered, and that (ignoring getting them into orbit) solar collectors in orbit collect several times as much energy per square meter in orbit than they do on the surface of the Earth.
I also do not know anything about the cooling needs for objects in orbit when they are in direct sunlight. I suppose that if the solar panels are shading the compute units, then there is no need for actual cooling.
I also don't know if the processing units (the things that get hot on their own) are to be run in a vacuum or will require some sort of heat conduction cooling. Though this might already be a solved problem used in other satellites.
But if I am not mistaken, the enormous energy required to get things into orbit should clearly outweigh any energy savings in cooling and improved solar conversion.
So I would appreciate pointers to credible analyses of this.
Edit: I have since looked for an found how electronics are cooled on existing spacecraft: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-control/
As a skeptic what category of paranormal claims do you think is the most silliest? Can you rate them from least silly to most silly?
A. Telepathy Psychic powers
B. Near Death Experiences/Out of Body Experiences (Consciousness independent of brain)
C. Reincarnation
D. Ghosts (Ok be honest with this one, don't tell me it is silly if you are afraid of ghosts)
E. UFOs
F. Meditation Levitation Mind power/ Nirvana
G. Creationist God
Users over on r/UFOs are saying that NDT has changed his mind about UFOs. I've seen nothing indicating that. For years now NDT has basically said "forget videos why don't you grab something next time you're abducted even alien trash would be remarkable." NDT has also said for years and recently that sensor anomalies could be due to sensors not being calibrated correctly and could account for odd instrument readings. Over the last few days NDT has been on the news and on podcasts going over the new government UFO videos and documents which I will say are disappointing and some videos have already been debunked. I've watched several videos of NDT on the news and in podcasts recently saying "fork out the alien" and then we don't need blurry videos or to hear about some witness's credentials because we have the alien body as proof. To my knowledge at no point has NDT said he believes the U.S. government is in possession of crafts or aliens.
Someone I know sent me an article from healthhorizon.news. My first instinct (heh) was to try to find out if the website is science-based or not. Nothing that was stated in the article or on the really leaped out at me, but references to "wellness" are generally not a good sign.
I tried to look up the site on Media Bias/Fact Check, they do have a shitload of sites rated, but that one wasn't there.
So is that site legit or not? How can I tell if there is nothing that leaps out at me, but I can't find the site's reliability verified? Sites dedicated to health run such a spectrum, from science-based to sensationalist to utter quackery, and more.