A while back, there were some demonstrations at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former bartender and waitress, told everyone that she had nearly died because the rioters broke into her office.

It was later discovered that she was never in the Capitol bulding.

Newsweek reported AOC’s version of the events:

Ocasio-Cortez said that rioters actually entered her office, forcing her to take refuge inside her bathroom after her legislative director Geraldo Bonilla-Chavez told her to “hide, hide, run and hide.”

“And so I run back into my office,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I slam my door. There’s another kind of like back area to my office, and I open it, and there’s a closet and a bathroom. And I jump into my bathroom.”

Ocasio-Cortez said [she] was hiding behind the door “and then I just start to hear these yells of, ‘Where is she?’”

As members of the mob banged against the door, Ocasio-Cortez believed “this was the moment where I thought everything was over.”

“And the weird thing about moments like these is that you lose all sense of time,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “In retrospect, maybe it was 4 seconds. Maybe it was 5 seconds, maybe it was 10 seconds. Maybe it was one second, I don’t know. It felt like my brain was able to have so many thoughts.”

“In between the screams and the yells,” Ocasio-Cortez added, “I mean, I thought I was going to die.”

Daily Wire explains that Newsweek had to correct their story after it emerged that AOC’s version was not true:

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), whose office is two doors down from Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, noted that “insurrectionists” never made it to their hall when the U.S. Capitol building was breached on Jan. 6.

[…]Mace argued that Newsweek was misleading in how they categorized AOC’s own account in an effort to “fan fictitious news flames.”

Maps don’t lie:

Newsweek issued a correction:

After Rep. Mace criticized Newsweek’s coverage, the outlet issued a correction to amend the description of Ocasio-Cortez’s account as follows: “Ocasio-Cortez said that an individual actually entered her office, forcing her to take refuge inside her bathroom after her legislative director Geraldo Bonilla-Chavez told her to ‘hide, hide, run and hide.’”

Newsweek’s correction note reads: “A previous version of this story stated that Ocasio-Cortez’s office was entered by rioters. Ocasio-Cortez’s office was actually entered by a Capitol police officer that did not identify himself. Newsweek regrets the error.”

So that’s the error, which was acknowledged by Newsweek. But what does Snopes think? Did they side with AOC’s delusional conspiracy theory? Or did they side with reality, facts and evidence?

Well, they report that the claim that AOC wasn’t even in the Capitol building as “Mostly False“.

They wrote:

Claim

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in that she “wasn’t even in the Capitol building” when the rioting occurred.

Rating

Mostly False

But their own fact-check acknowledges that the claim “she wasn’t even in the Capitol building” is TRUE:

What’s True

Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t in the main Capitol building where the House and Senate Chambers are located.

The more important point – the actual claim that people are making – is that the rioters never broke into AOC’s office. According to Newsweek, AOC says “rioters actually entered her office”. Newsweek’s correction says that the rioters never actually broke into her office. Conservatives are agreeing with Newsweek’s correction. Only Snopes seems to have a problem with the facts reported by Newsweek. They just can’t bring themselves to accept reality, that AOC lied in order to appear to be a victim.

Snopes’ “fact check” will be used by left-wing Big Tech companies to suppress the truth that was admitted by Newsweek in their correction to their original AOC-sourced story. People on the secular left are so desperate to appear to be victims, that it affects their sanity. It’s like a mental illness. And when they are called on it, they all circle the wagons and defend their conspiracy theories.

And this isn’t the first time that Snopes has failed.

Not the first time

In fact, the author of the Snopes article has been caught up in left-wing conspiracies before, and had to issue a retraction:

Why didn’t Snopes fire her after the first retraction? Well, my conclusion that Snopes is mostly a conspiracy website for secular leftists. Their writers mostly publish conspiracy theories, urban legends, myths, delusions, lies and other counterfactual nonsense on their web site. And the goal of their website is mostly just to give comfort to secular leftists who have failed at life, and are now living in a dream world where all their failures are caused by those conservative people who they look down on, who achieved more success in practical private sector jobs than they have with their many worthless debt-fueled non-STEM degrees.

So how would I rate Snopes as a fact-checker?

Rating: Mostly False.

Great article from Dr. Michael Brown in The Stream.

Read the whole thing, here’s some:

[Trump-voting conservatives] agreed that Trump’s character and personality could be negative and destructive. But we hoped that the good policy decisions he would make, decisions of massive, life and death proportions, would outweigh his character flaws.

And so, when it came to fighting against the slaughter of the unborn, numbering more than 60 million to date in America since 1973, Trump was our clear choice over Hillary Clinton or Biden. Jesus cares about “the least of these,” which most certainly includes the defenseless babies in the womb.

When it came to preserving our religious liberties and our freedoms of conscience and speech, Trump was our clear, hands-down choice.

More:

When it came to standing up to radical Islam or facing down tyrannical China, Trump was our definite preference.

One of my colleagues in the Middle East recently told me how the bloodbath which took more than 650,000 lives during the Obama administration virtually stopped with Donald Trump.

My friend recounted to me the horrific torture and abuse of women in his region at the hands of Islamic extremists, including their repeated gang rapes (and worse). In his mind, Trump was a champion who helped put a stop to such horrors.

A Chinese émigré to Australia told me early last year he was terribly afraid of President Xi and saw Trump as a hero, especially as Trump stood with the Hong Kong protesters.

Needless to say, the same Israelis who felt betrayed by the Obama administration were profoundly grateful to Trump for canceling the Iranian nuclear accords, knowing the real dangers of that terrible deal.

Foreign policy? What’s that? Christian Democrats didn’t see any foreign policy on NPR or PBS or CNN or MSNBC. They were in a leftist echo chamber. They had no awareness of reality outside their own lives.

More:

Are you surprised that Biden signed into law a radical transgender bill that has even caused consternation among gay, feminist, and transgender leaders and individuals? Do you feel good about the fact that by voting for him, you have negatively impacted women and girls throughout the country, as well as strengthened Big Tech’s crack down on our freedoms?

Are you surprised that there is already great concern within Israel that Biden might derail the amazing peace progress made by the Trump administration? Were you unaware that he might well give back to terroristic Iran a potential path to nuclear armament?

I first wrote about the Equality Act – an LGBT bill deisgned to crush dissenters from the LGBT agenda – in 2015. I had been warning about it all along. But I have yet to meet a Biden voter who knew anything about it, even though it passed the Democrat House and only failed because Republicans held the Senate. No longer.

It seems to me that Christians wanting to find work, keep their earnings, and be public about their Christian convictions did a lot better living under Trump’s laws, policies, judges, etc. That’s what matters to me. I want to work without comprimising my values. I want to keep what I earn instead of handing it to people who aren’t moving towards God. I want to invest in people and organizations who are working for God, not against him.

I’m not interested in making the lives of non-Christians happier or more prosperous. I don’t think I should have give money or compelled speech to make irresponsible, immoral people feel better about their immorality or recklessness. I’m talking about people who turn their backs on God with things like LGBT lifestyles and having fatherless kids with hot bad boys.

I liked Trump’s laws, policies, judges, etc. That worked best for my Christian life plan. I had more money and time for people who really wanted God. Now I have to be scared about my job, do with less money (higher taxes, inflation, regulation and growing national debt), and watch what I say and do for fear of offending reckless, immoral, irresponsible non-Christians. The sort of authentic Christian life I enjoyed has suddenly gotten a lot harder. And I don’t like it. I don’t like being taxed and controlled by non-Christians.

(Image source)

What I often see among atheists is this tendency to set up expectations of how God would have acted and then complain that he doesn’t met those expectations. I don’t think that this is a good way to argue against a religion, because it’s subjective. God isn’t obligated to comport with atheist expectations. A much better way of evaluating religions is to test the claims each makes against evidence.

So in this post, I wanted to show how a reasonable person can evaluate and reject different worldviews using evidence.

Falsifying a religion using science

Consider this argument:

1. Hindu cosmology teaches that the universe cycles between creation and destruction, through infinite time.
2. The closest cosmological model conforming to Hindu Scriptures is the eternally “oscillating” model of the universe.
3. The “oscillating” model requires that the universe exist eternally into the past.
4. But the evidence today shows the the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.
5. The “oscillating” model requires that the expansion of the universe reverse into a collapse, (= crunch).
6. In 1998, the discovery of the year was that the universe would expand forever. There will be no crunch.
7. Therefore, the oscillating model is disconfirmed by observations.
8. The oscillating model also faces theoretical problems with the “bounce” mechanism.

Notice how the oscillating model is falsified by mathematics and experimental evidence. Remarkable, when you remember how the public schools would play Carl Sagan videos which promoted this no-Creator model of the universe.

The absolute origin of the universe out of nothing is also incompatible with atheism, Buddhism, Mormonism, etc. because they also require an eternally existing universe.

Atheism in particular is incompatible with the universe “coming into being”, because that would be a supernatural cause – a cause that created the natural world. According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. The standard Big Bang theory requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing.

Falsifying a religion using history

Consider this argument:

1. To be a Muslim, you must believe that the Koran is without error.
2. The Koran claims that Jesus did not die on a cross. (Qur’an, 4: 157-158)
3. The crucifixion of Jesus is undisputed among non-Muslim historians, including atheist historians.
4. Therefore, it is not rational for me to become a Muslim.

I’m going to support the premise that Jesus was crucified by citing historians from all backgrounds.

Consider some quotes from the (mostly) non-Christian scholars below:

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” Gert Lüdemann

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”  J.D. Crossan

“The passion of Jesus is part of history.” Geza Vermes

Jesus’ death by crucifixion is “historically certain”. Pinchas Lapide

“The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.” Paula Fredriksen

“The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its co-agents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned, and was executed by crucifixion.” L.T. Johnson

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Ponitus Pilate.” Bart Ehrman

That’s 7 famous historians: 3 atheists, 3 Jews and 1 moderate Catholic. The atheists, Ludemann, Crossan and Ehrman, have all debated against the resurrection of Jesus with William Lane Craig. Johnson is the moderate Catholic, the rest are Jewish historians. The Koran was written in the 7th century. That is why no professional historian accepts the Koran as more authoritative than the many earlier Christian and non-Christian sources for the crucifixion story. Many of the sources for the crucifixion are dated to the 1st century. It’s not faith. It’s history.

I have seen debates with Muslim scholars, and I have never once heard them cite a non-Muslim historian to the effect that Jesus was not crucified. To my knowledge, there is no (non-Muslim) historian who denies the crucifixion of Jesus in his published work.

Can Christianity be falsified by science or history?

Yes. If you prove that the universe is eternal than would falsify the Bible’s claim that God created the universe out of nothing. That would be a scientific disproof. If you could find the body of Jesus still inside a tomb, that would falsify the Bible’s claim about a resurrection. That would be a historical disproof. The nice thing about Christianity is that we make lots of testable claims. When someone claims to be a Christian, it’s a good thing if they can show how they arrived at that conclusion. Being able to square God’s existence with science, and Jesus’ resurrection with history are two crucial steps to showing the reasonableness of Christianity.