Calling out Conspiracy Theories That Aren't Theories, But Real (Featuring the Basham Case, not all of the video)

Answers in Genesis is a Conspiracy Ministry
Creation Myths | 4.VIII.2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NB0hDAWKQY

9:39 For Tides Foundation, I could not verify beyond plausible deniability.

For Clinton and Gates, check here:

HILLARY CLINTON AFFIRMS SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH PROGRAMMES
https://press.un.org/en/1999/19990210.pop701.html

New name for Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health
https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/10/25/william-h-gates-sr-institute-for-population-and-reproductive-health/

Check this bit:

The institute is also unveiling a refreshed 2023-2030 vision, mission, and strategy synthesizing its strategic priorities to form five interconnected Global Programs, alongside its cross-cutting gender equity work:

Research, measurement, and data monitoring
Policy, advocacy, and community-building
Best practices scale up
Next generation leaders, and
Demographic futures, population, and environment

What was the last one again?

Demographic futures, population, and environment

I think at least two of the three very clearly do have an interest in population control, and this means you have no business calling Mrs Basham nuts

9:50 That Clinton and Gates promote Planned Parenthood is pretty obvious, and if Tides does so too, the plausible deniability disappears.

That kind of thing is an interest in population control.

I

shassett79

@shassett79

Counterpoint: it's actually in the interest of reproductive choice, which is well correlated with all sorts of positive outcomes if you're not being some weirdo who sweats and curses whenever trends indicate growth in non-white populations.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

hglundahl

@shassett79 I don't think any population can grow from aborting or contracepting.

But if it could, through integration in the world people like the Gates try to build, it's the wrong way to grow.

The old fashioned way of simply having children when you marry is perfectly OK, for non-whites too, in case you want it in explicit terms.

shassett79

@hglundahl Is English your second language? I'm wondering how you could possibly reach the conclusion that I was suggesting that abortion doesn't end pregnancy.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@shassett79 Is it your second language, or did you flunk logic?

No, it's actually my third language, but I seem to know it better than you ... because I don't do "dog whistle" exegetics to the point where an actual statement is hidden behind the supposed innuendos.

Both contraception and abortion are making the babies of the couple fewer. You have so far not helped to explain how that could help a population grow, except by integration into a world that persecutes decency.

shassett79

@hglundahl It's OK if you don't read English well. I'm not shaming your deficiency; I'm just trying to understand how you could be so wildly incorrect in your interpretation of what I said. But if you're so inclined, employ your amazing grasp of language and logic to point out the aspect of my comment which suggests I believe that birth control "could help a population grow."

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@shassett79 "if you're not being some weirdo who sweats and curses whenever trends indicate growth in non-white populations."

The phrase "growth in non-white populations".

II

Creation Myths

@CreationMyths

Dude. You need to get a grip.

a)

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@CreationMyths You know, there was this other video of yours where my comments kept disappearing.

Someone (not saying you, not saying not you) thinks I need to get out of the business of talking and into that of listening to your likes.

No thanks. Those people have stolen enough of my years already.

Creation Myths

@hglundahl I think you need to 1) sort by newest, and 2) touch grass.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@CreationMyths I really don't know what you mean by "sort by newest".

As to touching grass, some people bent on pushing me out of commenting publically are also pushing me out of decent leasure.

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

@evilgingerminiatures

@hglundahl don't blame Dan as nine times out of ten its Youtube and other folks can report comments and disappear them for a while

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@evilgingerminiatures Possible.

But shouldn't I get a notification "your comment has been flagged" in that case?

I haven't blamed nor exonerated him, I've asked.

If lots of people did flag, either Dan has some horrid followers, or "lots of people" in this case was my old foe "NinjaMonkeyPrime" who argues it's a bonus to control unplanned population.

Nah, sounds too anti-gypsy to me. Too anti-hippy. Too anti-people, overall, except those who plan everything or are "responsibly planned" which quite a few of us aren't and the rest mostly didn't turn out quite according to plan.

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

@hglundahl I have never had one & I get mine reported all the time

[Update on YouTube Hiding Comments
Jun 2, 2026 | Anthony Repetto
https://oaklandthinktank.medium.com/update-on-youtube-hiding-comments-b11e212c0769]

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@CreationMyths If "sort by newest" refers to order of comments under your video, like "trier par les plus récents" as I see it, I did that.

The problem persists.

Under a comment of mine, there are six comments to it, I answered five of them and the answers are not there.

b)

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

@CreationMyths I am even older than you & all my long life I have come up against people on the far right have keenly even eagerly anticipated a Malthusianism population collapse.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@evilgingerminiatures And then there are people who are concerned about one.

Whether you call us far right for being against abortion or not.

III

NinjaMonkeyPrime

@NinjaMonkeyPrime

Helping people plan parenthood is an interest in population control. It seeks to control the population of unplanned parenthood. Why someone would find that nefarious speaks to some serious mental health issues.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@NinjaMonkeyPrime What's wrong with unplanned parenthood?

One has to improvise?

How awful to certain control freaks!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@NinjaMonkeyPrime Invoking "serious mental health issues" also argues a control freak.

In other contexts one who cannot handle unexpected outcomes of debates, but has to put them down like wildfires by suggesting the opponent is a madman.

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

@NinjaMonkeyPrime yup, its long been understood that spacing pregnancies is good for a woman's health mental and physical & that having a baby every 9-12 months is ruinous in many ways especially in a backward country which is pro natalist but does not give a tinkers cus about the resultant children post birth

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@evilgingerminiatures You know, child spacing can be done in other ways than contraception, like abstaining during lactation.

Plus abstaining during Lent, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays before the evening, perhaps Wednesdays too.

I don't quite see how your comment isn't a slur on many children in poor families.

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

@@hglundahl Yes, but less reliably

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@evilgingerminiatures I did not say "child limitation" I said "child spacing" and that's fairly reliable.

Sufficient for health.

11:40 I'm sorry, but I did not hear Megan Basham complain about population control against white people.

I heard her complain about population control tout court.

Which I think is a pretty correct assessment, like when Fujimori allowed doctors to through force or deceit, forget which, sterilise Quechua speaking, so obviously non-white, women. Not the current president of Peru, but her father.

12:05 "This is the Antisemitic Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory"

Oh yeah ... when she didn't actually mention Jews?

YOU are the one claiming that attacking population control is some kind of attack on the Jews. As far as I can see, your words are more directly Antisemite than Megan Basham's are.

I

shassett79

You should probably acquaint your self with the phenomenon of "dog whistles" because they're everywhere in conspiracy-related thinking. It turns out you can communicate all sorts of things to a targeted audience w/o explicitly saying those things, and this is actually very common among such groups.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@shassett79 Have you heard the phrase: "some people detect dog whistles even if there are no documented dogs they whistle to"?

shassett79

@hglundahl I haven't heard that phrase. Did you make it up?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@shassett79 I wish I had, it's a good one.

shassett79

@hglundahl Returns literally zero results in a search engine, but OK

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@shassett79 shadowbanned, I met it on the internet

II

Mr Markers

@HarryTeasley

Most of the people out there concerned about population control are white nationalists. Look for the folks telling Americans to have more babies: also white nationalists.

And while you get a lot of white nationalists supporting Israel, and making a big show of hating antisemitism, that’s a lie. They believe war involving Israel will bring about the Second Coming, so they want to support that happening.

Being able to draw the association is not hard. I think he did a bad job of it, took the wrong road to get there, but he’s not wrong.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@HarryTeasley "Most of the people out there concerned about population control are white nationalists."

How do you verify that statistics?

By inflating the number of "white nationalists" in the group through "dog whistle" exegetics?

In fact, telling people to get more babies isn't bad, white nationalism or not. So, you are doing publicity for white nationalists, apparently.

AND ... just because Hagee is an Evangelical and Answers in Genesis are Evangelicals doesn't mean they are pushing for a war involving Israel.

Evangelicals aren't all that united.

III

EvilGinger Miniatures Ltd

Nope, but given the great replacement theory developed out of the Nazi occupation of France during world war two and the bitterness left by the Algerian war even if it has older roots and only got its current name recently. The theory sees all non whites and a threat to whites & would class the Jews as non white even though Jews have been a part of European culture time out of mind as they where a part near and middle Eastern culture for far longer.

The definition of white is also conveniently flexible. for these people.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@evilgingerminiatures I highly doubt Megan Basham could actually even get along with French Algerians rooting for OAS.

I'm probably one of the few who like both.

It seems you are more familiar with OAS than with the US pro-fertility movement, which involves Alveda King and very strong anti-Nazis and anti-Racists like Lyndon LaRouche, doesn't mean OAS defines them.

And you might want to tell me what the connection to the Occupation was.

12:17 She also didn't mention "the Western Civilisation" precisely as Lyndon LaRouche didn't when calling out Fujimori (the dad) back in the day.

The Clinton's aren't Jewish, even if they are pro-Jewish.

You could have spared me the knowledge there was some Jewish connection to the Clinton foundation, if indirect.

And what about Bill and Melinda?

"Bill Gates was raised in a Protestant Christian family and has no documented Jewish heritage."
[Melinda Ann] "French Gates, a Catholic, attended St. Monica Catholic School, where she was the valedictorian of her class."

So, no, not Jewish, however sufficiently indifferentist to have a Catholic / Protestant mixed marriage.

I looked up a result where Gates and Hirsch appear together:

"Before the Rothschilds, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, there was Baron Maurice de Hirsch."

Again, this is also not a direct tie between the Gates and Judaism or Jewish community.

So, calling out Gates and Clinton Foundations for population control is Antisemite exactly how?

As to the Tides Foundation:

"The Tides Foundation, which backs several organizations involved in anti-Israel protests on college campuses and beyond, is facing scrutiny from the House Ways ..."

They are accused of Antisemitism for being pro-Palestinian, in itself a somewhat bad logic, but that hardly makes calling them out for involvement in population control an act of Antisemitism.

From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

Assorted Retorts: Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me · New blog on the kid: This is Not a Response To Phil Stilwell, It's a Denunciation

Lundahl makes his most defensible concession when he says:

“As to the area where I really am subjective, perhaps it is one in which objectivity is not attainable.”

... But this concession changes the conclusion. If objectivity is unavailable, Lundahl cannot use private discernment as objective evidence that the Holy Spirit spoke.

It doesn't change my conclusion in the least.

I was not claiming to publically demonstrate the Holy Spirit spoke to me. If the Holy Spirit prompts me to give 50 c. to a fellow beggar, what I need in order to do that is to have the 50 c., not to convince Parish Priest, Bishop, Pope, Secular Authorities that I absolutely could do nothing better with 50 c. and even so needed a specific permission from the Holy Spirit to actually give the 50 c. AND then got it.

There are callings where someone has to assess if someone else is prompted by the Holy Spirit or just being a dumbass about himself. I am not pursuing any of these callings. I'm not standing before a monastery in order to become a novice, and I'm not standing before the gates of a seminary in order to study for the priesthood.

His interest seems too heavily similar to that of a shrink who wanted to poke into what he thinks I have decided or failed to decide.

What I have decided is to write, and both talent with words and knowledge of subjects are such that this decision is not totally whacky unless backed up by the supernatural.

What I've failed to decide is what I have left others to decide, namely when they will start treating me as an actual writer instead of attributing to me claims of prophecy or higher than usual Catholic callings.

If I claimed to be a monk, I would indeed be doing such a claim, but I am not claiming to be a monk.

If I claimed I absolutely wanted to become a monk ... which I probably haven't stated since last year in High School ... (I'm 57 now), I would again be close enough to doing such a claim, and I would need someone to verify the calling with. That someone is not Phil Stilwell.

I did a check on that, in early 2000, the monastery answered in the negative. I have since then been abiding by that decision, tried to get a wife and an income from writing, and I have been blocked by liars who mis-label my work as prophecy, unless it's demonic, prophecy, unless it's psychosis, and so on. As I am not claiming prophecy, I'm not obliged to tell the Blessed Virgin that the Parish Priest requested roses in winter to prove She was She. My name is not Bernadette Soubirous. And what I claim to do is not similar to what she claimed to receive.

If someone wants to be heard over seeing the Blessed Virgin, she had obviously better provide objective and miraculous evidence. Often it's girls not boys.

Meanwhile, I claim that theologically speaking Young Earth Creationism is a necessity. Gap theory and Day Age theory are not obviously heretical, but that's on the condition that they leave the creation of Adam as directly from the dust and the timeline from Adam to Jesus at least roughly speaking similar to Luke 3. One is not a heretic for preferring the Vulgate reading of Genesis 11 which has no second Cainan. But it should roughly speaking be similar to Luke 3. Which, since carbon 14 dating, a theory of an old universe and especially an old earth with an old atmosphere will not. So, when it comes to combining Day Age with a Biblical chronology from Adam on, that's theologically licit, it is actually done by the Watchtower Sect, often decent people by the way, but it is scientifically impossible.

If the atmosphere was billions of years old when Noah left the Ark in 2957 or 2347 BC, two dates in conventional Biblical chronologies, that of the Roman Martyrology and that of Ussher, that atmosphere could not leave organic material dating to 39 000 BP. It would most probably have dated to third millennium BC. And very certainly not older than fourth millennium. Human remains exist on either side of the carbon date 39 000 BC. To me, as a Young Earth Creationist, this means they were prior and subsequent to most probably 2957 BC. The Biblical timeline is intact at a point where no person is dying unless it's in the Flood (and if so the dating method will probably be Potassium Argon and give a much older date than carbon) and the persons alive being limited to Noah, his wife, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives (OK some may say Ham's wife was already pregnant). I have no problem with the conventional carbon dates given according to that convention, since I as a Young Earth Creationist belong to a school of thought according to which these can be reinterpreted variously to "much younger" or to my own more precise attempts of calibration, using Biblical events with archaeological traces as anchor points. But the moment you think the atmosphere has been around 100 pmC well before any of this and remained so with minor vaccillations, the moment you say the Neanderthal nicknamed Thorin really died 42 000 years ago, you have loads of skeleta you can't deny humanity to, and you would either have to stretch the timeline after Adam to 40 000 + years or you would have to pretend these skeleta belonged to actual human creatures before Adam. The one is inconsistent with the claims the Catholic Church traditionally makes for the Bible. The other is a heresy which the Church condemned by placing Isaac La Peyrère's book on the index.

I am very far from being a prophet, I'm a theologically concerned layman, and an amateur sleuth into questions that would "question" the Biblical narrative. And I have no duty to show anyone that the Holy Spirit prompted me to this position or to this activity.

Why do I bring this up in the context? Because in another place, and I don't care to cite, Phil Stilwell is half and half suggesting that I might have taken up the existence of a missionary because of what I took as a prompting of the Holy Spirit. Nonsense, if I live a less laidback life than I'd like it is not that I am sacrificing it to be a missionary, it's that people are sacrificing it to challenge me if my supposed decision to be a missionary wasn't stupid. It's pretty stupid to take me for a missionary in the first place.

And what I want to prove that my tables work is not show either an atheist or a priest that I'm led by promptings of the Holy Spirit, what I want to prove that is simply win an argument whether it solves a problem for Young Earth Creationism.

And if on some stretch of the Biblical and archaeological timelines they don't work, what I want to conclude isn't "perhaps it wasn't the Holy Spirit after all" but rather to rework the tables. From 2020 to 2024, I have been using a set of tables which in French are called: Tables de carbone 14 sur les bases révisées (I - VI) / Tables continuées (VI - IX) and which in English are called New Tables. Since Christmas 2024, I have tables I made even newer than that, so they are called Newer Tables: Preliminaries · Flood to Joseph in Egypt · Joseph in Egypt to Fall of Troy. But when in 2020 I called those tables "New" I implied they were newer than something else which I had previously elaborated and tested against archaeological items and the Biblical timeline. The weak spot of New Tables is the date of the corpses in the Mladec cave. In that now previous calibration, they were too many dead too soon after the Flood. I patched it with appealing to the reservoir effect, which is still an option, I have since remade the calibration in Newer Tables.

And I am sick and tired of people who do not share my polemic interest but also do not want to leave it alone, but make it a thing for them to worry about. Like worry about mental disease if you have Commie or Swedish Social Democrat inclinations to making Science your religion. Like worry about prelest as the Orthodox tend to illicitly do with the children of Fatima. Like worry about pastoral focus, since there are so many other topics I could preach about if I insisted on being a priest or similar. But I don't insist on it, I insist on not being it. I insist I'm not a seer. I insist being Young Earth Creationist is very far from a mental disease. If anything it's the Atheist who's delusional if he thinks his mind is a by product of matter via very complicated biology.

But let's give Phil Stilwell the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was not an umpteenth in between for some shrink trying to assess me without putting himself or his personnel at risk, perhaps he genuinely was just interested in the general question. Well, if so, there are other people than I who also would prefer to be left alone on such items. His original question never was one I intended to answer to the full, and I'm worried other Christians could be trapped into someone sidelining what in some sense promised to be a decent chat about the epistemology for accepting Catholicism at every step into "how are you making your decisions?" ... when it's none of his business nor of the kind of people I feel he reminds me of.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra (vel infra ut in bloggo)

Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5]

Assorted Retorts: Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me · New blog on the kid: This is Not a Response To Phil Stilwell, It's a Denunciation

I will here elaborate on the points, three here:

• the practical point of the individual evaluating whether to follow an inspiration
• the point of the hierarchy when on behalf of the Church evaluating whether an individual was a saint
• the question of the Church and Her divine origin.

1. The Question That Never Received an Answer

As mentioned in my answer to the abstract, I don't think his question really needs one.

The two questions "what do I do know" and "am I right in what I'm habitually convinced of" are distinct.

No reasonable man usually fuses them.

2.1 Absolute certainty is too much to demand

The serious question is therefore not:

Can the believer prove the Holy Spirit’s involvement with absolute certainty?

It is:

Does the proposed method make correct source attributions reliably enough to justify confidence, and how would we know?

A medical test need not be perfect to be useful. But we need some idea of its sensitivity, its false-positive rate, and the population in which it was tested.

A parallel insanity is proposed in:

3. The Logic of Discrimination

... No mathematical precision is required to see the problem. Lundahl supplies no defensible values, ranges, or even comparative arguments for the likelihoods.

Totally superflous, as already stated. Except perhaps internally for the Church. Which would not use Bayesian logic in mathematical form to make assessments of moral probability anyway.

The method the Church uses is, did this method of discernment make saints.

This leaves us with the external question whether we have reasons to believe the Church.

2.2 Historical inquiry is not identical to experimental prediction

...

This concession does not rescue Lundahl. It removes an easy escape. ...

I briefly halt here to note he claims the paper format is meant to reduce rhetoric that could be too vague, to logic barebones. (See: why answer in a paper).

The metaphors like "rescue" and "escape" and qualifiers "not" and "remove" are rhetorically calculated to give the impression I'm the person divagating, the one who needs some kind of schooling in logic. But does he back this up?

The problem is not that Acts fails a laboratory test.

A laboratory test is not applicable in the first place. As a rhetorical flourish, this sentence is of course OK. But as a serious objection, no.

The problem is that Lundahl treats the claims inside one religious narrative as if they independently confirmed one another,

Well, depends on what you mean by "independent". If you certainly want "independent" sources, it's not just the Christian account, but loads of others, that lack comparable outside confirmation. No one will say that Acts confirms that Caesar made or destroyed a bridge over the Rhine. Perhaps Livy will confirm it, but Livy is as little independent of Caesar's tradition (not necessarily limited to the text in Bellum Gallicum itself) as an early Church Father is independent of Acts and related oral tradition.

For the Battle of the Somme, we can have an account independent of French sources in English or German ones, but if we treat the West as one community, which it is, what would you answer a Japanese if he were to ask "are there any Indian or Chinese confirming sources?"

Communities are not lab teams that have agreed to double check on each other. If you want to establish that colchicine is good against gout, it may obviously help if both French and American doctors report it (however, they differ on posology recommended). Because American and French doctors are members of an international "meta-team" where national medical corps are treated as "local teams" ... that have since long ago agreed to check on each other's results. And usually to do so in open scientific polemic.

The epistemically correct "independent confirmation" in history is usually the independence of observations resumed in one source. If I knew nothing from the things Jesus said apart from His obviously being the one telling the disciples of the temptation by Satan, I would be reasonable to doubt it. But there are claims that are far easier to check than that, to the first Christians, because different people actually all saw them. If the story is true, which shouldn't be the first go to main issue.

The "religious narrative" is a resumé of the independent sources that were available to those formulating it, that is mainly to Luke and prior to him those whom he spoke to.

The fact that the narrative is religious doesn't warrant it a treatment of higher and all the way up to disingenuous suspicion nor exempt it from being the story of a community's immediate origin. And for non-religious origin stories, Stilwell will not put up this doubt. I have never heard him put any scepticism on the United States correctly remembering to have started out as thirteen colonies of the United Kingdom which then at a certain date broke off connections in a war. I have never heard him pretend George Washington didn't exist or that his actual role was very different.

then asks his critic to explain every missing stage of an alternative history.

If I pretended that George Washington was a British governour and obtained independence by first petitioning and then calling a referendum, I assume that Stilwell would want me to explain why a War of Independence and a second War of 1813 was inserted into the narrative. Stilwell might pretend we could easily solve the problem in another way, by appealing to British records. That's beside the point. I could push disingenuous even further and say British records were faked later on. I suppose that at least at this point Stilwell would require a coherent, if not the one accurate, at least a coherent and possible history of how the non-event in the series of events became an event in remembered history.

I am applying exactly that same test. I am being perfectly consistent about my criteria. I am just not treating "religious narratives" as a specially suspect category, but instead "immediate origin stories of actually existing communities" (and to a weaker degree "stories of the community's past, even outside the crucial point of immediate origin as the community started) as a specially robust one. Amnesia plus false memory is curious even in one person, and even more so collectively. A claim that a community first knew it's origin to be A, then forgot A and replaced it with B to the point of referencing B as knowledge of their origin is a remarkable claim which would require quite some evidence. I ask my critic to produce it. Or at least an explanation, if not evidence for it. Even that is apparently too much, and warrants irony in a paper pretending to use the objectivity standards of the paper format/

And by the way, I would have a coherent scenario of why Jewish sources don't confirm the Christian ones. Stilwell himself has called the general mechanism I'm speaking of "villain-driven irrationality" in a different paper. That Jews to this day have a very clear tendency to cast Jesus for a villain, though non-religious versions have weakened it, and some Jews even religious ones, living among Christians, have dropped it, can be seen in some of the comments by Tovia Singer.

4. Satan Makes the Proposed Test Harder, Not Easier

Even if a healing were genuine, a language genuinely unlearned, or a vision genuinely external to the recipient’s imagination, a second question would remain: Which supernatural agent was responsible?

For healings, we assume Satan cannot imitate a totally sudden healing. God has put limits on his power.

For a person's good or bad inspirations, we assume, if he didn't repent of them and if he was a saint, they came from the Holy Spirit. And guess what the one most crucial test for him being a saint is? Healing miracles. Which brings us back to God having put limits on Satan's power, some types of sudden never ever having been within angelic power, fallen or unfallen, and some powers Satan would actually have in his nature being made inavailable to him if it were about deceiving ... so much that when Biblical prophecy talks about the Antichrist doing "signs and wonders" some say they won't even include miraculous healings and others that he'd need real relics from real saints.

Lundahl says that good moral direction points to God and the wrong moral direction points away from the Devil. But this assumes that a deceptive agent must display his final aim in every local act.

A Christian praying to God for direction, if he were in good faith following a deceptive but apparently morally good inspiration from the Devil, would thereby merit God's protection from deception when it became crucially bad. This is to some degree also true of as yet non-Christians. And this is part of the reason why someone outside the Church if genuinely a Christian would come into Her.

If Satan can imitate signs of goodness, then orthodoxy, charity, success, and even wonders do not reliably identify the Holy Spirit. If Satan cannot imitate them, Lundahl needs to explain why the deception hypothesis appeared in his own account of imagination in the first place.

Has Stilwell heard of consistently and all the way versus not all the way and finally with some glaring inconsistency? When the Church evaluates if someone became a saint, the Church has some real clues on what went "all the way" (not saying this has been the case with the Vatican II sect accepting John Paul II as a Pope, but that's a different discussion). For the individual decision maker or decision accepter, again, the person doesn't quite as much need an epistemic as a moral guide. Though obviously being acquainted with the truths of the faith clearly helps in detecting fraud.

5. The Church Does Not End the Regress

[diagramm notation could not be replicated here]

In ordinary language: the authority is legitimate because the Church is protected; protection is known through a tradition certified by the Church; and miracles read through that tradition are then used to confirm the Church.

You forget that the tradition is not just "certified by the Church" (as by an institution) but is actually the memory of the community. The Church is not a parallel to FBI, not even to Supreme Court, the Church is a parallel to the United States. Stilwell has probably confused the two related concepts "the Catholic Church" and "the hierarchy of the Catholic Church" ... which in some contexts is actually called "the Catholic Church". The United States does not recall being founded by Kemal Atatürk and arguably never will.

The historical existence of an institution is independent evidence that the institution existed. It is not independent evidence that the institution possesses supernatural protection.

Granted, but irrelevant.

We independently know that Mormonism exists. That fact does not verify Joseph Smith’s plates.

It may verify the existence of the plates, which I could explain as demonic, or it may not verify it. Depends on the detail. For instance, could the people attesting the plates have been in on a con game? And THAT depends on the detail of the story.

While we are at con game, before you ask "why not the reports of Jesus' Resurrection" con men don't volunteer to risk martyrdom. And if you pretend that the one doing the con game and the ones being martyred are different persons, how do you account for the top tier of the hierarchy being the ones martyred? The criterium is consistent, it involves "con game is a possible explanation, except when it's impossible" ... and it sometimes is for an obvious reason.

We independently know that Islam exists. That fact does not verify Muhammad’s revelations.

It arguably verifies he had or claimed to have revelations. If he was sincere, there is a certain problem of discernment that is not solved by the Catholic Church canonising him, because the Catholic Church hasn't canonised him.

The continued existence of the Catholic Church establishes continuity of a community, not the divine truth of the community’s account of itself.

How about starting with the human truth of the community's account of itself? I don't appeal to divine protection of the US when saying I trust the US on George Washington. I appeal to the improbability of a real origin A being completely forgotten and replaced by a fake origin B taken by all as if the real one. Already a very problematic and improbable claim about individual memories, but pretty absurd on the account of the community.

Now, the Mormon account of the plates is on several levels perfectly compatible with human fraud.

• Few people present when the plates were given
• plates often in a closed chest
• plates absent when Joseph Smith produced translation with use of two or one seer stone (depending on stages)
• plates returned, so not kept as relics by the Mormon Church.

I'd like you to construct one level where the account isn't so compatible on principles perfectly consistent with those (oh, never mind, I forgot whom I was asking, but still) I'm using to exclude fraud within the Church's account of Herself.

And similarily, the single person who could verify that Mohammed had revelations from Allah was Mohammed.

In this context, I'm reminding that Islam makes claims about only five miracles for the founding of its Ummah:

• the Quran (good style vs illiteracy of Mohammed, scientific knowledge beyond the period have featured)
• the split Moon
• the expansion in military action with victory after victory
• the spider weaving very quickly a web before the cave
• the night journey.

The two last of these, like receiving ayah after ayah supernaturally, depend entirely on Mohammed's claim about his own experience. The split moon can be explained by social conformity within the Ummah and social and military pressure for the king in India who confirmed it (in the 13th C).

And I think one can agree after seing long term English misrule in Ireland, including a genocidal application of tenant's contracts in 1847 to 1853, military conquest doesn't prove divine protection from error. From our own Bible, we have an even more direct confirmation thereof:

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them. And power was given him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 13:7]

Whether you believe the prophecy or not, I think you can at least relate to the principle. Vanquishing someone doesn't prove him wrong and doesn't prove oneself right.

Any more parallels? I'll give one about Rome. I'm accepting Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 BC, I'm just not accepting he was son of Mars or that Jupiter Capitolinus as his granddaddy promised prosperity to Rome forever.

The Church’s existence, age, influence, and selfunderstanding are all compatible with a successful human institution. None discriminates divine protection from institutional durability. The regress stops only because Catholic authority is declared a stopping point. Declaring the stop is not validating it.

The account of the initial miracles, primarily the Resurrection, leaves no reasonable room for deliberate fraud, for honest misunderstanding or for hallucinations, which do not exist as collective phenomena. Several people in the same hospital may hallucinate due to ergotine poisoning, but the ergotine poisoning won't make their hallucinations agree. Radical restructuring of what was initially reported and taught need substantiation. Dating of Gospels and then pretending they were the only reports available for the community and then selectively presenting cases for initial absence of claims of physical resurrection are clearly prima facie absurd solutions, would not have occurred to Stilwell to do with the United States, would therefore require at the minimum a model.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Ruffinus of Assisi, Martyr
30.VII.2026

Assisii, in Umbria, sancti Rufini Martyris.

Dan Makes my Point Again

He Thought He Has Refuted YEC, Well, Not My Version · Dan Makes my Point Again

Directly Observed Mutation Rates Disprove Young Earth Creationism
Creation Myths | 29.VII.2026 (US TZ)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4eIQvNueM

Thank you again for making my point.

At some point in the past, for young earth creationism to work, we need to have had more mutations per generation and less weeding out.

Why is the time after the Flood ideal?

1) We see lowering life spans, suggesting degraded genome or mutations, as well as carbon 14 buildup and on my view even the Ice Age which I set earlier, all three of which hang together with more radiation.
2) Just after the Flood, mankind had pretty few mutations (though the Neanderthal inherited ones are from pre-Flood times), and therefore the arriving mutations were far less likely to do harm.

Noting

that my answers keep disappearing. On the next day, the objections except that of John still stand, but my answers to them are gone. Someone deleted. Not me. Last of July, I email Dan, first of August, they are not restored.

fol alibi

@folalibi2743

Poe's Law in action... :)

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@folalibi2743 I had to look it up.*

No, my intent wasn't ironic, I'm a Young Earth Creationist, I'm also at loggerheads with CMI over a few things like whether Neanderthals were pre- or post-Flood.

And they have not been eager to look at my tables for carbon 14 build-up either.

* footnote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's law

Winnetouch

@noWinneTouching

Out of all the ancient human skeletons and fossil remains ever unearthed, why haven’t we found a single skeleton with the biological age of a 500 year old human? High radiation leaves clear pathological markers on bone tissue, yet ancient skeletons look biologically identical to modern ones dying in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. Taking patriarchal lifespans directly from bronze age mythic genealogies doesn't magically create the forensic evidence to back it up.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@noWinneTouching My point is, the genetics was such that a man of 100 or 200 back then would be biologically like modern 30 or 40.

Mutations changed that.

I'm not sure what levels of radiation you think of.

In my case, it's like maybe 10 to 20 times the modern background radiation.

fol alibi

(Since this doesn't seem to be a parody...) How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood? Through a ghost lineage that was not on the Ark? Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan? Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years) to have accumulated these mutations, especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@folalibi2743 "How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood?"

Example, if one or more of Noah's daughters in law had a Neanderthal daddy, or if Noah had a Neanderthal mother. Or if his wife was half or full Neanderthal (but if so daughters in law of the sapiens type to account for genomic dominance over the residual Neanderthal genome).

"Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan?"

Neither of them had non-sapiens mitochondriae, and Denisovan DNA is in a smaller proportion, so probably further off in the ancestry.

"Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years)"

Let's speak in BC terms, 5200 - 2957 = 2242 years and probably that involves a misreading about Mathuselah and should be 2262 years.

Less time, but ….

"to have accumulated these mutations,"

Supposing they were only accumulated by natural process rather than accelerated by preternatural ones, involving at some level the Nephelim.

"especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old."

An old daddy obviously legates more mutations to his children than a young one

qiexia

@muskyoxes

Aren't you arguing the wrong way? If mutations are slower and generations are longer, we need a lot more time to account for the observed genomic differences

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@muskyoxes Lifespans were longer, generations maybe not quite as much (except the lineage in the Bible).

After the Flood, previously accumulated mutations were fewer, but the new rate of mutations was not just faster than before but significantly faster than now.

John

@John.0z

How widespread is this flood that you are talking about?

Does it perhaps extend far enough back to encompass the First Australian people... with their 40,000+ uninterrupted culture, without recording new arrivals, and that does not mention a flood at all? What is recorded in Queensland is the retreat on land from a rising sea level that drowned the earlier reef (about 30,000 years ago) and saw the growth of the Great Barrier Reef we now see offshore.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@John.0z I highly doubt that their own records can be ascribed a totally fault free chronology.

The 40 000 years date is from thermoluminiscence in sand, which I don't know how to calibrate, but I suppose it disfigures real dates more than carbon dates do.

Lake Mungo 3 (I recall) has a carbon date of c. 20 000 BP, which would be during the post-Flood Ice age or midway in Noah's post-Flood remaining lifespan.

Some time between 2725 BC and 2712 BC. Which are respectively carbon dated (usually) as 18,786 BC and as 17,081 BC, while the carbon 14 level in the atmosphere was rising from 14.329 pmC to 17.585 pmC. Yes, carbon 14 was, on my theory, produced faster than now, and significantly so.

The 30 000 years date would be 28 050 BC, between 2892 BC and 2870 BC, if obtained by carbon dates. Between 65 and 87 years after the Flood.

Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract

Assorted Retorts: Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me · New blog on the kid: This is Not a Response To Phil Stilwell, It's a Denunciation

Here is it, the paper, starting with the abstract:

The Spirit in the Closed Circuit: Why Catholic Authority Does Not Solve the Problem of Discernment
By Phil Stilwell | Published 2026
https://www.academia.edu/170883041/_The_Spirit_in_the_Closed_Circuit_Why_Catholic_Authority_Does_Not_Solve_the_Problem_of_Discernment

How can a person tell whether an inner prompting comes from the Holy Spirit, a deceptive spirit, or ordinary human imagination? Hans-Georg Lundahl answers by recommending prayer, conformity to Catholic teaching, submission to Catholic authority, attention to moral fruits, and, in exceptional cases, later miracles. These practices may help a Catholic decide whether an impression is safe to act on. They do not identify the impression’s source. A thought produced by religious training can agree with Catholic teaching. An institution can approve a mistake. A decision can turn out well by coincidence, competence, or selective reporting. Even an event that remains medically or historically unexplained would not, by that fact alone, identify the Holy Spirit rather than some other supernatural or unknown cause.

Phil Stilwell seems bent on mixing two problems that have nothing to do with each other.

How do I know?

This is usually not what I or any Catholic of typical Catholic culture (though it wouldn't be heretical) would try to solve with attending to personal promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Nor are such promptings anything like why I converted to Catholicism.

What should I do?

Obviously a Catholic who already accepts the authority of the Catholic Church will not take practical decisions as occasions to put it in doubt.

I can come to doubt whether this or that version of the Catholic Church is the correct one if it's making it harder for me to get a correct decision started.

I have ditched more than one for this reason.

So, I kindly suggest to the author of the paper

to admit fairly and squarely these are separate problems.

And, when it comes to the practical one:

it doesn't even closely matter to you if we can in a given situation know with full certainty or moral certainty that the Holy Spirit actually was behind a prompting.

Far from being a philosophy paper asking a reasonable question, it would then become a kind of psychology paper, or worse, an undercover psychological examination of the one you are dealing with. I have more than enough of that rabble.

Also, you don't start questioning your presuppositions every time you take a decision, so why should I?

Now, let's go to "How do I know" ...

Lundahl tries to close these gaps by appealing to Christ’s promise to the Church, the Church’s preservation of the Gospel accounts, the prima facie credibility of tradition, the growth of early Christianity, and the beneficial effects of Catholicism. But these claims form a closed evidential circuit. The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution, traditions and miracle reports certify both, and the institution’s alleged divine protection supplies the favored interpretation of those reports. Evidence that is genuinely independent—the mere historical existence of the Church, for example—does not establish the supernatural authority attributed to it.

Analysing an argument correctly is a good starting point before trying to answer it.

Stilwell tries to construct a circulus vitiosus in probando.

The institution certifies the texts, the texts certify the institution,

More like, every community that ever existed usually knows how it started. The opposite would be more improbable. The US is not likely to forget about George Washington and Lafayette and replace them with Kemal Atatürk. It is also not likely to forget the actual process and substitute sth like Moses parting the Red Sea or Seven day trumpet blows making Jericho's walls tumble down.

Therefore, it is a priori probable that the texts of an institution that's a community (which the Catholic Church is) and not just sponges of one (like the FBI on the US, I get the impression, when FBI targets Latin Mass Catholics as a security threat) actually do fairly historically accurately reflect the actual process by which the community came to be.

This paper reconstructs Lundahl’s position in its strongest form, then shows why it fails.

Stilwell is hardly likely to be able to do that if he:

• conflates two positions on two subjects with one single position
• generously pretends detecting circuli vitiosi in probando just for ease of refuting, which to me seems more like strawmanning than steelmanning.

It also refines the original challenge. Absolute certainty is unnecessary, and historical claims are not tested exactly like laboratory hypotheses.

Thank you.

The proper demand is more modest: a method must discriminate among the proposed causes better than chance, bias, and hindsight. Lundahl provides no such method.

I did not propose promptings of the Holy Spirit as the best way to evidence Catholicism. If Stilwell wants to evaluate what I'm doing when discerning anything, as if it were a medical cure, no thanks.

Doctors need to be able to verify the kind of medical cures they prescribe to others. People are very much entitled to try and persist in their home cures for coughs, colds, diabetes and whatever without continuously being poked by doctors trying to validate or invalidate their methodology.

If anyone wants to take away that right from me, I take that as a very inimical action. Sufficiently grave, as being a kind of slave hunt, to merit death penalty in a court and therefore sufficiently grave to merit a self defense that could be lethal.

So, I'll suppose we'll be dealing with evidence for Catholicism.

He offers an internally Catholic policy for managing impressions, not a publicly reliable way to discover who—or what—produced them.

Impressions are not public busines, and an internally Catholic policy is good enough for a Catholic.

On top of that, he insinuates that "public" and "Catholic" shouldn't go together, ideally obviously they should.

A dedicated objections section answers the strongest replies in his own words. A verification roadmap then identifies the conditions, possible falsifiers, and prospective tests Lundahl would need to establish his claims,

I hope this deals with "How do I know" in the credal sense. That's all that such verification roadmaps should deal with.

while two appendices supply a formal argument audit

Not sure what that even is. And given certain propensities for overdiagnosing circulus vitiosus, I'm not sure Stillwell is capable of doing one correctly.

and a practical discernment matrix.

This one on the other hand should be on "what should I do" ... thankfully the two appendices are separate items.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Olaf
29.VII.2026

In Norvegia sancti Olavi, Regis et Martyris.

Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

A Reflection by Mother Miriam (Who I Think Has the Wrong Pope) · A Novus Ordo Gave Advice · FSSPX Does Not Equal Sedevacantism or Conclavism, There is a Difference of Approach · Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

I'm Not Catholic Because I'm Mormon...
Catholic Answers Live Clips | 20 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFlbDzW4wo

Just out of curiosity, has the Catholic Church condemned the Book of Mormon?

I am totally on board with Mormons usually being outside the Church (possible individual exceptions of the type Dimond brothers dispute and even then, they are outside Her in the external forum).

But it was founded in the early 1800's, like sometime after 1838 or sth. Book of Mormon is as far off a prequel to that Church as Book of Acts are, according to their claim. They can show no more direct unbroken unity with Nephite believers than with 1st C AD Jewish and Greek ones.

That said, I don't believe that book to be true, but what if it had been? Obviously, if it clearly teaches a theology like that of Joseph Smith, it's out.

6:16 While not disputing this, I'd say they also are the main rulers over another Eretz, the one divided from Sea in Genesis 1.

Rome is (to the exclusion of Genghis Khan) ruling in great shape in the treaty of Tordesillas.

When somewhat later one Tatar type kingdom actually does become important on the world wide scene, it claims to be Third Rome. I'm speaking of Muscovy. The only Tatar kingdom that came to rule one of the Four corners.

So, currently, the four corners are still in a sense ruled by Rome.

Alaska and Tasmania by post-Roman Britain's successor and Charlemagne's ally Alfred's successor. Cape Horn by a successor of Spain, which was once ruled by a Roman Emperor, Charles V. And Siberia by Third Rome.

But, the katekhon, as such, the dignity of Roman Emperor concretely on a human person was taken out of the way c. 100 years ago, when Nicholas II and Charles the Last were so.

One could say, the Holy Roman Empire got carved up into ten kingdoms, not counting Liechtenstein or Luxemburg.

1648, Austria lost Switzerland. 1864, the German parts of HRE apart from Habsburg lands (Erbländer), and after WW-I, it was divided into 8 regions. 1 + 1 + 8 = 10. St. Hippolytus thinks of the ten toes as democracies ... which all of the ten regions currently are.

11:12 "There isn't a clear day, when the great apostasy happened."

For an end times only great apostasy, this doesn't work.

I am open to Vatican II and even Assisi 86 being kind of false alarms, and the great apostasy happening when Wojtyla holds a speech in 1992 that mentions Galileo of Pisa. And by then an emergency conclave had already happened, so, the papacy was not seriously interrupted by Wojtyla losing it.

However, Popes Michael I and II have so far held already Vatican II and Novus Ordo were marks of The Great Apostasy.

As you might know, these never quite flew with all Catholics. Which means the Great Apostasy would even so not have been a Universal one, sth excluded by Matthew 28:16--20.

Cuando las reformas del Concilio Vaticano II comenzaron a implementarse en Norteamérica, fue Sáenz quien lideró la lucha contra ellas. Su tradicionalismo intransigente condujo a un rechazo de la nueva Iglesia Conciliar, y fue uno de los primeros en proponer la conclusión teológica del sedevacantismo, que sostiene que, desde la muerte del Papa Pío XII, ha habido un estado de sede vacante en Roma porque los siguientes llamados papas abrazaron las enseñanzas heréticas del falso Concilio Vaticano II.*

I think this means, Joaquín was still on board with Vatican II until it got practical consequences.

Even earlier? Well, in 1958, Duarte Costa and Michel Colin, though illegitimately so on other grounds, were refusing obedience to Roncalli.

12:52 I hadn't understood the dynastic part.

If I'd give an alternative interpretation ... ethnicities getting drawn into Rome and Germanic and Slavic people are still not Romance, or even Munich is under iron in 1864 and under clay in 1870, Austria is divided into iron of Austrofascism and clay of Social Democrats and Nazis in the 1930's. BUT they are still ethnically the same.

For my interpretation, we have St. Hippolytus.

Or against it. To him, the democracies are the toes.

But the mixing begins before the toes, so ...

* https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquín_Sáenz_y_Arriaga

A Side Note

Creation vs. Evolution: Green Arabia · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: A Side Note

Suzanne Martser's Self Defense Course, Episode 1: Does God Tempt?
TektonTV Redivivus | 28 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvb_6GOymm0

Plus, after Abraham inadvertently nearly killed Ishmael by sending him out into the Arabian Desert, c. 30 years after Green Arabia ended, his nearly killing Isaac was arguably a move on God's part to prevent Ishmael from actually killing Isaac in sheer frustration.

So Abraham rose up in the morning, and taking bread and a bottle of water, put it upon her shoulder, and delivered the boy, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Bersabee And when the water in the bottle was spent, she cast the boy under one of the trees that were there And she went her way, and sat over against him a great way off as far as a bow can carry, for she said: I will not see the boy die: and sitting over against, she lifted up her voice and wept And God heard the voice of the boy: and an angel of God called to Agar from heaven, saying: What art thou doing, Agar? fear not: for God hath heard the voice of the boy, from the place wherein he is Arise, take up the boy, and hold him by the hand: for I will make him a great nation And God opened her eyes: and she saw a well of water, and went and filled the bottle, and gave the boy to drink
[Genesis 21:14-19]

I just need to find a source for Negev having a similar green period, since I didn't read the reference to Beersheba, but cited from memory when commenting on my calculations.

FOUND

From 1987 to 1989, excavations at Shiqmim revealed the longest chronostratigraphic séquence for a late hfth to early fourth millennium site in westem Palestine. The séquence extends >5 m in depth and spans >800 radiocarbon years of occupation (4500 to 3700 BC)

.

Source:

https://www.academia.edu/47953461/Subterranean_Negev_Settlement_Subterranean_Settlement_in_the_Negev_D%C3%A9sert_ca_4500_3700_B_C

2097 BC

74.949 pmC, dated as 4481 BC*

1982 BC

80.546 pmC, dated as 3770 BC

1965 BC

Serug died

1959 BC

81.656 pmC, dated as 3634 BC

Let's count

(1982 + 1959) / 2 = 1970.5 BC

(80.546 + 81.656) / 2 = 81.101 pmC

5730 * log(0.81101) / log(0.5) + 1970.5 = 3702 BC

1970 BC

81.101 pmC, dated as 3702 BC

1936 BC

82.763 pmC, dated as 3500 BC

1930

Ishmael born

1916 BC

Isaac born.

83.166 pmC, dated as 3440 BC

So, the Shiqmim habitation was still going on near Beersheba to five years before Serug died.

Meaning Shiqmim had been inhabited for over 120 years, from 2097 to 1970 BC, then empty for c. 50 years, 54~55 years to when Ishmael was going that way.

And needed an angel to find water.

As Genesis 21 is the first time Bersheeba is mentioned in Genesis, we can surmise, Abraham may have been unfamiliar with the exact circumstances.

When Abraham and Abimelech and Phicol met, in Bersheeba, they may have been looking for Shiqmim./HGL

* The tables cited are quoted from Newer Tables, Flood to Joseph in Egypt, also true for the other post. Years obtained by calculation and not in original tables are marked in italics.