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What On Earth Am I Here For? Study Guide

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You are about to embark on a journey of discovery. Throughout this six-session study from Pastor Rick Warren, you will discover the answer to life's most fundamental question: What on earth am I here for?

Designed for use with the DVD as well as the newly expanded Purpose Driven Life book, the What On Earth Am I Here For? Study Guide will take you through 6 sessions by Pastor Rick Warren, teaching you why you were created and how you can discover your identity, meaning, purpose, significance, and destiny. Whether you are going through this study with a small group, or as an individual, this journey will change your life.

The six sessions include:

• You Matter to God
• You Were Planned for God's Pleasure
• You Were Planned for God's Family
• You Were Created to Become Like Christ
• You Were Shaped for Serving God
• You Were Made for a Mission

Book Summary – The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here For?

Home > Book Summaries > Book Summary - The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here For?

FULFILLING YOUR 1ST PURPOSE: GIVING GOD PLEASURE

Anything that brings pleasure to God is called “worship”, and the first purpose of your life is to bring pleasure to God via worship. Music can be a part of worship, but worship is much more than music. Any activity can be transformed into an act of worship so long as you do it for God’s glory and pleasure.

For Days 8-13, Warren walks you through various aspects of how you can please God (i) with specific acts of worship, (ii) by offering/surrendering yourself to God fully, (iii) deepening your friendship with Him, and (iv) worshiping him even when he seems far away and unresponsive. These areas are further elaborate in our complete The Purpose Driven Life summary.

FULFILLING YOUR 2ND PURPOSE: BEING AN INTEGRAL PART OF GOD’S FAMILY

God’s second purpose for your life is to be a member of His family. You’re created to be part of God’s family. As His children, the church is our spiritual family and other believers are our brothers/ sisters. This spiritual family is eternal whereas our blood families can end with divorce, separation and death.

Days 15-21 are about considering (i) your place in God’s family and how you treat your family members, (ii) how you can give priority to your relationships, (iii) how you committed/involved you are to your local church (the body of Christ), (iv) if/how you can build real fellowships or the shared experience of Christian life (not just socializing with church friends), (v) how to make peace and repair broken fellowships, and (vi) protect the unity of the Church).

YOUR 3RD PURPOSE: BECOMING CHRIST-LIKE

Your third purpose is to become more like Jesus Christ—not to be a god, but to become godly through your actions and character. Humans are the only beings made in God’s image: we have immortal spirits, the intellectual ability to reason, the capacity to love, and the ability to know right from wrong. Your time on earth is meant to shape you and prepare you for eternity in Heaven. This involves more than prayer and Bible study; you must also practice Christ-like thinking/acting and develop new godly habits.

Days 22-28 focus on (i) deliberately choosing the right things to fulfill God’s purposes, (ii) maturing spiritually, (iii) embracing God’s Word with daily Christian living, (iv) using your circumstances and problems to build your character, and (v) overcoming temptation. To learn more details, check out our full 16-page version of The Purpose Driven Life summary.

YOUR 4TH PURPOSE: SERVING OTHERS WITH YOUR GIFTS (YOUR MINISTRY)

You were created for a unique role on earth (that no one else can fill). Every Christian (not just the pastors, priests and clergy) is called to God’s service (your Ministry). You serve Him by using your God-given abilities to help others. This is a full-time commitment, not something you do in your free time.

For Days 29-35, Warren takes you through what it means to (i) answer God’s call to service, (ii) identify and use the SHAPE that God specifically gave to you (your Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience), (iii) hone/nurture your shape, (iv) admit to and embrace your weaknesses and (v) become a true servant.

YOUR 5TH PURPOSE: SPREADING THE WORD TO NONBELIEVERS (YOUR MISSION)

Your ministry is about serving other believers, while your mission is about reaching out to nonbelievers. one of Jesus’ followers is commissioned to continue what he began on earth: to free God’s children from Satan’s power. Share the love of Christ with everyone you encounter in your daily work/life. In the process, you impact their eternal salvation.

Days 36-38 focus on how to (i) address the fears holding you back from your mission, (ii) craft and share your Life Message, and (iii) become a world-class tool for God to spread the Good News effectively.

LIVING THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE

Now that you know God’s 5 purposes for you on earth, you can start to (i) balance and fulfill all 5 purposes and (ii) develop a life purpose statement to guide your life. The last 2 days (days 39-40) focus on helping you to get started and truly live a purpose driven life.

Other Details in “ The Purpose Driven Life “

This is a detailed spiritual guidebook with a chapter for each of the 40 days summarized above. In our complete book summary bundle , which includes an inforgraphic, a 16-page text summary and a 25 minute audio summary, we cover an overview of your 5 purposes and the ideas for the 40-day spiritual discovery.

To dive deep into the exercises and reflections, purchase the book here which also includes: (i) extensive Biblical quotations, (ii) Biblical examples of people who lived out God’s will, (iii) stories from Warren’s own life and ministry, (iv) practical tips, and (v) a guided daily meditation for each of the 40 days. Alternatively, you can get more details and resources at www.purposedriven.com .

About the Author of The Purpose Driven Life

The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth am I Here For? is written by Rick Warren — an American Evangelical Christian pastor and founder of Saddleback Church, based in Lake Forest, California. In addition to bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren is the author of The Purpose- Driven Church and many other Christian books for adults and children. Saddleback Church is one of the largest and best-known Evangelical Christian churches in America.

The Purpose Driven Life Quotes

“Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do.” —The Bible

“You were made by God and for God—and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”

“The deepest level of worship is praising God in spite of pain, thanking God during a trial, trusting him when tempted, surrendering while suffering, and loving him when he seems distant.”

“Worship helps you focus on God; fellowship helps you face life’s problems; discipleship helps fortify your faith; ministry helps find your talents; evangelism helps fulfill your mission. There is nothing else on earth like the church!”

“Pride builds walls between people; humility builds bridges.”

“Christianity is not a religion or a philosophy, but a relationship and a lifestyle.”

“Spiritual growth is not automatic…You must want to grow, decide to grow, make an effort to grow, and persist in growing.”

“The battle for sin is won or lost in your mind. Whatever gets your attention will get you.”

“When we stop focusing on our own needs, we become aware of the needs around us.”

“God determines your greatness by how many people you serve, not how many people serve you.”

“Living on purpose is the only way to really live. Everything else is just existing.”

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An Informative Essay on Life on Earth In 150 Words

The planet Earth is the only home that we have. Many people have different opinions on what makes life worth living, but with so much to talk about, it can be hard to separate truth from fiction. What do you think makes life worth living?

Table of Contents

Importance Life On Earth Essay For Students

What is life on earth, an overview of life on earth.

Life on Earth is a beautiful and amazing phenomenon. From the first moment of existence, organisms have been striving to survive, grow, and thrive. This endless cycle of growth and development has led to the magnificent life we see today on our planet.

The diversity of life on Earth is simply astounding. From single-celled organisms to towering trees, every form of life has its own special way of surviving and thriving. No matter how different they may seem at first glance, all organisms share one common attribute – they are capable of reproducing themselves.

This ability to reproduce is what allows life to continue evolving and adapting over time. The ever-changing environment provides new opportunities for organisms to thrive, and as a result, they evolve into new and unique forms.

In short, life on Earth is a miraculous phenomenon that is constantly evolving and changing in interesting and unexpected ways. Thanks for reading!

How does life function on Earth?

The answer to this question is far from simple, and it has been debated by scientists and philosophers for centuries. However, the most general consensus in the scientific community is that life on Earth functions by harnessing energy from the sun. This energy is converted into chemical energy, which is then used to create biomolecules such as proteins and DNA. These biomolecules then interact with each other to create complex systems, including plants, animals, and humans.

Problems and risks: what are the dangers to life on Earth?

Life on Earth is in danger from a number of sources. The dangers to life on Earth come from a variety of sources, including natural disasters, environmental degradation, and human actions. Each year, a large number of people die as a result of these dangers.

Natural Disasters: Natural disasters cause death and injury to people all over the world. Natural disasters can be caused by weather conditions such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or tornadoes. They can also be caused by animals, such as pandemics or animal attacks. Natural disasters can also be caused by human activities, such as mining accidents or nuclear accidents.

Environmental Degradation: Environmental degradation results in the loss of natural resources and the destruction of habitats. This can cause wildlife to become extinct, decrease food supplies, and increase pollution levels. Environmental degradation can also lead to the release of harmful chemicals into the environment.

Human Actions: Human actions can also endanger life on Earth. Human activities that endanger life on Earth include the use of pesticides, the disposal of waste products, and the use of fossil fuels. Human actions that protect life on Earth include the promotion of renewable energy sources and the conservation of natural resources.

In conclusion, life on earth is a fascinating and complex journey. We are constantly evolving as a species, and our planet is in the midst of some very big changes. As we learn more about our planet and its systems, it’s evident that we need to take care of it – for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations. Thank you for reading this essay on life on earth – I hope you have enjoyed learning about all of the incredible things happening here on Earth.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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Why Am I Here? Creative Essay Example

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Why am I here? That’s a tough question for me or anyone else to ask themselves and then truthfully answer. And I’ve come a long way — from China — to ask it and discover the answer.

I never thought that I would find myself at UCI, or at any college for that matter. I was not a particularly good student in middle school — I was a bad student actually. Dramas with girls and conflicts with guys began at that time, right on schedule. I struggled with myself and my parents and friends about all these problems. And that gave me a nice excuse to keep right on being a bad student during my first year of high school.

But then things abruptly changed. My parents told me I would have to finish high school in Alabama, of all places. I didn’t like the idea at all at the time, but now I realize I have my parents to thank for forcing this upon me, because that was the point at which my whole future changed: at age sixteen, I had to grow up, to sink or swim.

With the start of my American life, I faced alone the cultural shock of dealing with an entirely new kind of high-school world. I started to pay attention in class, and to go to church every weekend. I recognized how much pressure my parents felt for me to succeed, how much expectation their own world was putting on them.  The clarity of this insight made me feel reborn, and I began to face all the things that the young have to face sooner or later: that we are not put on this earth free of responsibility. We have to pull our own weight.

I’ve now spent four years of my life in the United States. As a sophomore at UCI, I’ve came a long way to be where I am today. My freshman year began in the summer of 2013. I started with the Academic English program. I’ve taken four different courses in the program in order to get to the 39 Series, which, with its essays and deadlines, really challenged me.  But all good effort is rewarded, and last quarter I finished the 39 Series and entered the 39A Series. However, I also had to take Math 2B. Mathematics is hard on English majors, and I am no exception. I spent so much time working with numbers that I only got a C- working with words.     That was a shock. I was so rattled by it that I just decided to double down and apply to retake English 39A. Unfortunately, all of those classes were full. That was a very real problem, because if I could not retake the course that quarter, my parents would have to foot the bill for another one. But as I mentioned above, all good effort is rewarded. I persisted, finally meeting Abbey an accommodating instructor who enrolled me in her class.

So, why am I here? At the most basic level, I’m here to get a better grade in the 39A Series. And I’m here to graduate with a high GPA. But more broadly, I’m here to train myself to become a better me . I’m here to become someone who will meet and uphold all the responsibilities of my family. I’m here to earn the faith that my parents had, and have, in me. I’m here to prepare for all the things I can and must prepare for before can I step into another real world — a new world where I will have to grow up, all over again, right on schedule.

All good effort is rewarded.

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Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation

By Manvir Singh

Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles toward the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, in a dusty cloud half a mile away.

Hughes was among the best-known proponents of Flat Earth theory , which insists that our planet is not spherical but a Frisbee-like disk. He had built and flown in two rockets before, one in 2014 and another in 2018, and he planned to construct a “rockoon,” a combination rocket and balloon, that would carry him above the upper atmosphere, where he could see the Earth’s flatness for himself. The 2020 takeoff, staged for the Science Channel series “Homemade Astronauts,” was supposed to take him a mile up—not high enough to see the Earth’s curvature but hypeworthy enough to garner more funding and attention.

Flat Earth theory may sound like one of those deliberately far-fetched satires, akin to Birds Aren’t Real, but it has become a cultic subject for anti-scientific conspiratorialists, growing entangled with movements such as QAnon and COVID -19 skepticism. In “ Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything ” (Algonquin), the former Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill writes that the tragedy awakened her to the sincerity of Flat Earthers’ convictions. After investigating the Flat Earth scene and following Hughes, she had figured that, “on some subconscious level,” Hughes knew the Earth wasn’t flat. His death set her straight: “I was wrong. Flat Earthers are as serious as your life.”

Weill isn’t the only one to fear the effects of false information. In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “ Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It ” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine .” In “ Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity ” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “ Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It ” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”

Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity. Following the 2020 Presidential race, sixty per cent thought that misinformation had a major impact on the outcome, and, to judge from a recent survey, even more believe that artificial intelligence will exacerbate the problem in this year’s contest. The Trump and the DeSantis campaigns both used deepfakes to sully their rivals. Although they justified the fabrications as transparent parodies, some experts anticipate a “tsunami of misinformation,” in the words of Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the first C.E.O. of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” he told the Associated Press.

The fear of misinformation hinges on assumptions about human suggestibility. “Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other dangerous ideas, latch on to the brain and insert themselves deep into our consciousness,” van der Linden writes in “Foolproof.” “They infiltrate our thoughts, feelings, and even our memories.” Thagard puts it more plainly: “People have a natural tendency to believe what they hear or read, which amounts to gullibility.”

But do the credulity theorists have the right account of what’s going on? Folks like Mike Hughes aren’t gullible in the sense that they’ll believe anything. They seem to reject scientific consensus, after all. Partisans of other well-known conspiracies (the government is run by lizard people; a cabal of high-level pedophilic Democrats operates out of a neighborhood pizza parlor) are insusceptible to the assurances of the mainstream media. Have we been misinformed about the power of misinformation?

In 2006, more than five hundred skeptics met at an Embassy Suites hotel near O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, to discuss conspiracy. They listened to presentations on mass hypnosis, the melting point of steel, and how to survive the collapse of the existing world order. They called themselves many things, including “truth activists” and “9/11 skeptics,” although the name that would stick, and which observers would use for years afterward, was Truthers.

The Truthers held that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were masterminded by the White House to expand government power and enable military and security industries to profit from the war on terror. According to an explanation posted by 911truth.org, a group that helped sponsor the conference, George W. Bush and his allies gagged and intimidated whistle-blowers, mailed anthrax to opponents in the Senate, and knowingly poisoned the inhabitants of lower Manhattan. On that basis, Truthers concluded, “the administration does consider the lives of American citizens to be expendable on behalf of certain interests.”

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The Truthers, in short, maintained that the government had gone to extreme measures, including killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to carry out and cover up a conspiracy. And yet the same Truthers advertised the conference online and met in a place where they could easily be surveilled. Speakers’ names were posted on the Internet along with videos, photographs, and short bios. The organizers created a publicly accessible forum to discuss next steps, and a couple of attendees spoke to a reporter from the Times , despite the mainstream media’s ostensible complicity in the coverup. By the logic of their own theories, the Truthers were setting themselves up for assassination.

Their behavior demonstrates a paradox of belief. Action is supposed to follow belief, and yet beliefs, even fervently espoused ones, sometimes exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence over behavior. Take the “Pizzagate” story, in which Hillary Clinton and her allies ran a child sex ring from the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. In the months surrounding the 2016 Presidential election, a staggering number of Americans—millions, by some estimates—endorsed the account, and, in December of that year, a North Carolina man charged into the restaurant, carrying an assault rifle. Van der Linden and Berinsky both use the incident as evidence of misinformation’s violent implications. But they’re missing the point: what’s really striking is how anomalous that act was. The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews.

That certain deeply held beliefs seem insulated from other inferences isn’t peculiar to conspiracy theorists; it’s the experience of regular churchgoers. Catholics maintain that the Sacrament is the body of Christ, yet no one expects the bread to taste like raw flesh or accuses fellow-parishioners of cannibalism. In “ How God Becomes Real ” (2020), the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann recounts evangelical Christians’ frustrations with their own beliefs. They thought less about God when they were not in church. They confessed to not praying. “I remember a man weeping in front of a church over not having sufficient faith that God would replace the job he had lost,” Luhrmann writes. The paradox of belief is one of Christianity’s “clearest” messages, she observes: “You may think you believe in God, but really you don’t. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act as if he’s there.” It’s right out of Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The paradox of belief has been the subject of scholarly investigation; puzzling it out promises new insights about the human psyche. Some of the most influential work has been by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi Occupation, Sperber was smuggled to Switzerland when he was three months old. His parents returned to France three years later, and raised him as an atheist while imparting a respect for all religious-minded people, including his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.

The exercise of finding rationality in the seemingly irrational became an academic focus for Sperber in the nineteen-seventies. Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, he noticed that they made assertions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. “Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians,” Sperber wrote, “but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.”

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

In a masterly new book, “ Religion as Make-Believe ” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence.

One of Van Leeuwen’s insights is that people distinguish between different categories of belief in everyday speech. We say we “believe” symbolic ones but that we “think” factual ones are true. He has run ingenious experiments showing that you can manipulate how people talk about beliefs by changing the environment in which they’re expressed or sustained. Tell participants that a woman named Sheila sets up a shrine to Elvis Presley and plays songs on his birthday, and they will more often say that she “believes” Elvis is alive. But tell them that Sheila went to study penguins in Antarctica in 1977, and missed the news of his death, and they’ll say she “thinks” he’s still around. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized more than a century ago, religious beliefs seem to express commitments—we believe in God the way we believe in a parent or a loved one, rather than the way we believe chairs exist. Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them as believe in them.

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “ Not Born Yesterday .” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focussed more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.

After Mike Hughes’s death, a small debate broke out over the nature of his belief. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said that Hughes never really believed in a flat Earth. “It was a P.R. stunt,” he told Vice News. “We used the attention to get sponsorships and it kept working over and over again.” Space.com dug up an old interview corroborating Shuster’s statements. “This flat Earth has nothing to do with the steam rocket launches,” Hughes told the site in 2019. “It never did, it never will. I’m a daredevil!”

Perhaps it made sense that it was just a shtick. Hughes did death-defying stunts years before he joined the Flat Earthers. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1956 to an auto-mechanic father who enjoyed racing cars. At the age of twelve, Hughes was racing on his own, and not long afterward he was riding in professional motorcycle competitions. In 1996, he got a job driving limousines, but his dream of becoming the next Evel Knievel persisted; in 2002, he drove a Lincoln Town Car off a ramp and flew a hundred and three feet, landing him in Guinness World Records.

When Hughes first successfully launched a rocket, in 2014, he had never talked about the shape of the planet. In 2015, when he co-ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the next rocket flight, the stated motivation was stardom, not science: “Mad Mike Hughes always wanted to be famous so much that he just decided one day to build a steam rocket and set the world record.” He got two backers and three hundred and ten dollars. Shortly afterward, he joined the Flat Earth community and tied his crusade to theirs. The community supported his new fund-raising effort, attracting more than eight thousand dollars. From there, his fame grew, earning him features in a documentary (“Rocketman,” from 2019) and that Science Channel series. Aligning with Flat Earthers clearly paid off.

Not everyone believes that he didn’t believe, however. Waldo Stakes, Hughes’s landlord and rocket-construction buddy, wrote on Facebook that “Mike was a real flat earther,” pointing to the “dozens of books on the subject” he owned, and said that Hughes lost money hosting a conference for the community. Another of Hughes’s friends told Kelly Weill that Flat Earth theory “started out as a marketing approach,” but that once it “generated awareness and involvement . . . it became something to him.”

The debate over Hughes’s convictions centers on the premise that a belief is either sincere or strategic, genuine or sham. That’s a false dichotomy. Indeed, the social functions of symbolic beliefs—functions such as signalling group identity—seem best achieved when the beliefs feel earnest. A Mormon who says that Joseph Smith was a prophet but secretly thinks he was a normal guy doesn’t strike us as a real Mormon. In fact, the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers argued in “ Deceit and Self-Deception ” (2011) that we trick ourselves in order to convince others. Our minds are maintaining two representations of reality: there’s one that feels true and that we publicly advocate, and there’s another that we use to effectively interact with the world.

The idea of self-deception might seem like a stretch; Mercier has expressed skepticism about the theory. But it reconciles what appear to be contradictory findings. On the one hand, some research suggests that people’s beliefs in misinformation are authentic. In “Political Rumors,” for example, Berinsky describes experiments he conducted suggesting that people truly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that the U.S. government allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. “People by and large say what they mean,” he concludes.

On the other hand, there’s research implying that many false beliefs are little more than cheap talk. Put money on the table, and people suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point still stands. There may be people who believe in fake news the way they believe in leopards and chairs, but underlying many genuine-feeling endorsements is an understanding that they’re not exactly factual.

Van der Linden, Berinsky, and Thagard all offer ways to fight fabrication. But, because they treat misinformation as a problem of human gullibility, the remedies they propose tend to focus on minor issues, while scanting the larger social forces that drive the phenomenon. Consider van der Linden’s prescription. He devotes roughly a third of “Foolproof” to his group’s research on “prebunking,” or psychological inoculation. The idea is to present people with bogus information before they come across it in the real world and then expose its falsity—a kind of epistemic vaccination. Such prebunking can target specific untruths, or it can be “broad-spectrum,” as when people are familiarized with an array of misinformation techniques, from emotional appeals to conspiratorial language.

Prebunking has received an extraordinary amount of attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine against fake news, it was probably about van der Linden’s work. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Prime Minister’s office; similar interventions have popped up on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden reviews evidence that prebunking makes people better at identifying fake headlines. Yet nothing is mentioned about effects on their actual behavior. Does prebunking affect medical decisions? Does it make someone more willing to accept electoral outcomes? We’re left wondering.

The evidential gap is all the trickier because little research exists in the first place showing that misinformation affects behavior by changing beliefs. Berinsky acknowledges this in “Political Rumors” when he writes that “few scholars have established a direct causal link” between rumors and real-world outcomes. Does the spread of misinformation influence, say, voting decisions? Van der Linden admits, “Contrary to much of the commentary you may find in the popular media, scientists have been extremely skeptical.”

So it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation. What about the social conditions that make us susceptible? Van der Linden tells us that people are more often drawn to conspiracy theories when they feel “uncertain and powerless,” and regard themselves as “marginalized victims.” Berinsky cites scholarship suggesting that conspiratorial rumors flourish among people who experience “a lack of interpersonal trust” and “a sense of alienation.” In his own research, he found that a big predictor of accepting false rumors is agreeing with statements such as “Politicians do not care much about what they say, so long as they get elected.” A recent study found a strong correlation between the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs and levels of governmental corruption; in those beliefs, Americans fell midway between people from Denmark and Sweden and people from middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey, reflecting a fraying sense of institutional integrity. More than Russian bots or click-hungry algorithms, a crisis of trust and legitimacy seems to lie behind the proliferation of paranoid falsehoods.

Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

From this perspective, railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we’ve allowed to go to rack and ruin. It distracts us from our collective failures, from the conditions that degrade confidence and leave much of the citizenry feeling disempowered. By declaring that the problem consists of “irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds.

Mike Hughes was among the disenchanted. Sure, he used Flat Earth theory to become a celebrity, but its anti-institutionalist tone also spoke to him. In 2018, while seeking funding and attention for his next rocket ride, he self-published a book titled “ ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes: The Tell All Tale.” The book brims with outlandish, unsupported assertions—that George H. W. Bush was a pedophile, say—but they’re interspersed with more grounded frustrations. He saw a government commandeered by the greedy few, one that stretched the truth to start a war in Iraq, and that seemed concerned less with spreading freedom and more with funnelling tax dollars into the pockets of defense contractors. “You think about those numbers for a second,” he wrote, of the amount of money spent on the military. “We have homelessness in this country. We could pay off everyone’s mortgages. And we can eliminate sales tax. Everyone would actually be free.”

Hughes wasn’t a chump. He just felt endlessly lied to. As he wrote near the end of his book, “I want my coffee and I don’t want any whipped cream on top of it, you know what I mean? I just want this raw truth.” ♦

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