Is this the longest issue yet?
6th March 2023
It’s a bumper issue today, but I make no apologies for bringing you a ridiculously long email! If you’re using a web based client like GMail, you may need to click the “View entire message” link or similar to read the whole newsletter this week, or click the “Read this in your browser” button at the top of the email to open the newsletter as a web page in your browser.
We start with a short story of a work email I responded to with some skepticism - an instance of the usual corporate silliness where people don’t understand how to not treat a single bad study as gospel.
Committee member Sara Passmore messaged me the other day to tell me that our newsletter was mentioned in Byron Clark’s recently published book, “Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists”. I can’t tell you if it’s any good, as I’ve not read it yet, but thankfully Sara can - she’s written us a brief review during a short break from writing her PhD research proposal. Here’s the snippet where our newsletter is mentioned:
This week’s newsletter is so full that we’ve had to delay publishing an article from Katrina, but in its stead I have an email that Peter Clemerson of the Humanists sent to Katrina’s mother and step-father, the owners of Stonehenge Aotearoa (yes, it’s a small world!). Peter’s skeptical radar went off when he was told a story about the destruction of a part of the original UK stonehenge, and did what any good skeptic would do - researched the heck out of it on the internet, and then penned an email detailing his findings. Rather than try to wrangle the email into an article, I’ve simply published Peter’s email, and the response, as they were forwarded to my inbox - I think it works quite well being able to read Peter’s polite expression of skepticism, and Richard and Kay’s short but kind and grateful response.
Finally we have three articles on a topical issue for New Zealand, Eastern Lightning. Dan Ryan and myself have both joined this cult recently, and we’ve been learning about the tricks of the trade when it comes to running a religious group that wants to grow rapidly in New Zealand. I’ve written about my experience of being in one of the beginner groups for this cult, up to my first graduation on the way to the hallowed heights of Level 3, while Dan for now has been looking into how they use Facebook to reach lots of people in a short space of time, and has done a great job of dissecting the information he’s collated. Bronwyn has delved into the history of this cult, which is no easy task given that most of the sources out there can’t be trusted - the people mainly writing about this church seem to be the church itself, other churches in China, and the Chinese Communist Party - and each of those groups has an axe to grind. I’m impressed and grateful that she’s managed to wade through all of that and put together a coherent timeline of events.
In a couple of weeks I plan to bring you all the second part of my story, and I’m hoping we’ll also have Dan’s perspective on how the lessons went, and what it was like being undercover in a cult. We may even be able to convince past newsletter contributor Tim Atkin to dig up some information about how the church manages to get away with operating in China when they’ve been put on the CCP’s naughty list. It’s great to be able to work with other skeptics on a large project like this - I’m very thankful to my colleagues who have done an amazing job of diving into the details and separating the wheat from the chaff, to figure out what’s behind the curtain of Eastern Lightning.
