You’ve heard that the Bible has been perverted and changed by nefarious and hidden forces.

You’ve heard that aliens built the pyramids and the government is hiding flying saucers in Area 51.

You’ve heard that the moon landing never happened and it was all a giant hoax.

You need stop listening to crap, then. Aren’t you smarter than that?

The Bible has been copied and recopied for thousands of years by thousands of people. Unsurprisingly, the thousands of copies we have from these thousands of years look pretty similar to each other. Some spelling differences, a few changes in word order—think about what happened when you copied your buddy’s paper in school—but overall, there’s too many copies made by too many people in too many scattered places for any nefarious group to have ever hidden or controlled anything.

Think about it: how good are you at getting your children to clean their rooms? Or getting your teenagers to behave? You think anyone could get everyone to obey the hidden nefarious ones that these theories suppose had to have existed? Fiction is fun, but only preschool children think it’s describing real life.

If aliens have landed, then why do you have so much trouble getting your computer to boot up? And why’s NASA spending so much money struggling just to get into orbit if we’ve reverse engineered flying saucers that can move like the Star Ship Enterprise? And if they knew there was life out there, don’t you think NASA would tell everyone? How much easier would it be then for them to get more money out of the federal budget? You know, they get less than one percent of it now. The feds spend more than twice as much just on the food stamp program than they do on getting astronauts into space.

If the moon landing was a hoax, how’d we convince the Russians to go along? Let alone the French? And have you looked at the cheesy special effects they had in the 60’s? Like that would fool anyone!

We all like conspiracies and secrets, but remember, real life isn’t like in the movies. It just doesn’t work that way. No one’s really in control. The good guys don’t always win. Neither do the bad guys. And sometimes things just go wrong, or sometimes things just go right. Napoleon is quoted as saying, after one of his generals was accused of treason for losing a battle: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

And humans are pretty smart all by themselves. We don’t need no stinking aliens to build piles of rocks like the pyramids. We can pile up rocks pretty damn well all by ourselves if we have good enough motivation. And really: aliens have nothing better to do with themselves than mutilate cattle and make intricate designs in cornfields? Is that what you’d do as a member of a technologically advanced civilization after traveling a thousand light years? Why? Me, I’d be looking for a good burger.