Odd ideas spread because they're interesting, not because they're true. Here are some of the best-known, each sorted by what the evidence says. We also look at weak claims from the atheist side, because a site that only checks the other team isn't checking.
1) What exactly is claimed? Say it in one sentence. 2) What would we expect to find if it were true? 3) Is it there? 4) Who checked? People with no stake, or only fans? 5) Is there a plainer explanation? The plainer one usually wins.
The ratings
Supported real evidence · Partly true a true seed, a false story · Unproven no good evidence either way · Rejected experts looked and said no · Disproven tested and failed
2. Was the Bible written on drugs?
Every few years someone says religion began with hallucinogens. Some of this is serious scholarship, some is speculation, and some is silly. The key point first: even if a vision came from a plant, a fever or a brain state, that wouldn't by itself show whether the vision was true or false. The question is what the evidence shows.
Jesus as a mushroom (John Allegro, 1970) Rejected
The claim: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross argued Christianity grew out of a cult using the Amanita muscaria mushroom, with Biblical names being coded words for it.
The evidence: Allegro was a real Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, but linguists across the field rejected his word-derivations, and a group of senior scholars wrote publicly against the book. Not a single early Christian text, image or practice backs it up. (Later art-history claims about a "mushroom tree" in a Plaincourault fresco are also rejected by experts.)
The burning bush and Moses on DMT Unproven
The claim: Israeli psychologist Benny Shanon (2008) suggested Moses' encounter on Sinai could reflect a drink made from an Acacia plant (with DMT) and a Syrian rue (an MAO inhibitor), like ayahuasca.
The evidence: The plants exist in the region, but no text mentions such a drink and no archaeology shows it. It's a "could have", not a "did". Most Biblical scholars treat Exodus as a later composite text, not an eyewitness drug report.
"Cannabis" in the anointing oil Rejected
The claim: Hebrew qaneh bosem in Exodus 30:23 means cannabis (Sula Benet, 1936).
The evidence: The words mean "fragrant cane", usually identified as calamus or lemongrass. The sound-alike with "cannabis" is a coincidence, and Hebrew has a different word for hemp.
Ergot, the Eleusinian Mysteries and Delphi Partly true
The claim: Ancient Greek initiation rites used a barley drink (kykeon) that may have been spiked with ergot, a fungus with LSD-like compounds (Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck, 1978).
The evidence: A plausible suggestion about Greek rites, still debated. It isn't a claim about the Bible. At Delphi, the idea that the oracle breathed ethylene from a crack was widely popular after 2001, but later work questions it.
Brain "God spot" and the God helmet Disproven (an atheist-leaning claim)
The claim: Magnetic fields on the temporal lobes cause religious experience (Michael Persinger).
The evidence: A 2005 Swedish study (Granqvist et al.) repeated it double-blind and found the effect came from suggestibility, not magnets. Religious experience is real, but the helmet doesn't explain it.
3. Relics and signs
The Shroud of Turin Rejected
The claim: A linen cloth showing a man's body is Jesus' burial shroud.
The evidence: In 1988, three labs (Arizona, Oxford and Zurich) carbon-dated samples independently. Their results, published in Nature in 1989, placed the cloth between 1260 and 1390 CE with 95% confidence. It first appears in the historical record in the 1350s, and in 1389 a bishop (Pierre d'Arcis) wrote that an artist had confessed to painting it. Critics argue the sample was a medieval repair, but later sample studies did not support that. Later reanalysis of the raw data found some variation, not a first-century date.
The "Bible Code" Disproven
The claim: Skipping letters in the Hebrew Bible reveals hidden predictions (Michael Drosnin, 1997).
The evidence: McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai (Statistical Science, 1999) showed that the same method finds "predictions" in Moby Dick and in a translation of War and Peace. With enough text and enough freedom, you can find almost anything.
4. Modern myths and conspiracies
The Mandela effect Explained
The claim: Large numbers of people remember things that "changed" (Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s; "Berenstein" Bears; a monocle on the Monopoly man; a black tip on Pikachu's tail), so reality shifted.
The evidence: Memory isn't a recording. Elizabeth Loftus's research shows memories are rebuilt each time we recall them, and a false detail repeated by many people reinforces itself. Many people share the same wrong guess because it seems like the pattern (Berenstain vs. -stein, which sounds more usual). Records show Mandela died in 2013, the Monopoly man has never worn a monocle, and Pikachu's tail has no black tip.
The Hollow Earth Disproven
The claim: Earth is hollow, and maybe has people living inside (Edmond Halley proposed a version in 1692).
The evidence: Earth's average density, worked out from Cavendish's 1798 experiment, is about 5.5 g/cm³, twice that of surface rock, so the inside must be denser, not empty. In 1936 Inge Lehmann used earthquake waves to find a solid inner core, and seismometers still track it today.
Moon landings were faked Disproven
The evidence: Apollo left mirrors that scientists still bounce lasers from, and 382 kg of moon rock with unique features have been studied by labs worldwide. The USSR, who had every reason to expose a fake, tracked the missions. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the landing sites and tracks since 2009.
The Illuminati and the "New World Order" Partly true
The claim: A secret society still secretly runs the world.
What's real: The Bavarian Illuminati was real, founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, and was banned by the Bavarian government in 1785–87. There is no good evidence that it survived. The modern theory takes a real, short-lived group and stretches it across 240 years. Claims like this can't be falsified, because every missing piece of evidence is taken as proof of the cover-up, which is a reason to be suspicious of them.
Flat Earth and Young Earth Disproven
Both have their own pages with tests you can do yourself: Flat Earth and Young Earth.
5. Weak claims on the atheist side
Atheists believe wrong things too. These come up a lot, and this site doesn't rely on any of them.
"Jesus never existed" Rejected by most historians
The Christ myth theory has defenders (Richard Carrier, Robert Price), but most historians, including non-Christian ones like Bart Ehrman (Did Jesus Exist?, 2012), think a Jewish preacher named Jesus was crucified under Pilate. That is a separate question from whether the miracle stories are true.
"Horus, Mithra and Krishna were all born of virgins on December 25" Disproven
Popular since the 2007 film Zeitgeist. Horus was conceived by Isis and the dead Osiris, not a virgin birth, and December 25th isn't in any of these myths. Nothing shows Mithraism had a Dec 25 birth story, and Franz Cumont's older theory that Mithraism was the same as Christianity has been largely abandoned.
"Einstein was an atheist" Partly true
Einstein rejected a personal God who answers prayers, and called the idea of God "the product of human weakness" in a 1954 letter. But he also said he was not an atheist and preferred the pantheism of Spinoza. Both camps quote him, and neither gets him cleanly.
"Religion is a mental illness" Rejected
Psychiatry does not classify ordinary religious belief as a disorder. Delusions can have religious themes, but sharing a common belief with a culture isn't the same.
6. Why do these spread?
- They give a hidden-knowledge feeling. "They don't want you to know" is flattering.
- A seed of truth makes the rest feel safe. Tartary was real, the Illuminati were real, and Allegro was a real scholar.
- They can't lose. If a missing record means the cover-up worked, no evidence could ever change the theory. That's a warning sign. A claim worth believing says what would show it wrong.
- They're social. Sharing a surprising idea builds a group, and groups protect their ideas.
The same habits also keep religious claims alive. So the five questions at the top work on every claim, including the ones on this site. Found an error here? Send a correction.
See also: tools for thinking · where you're coming from · how science checks things