Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything?

A short empirical check on the (mis-attributed, fake-Chesterton/Lewis) line that people who stop believing in God will 'believe anything.' Scott first notes the cherry-picking confounder in the Economist's right-coded conspiracy list (QAnon etc. just track right-wingness), then looks at politically-neutral woo -- UFOs, Bigfoot, astrology -- across religiosity. The pattern: strongly religious people AND outright atheists are both relatively skeptical (evangelicals and atheists are the two most UFO-skeptical groups -- a 'Baptists and Bootleggers alliance'), while the believers cluster in the squishy middle (weakly religious non-churchgoers, vague agnostics). Concludes the fake quote is true in a weird U-shaped way -- a coherent worldview at either pole inoculates against credulity -- while admitting no single mechanism (smarter/more-intellectual? closed-against-the-supernatural? but neither materialism nor Biblical literalism actually precludes Bigfoot) fully explains it.

Quality 65 · Strong. Strong/Solid edge. A clean, fair empirical check that does the small job nobody else bothered to do (separate neutral woo from right-coded conspiracies, find the U-shape), with the nice Baptists-and-Bootleggers observation and a good source-checking opening. Light and short -- low Strong.

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. Moderate, low. The U-shaped-credulity finding is a mildly fresh empirical nugget; the post is mostly a data-check, not a new frame.

Real-world impact 1 · Negligible. Negligible. A light empirical post with no material reach. 1.