I am not sure what you mean.

If you mean, everyone trying to discern God’s intentions behind prophecies and songs etc. is arguing over a nonfact (there simply is no fact of the matter, because God has nothing to do with these prophecies), then indeed, that’s exactly right.

But once historians accept that (and all mainstream historians do), there remain facts of the matter regarding what each author meant (why they wrote what they did, what they thought it meant, and wanted others to understand it to mean), even lyricists; and standard methods of literary and historical analysis can indeed arrive at correct conclusions about that (indeed most of what history as a knowledge field consists of is exactly this: discerning, empirically, what authors meant).

There are some indiscernible cases (where we have lost the data needed to discern what all an author meant in this or that passage, in which case, that will be the empirical consensus: that the sense is obscure and no confident conclusion can be asserted against any other). But a lot are quite discernible. And there is a lot of good academic literature about this.

Zechariah 6 is a good example: actual experts on it all agree on what the author of it originally meant, as well as on what later Jewish interpreters like Philo re-thought it meant, and these are not arbitrary opinions but strong empirical arguments, based in evidence and sound logic. They are also correctly weighted (scholars admit to what we can be more certain of and what less, what options fit within a credible range, and so on).

Christian apologists and lazy polemicists are then doing pseudo-scholarship when they deny this or pretend it isn’t the case.

For what I mean, see: Kipp Davis Didn’t Check The Literature.

You can check the bibliography there and see extensive empirical (evidence-based) arguments across all scholarship that agrees with me as to what Zechariah originally meant and how that meaning was changed by later interpreters by the time of Philo.

Davis is the one engaging in pseudo-scholarship here by not even checking so as to know what the mainstream consensus is on this or on what evidence it is based (and it is soundly based on that evidence, which is why no real scholar disagrees with me on this point). So I am not disagreeing with any real scholars; I am simply repeating their consensus position. Davis is the one ignoring everything we are saying and falsely pretending to know better, and misleading the public on what even it is we said, much less its merits.

Davis trends pseudo-scholar on this subject a lot. See And So Kipp Davis Conclusively Demonstrates His Incompetence as a Scholar and Then Kipp Davis Fails to Heed My Advice and Digs a Hole for Himself and Kipp Davis’s Selective Confirmation and Ignoring of Everything I Actually Said in Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus. I document numerous pseudoscholarly moves across these analyses, showing Davis doing every single thing typifying pseudoscholarship.

And yet, so far as I can tell, only when it is this subject does Davis collapse into a pseudoscholar. I suspect this is because he was lazy and trapped himself in errors that he is too arrogant to admit to and thus correct, so he had to double down on crankery and lean on credentials and bluster to save face.

You discuss quotes like Zechariah 6:13 in your books and articles, and you cite scholars and I assume different opinions, but they can all be wrong totally. They are not being pseudo-scholars. It is just that they are guessing what the verse was originally meant to mean because poetry and prophecies are vague and ambiguous. I think people should not assume that scholars are right when it comes to the Bible.

P.S. And as I point out in the present article and elsewhere (e.g. On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and in this other comment here), crankery/apologetics relies on stolen prestige, so it will try to accuse real scholarship of being crank on these same criteria.

For example, on the third criterion above (infinite goalposting), they will strip away any question of whether and whose arguments are fallacious, and instead claim that any theory that has a defense against every attack is therefore crank, when the actual distinguishing feature is whether the defense is fallacious, and thus whether the critique it is facing is fallacious. So that climate scientists “have an answer for everything” becomes evidence of infinite goalposts, when it’s not. Likewise, non-crank experts will be accused of relying on fallacies when they are not, or making stuff up when they are not.

Cranks/apologists need to trade on the “prestige” that these arguments carry, without “having the goods” but only pretending to. So they will accuse people of making ad hominem arguments when in fact they are not, of telling just-so stories when they are not, of making fallacious appeals to authority when they are not.

This is all facilitated by the fact that there are real versions of these arguments. For example, revealing incompetence and dishonesty in making an argument is not formally ad hominem but “looks” like it, because the scholar is made to look bad, so they trade on this insulting them to claim that is all that has been done, when in fact a relevant and substantive point has been made against them. Likewise, documenting the scale of a consensus and what it is based on is not an argument from authority but “looks” like it, because it does appeal to authorities, but it is actually appealing to the quality and corroboration of their epistemic findings, which is directly pertinent to determining what is true.

So you have to be on your guard against pseodoscholars abusing the very definitions of peudoscholarship to try and hide their status as pseudoscholars by trying to falsely make all their critics out to be pseodoscholars instead. Which means we have to always be critical thinkers and weigh who is making these critiques legitimately, and who is not.

There are experts in crankery in other fields (historians of WW2 can specialize in studying Holocaust Denial; historians of modern religions can specialize in UFO cults; historians of environmental history can specialize in climate denialism; historians of anti-semitism can specialize in lizard theory; there are secular historians of Mormonism; etc.). So that’s not odd.

As to the question, what demarcates pseudo- from real sciences, that’s a huge subfield in philosophy (see Oxford, Stanford, IEP, even Wikipedia).

I have proposed answers in various places: see my discussion of what demarcates them in Is 90% of All EvoPsych False? and (in respect to philosophy itself) You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If and in respect to history in my subsection on Infinite Goalposts.

From the latter I find the common theme to be that a typical crank “never has any defensible examples, rarely knows what he is talking about, gets a lot wrong, makes stuff up, never admits an error, and is generally” a “frustrating delusional fanatic.”

In more formal terms:

• Pseudoscholars rely substantially on fallacies of reason. Rather than occasionally guilty of a fallacy, their theories are built on a foundation of them. When a scholar is widely dependent on pseudologic (arguments that “look” like logic but analyze as fallacious) they are probably a pseudoscholar.
• Armchairs over research. The defining activity of a scholar is competent research, knowing basic facts, and building on past consensus work. Pseudoscholars either rely overmuch on “armchair facts” than actually researched-and-checked facts or they don’t build on past foundations at all but reject everything inconvenient for their point and “start over” as if they can single-handedly rewrite all the facts of a long-established knowledge-field. These can include treating “just so stories” as confirmed facts, and every other kind of possibiliter fallacy. They thus rely on made-up facts or even outright lies about the facts. This is a major sign of pseudoscholarship.
• Rejection of all standards of expert review. This is what I call “infinite goalposts,” whereby even a sound refutation or challenge is dismissed with wordwalls of fallacious excuse-making. Often this manifests as simply avoiding peer review altogether. But it can also manifest after surviving a lax peer review process, when the scholar never admits a mistake even when clearly caught in one, or never abandons a theory no matter how dubious it has become. The whole point of standards in knowledge fields is to limit exactly this outcome by putting sound epistemic guardrails on what can be confidently declared. Hence real scholarship is supposed to always be “evidence over authority,” and thus not reliant on Arguments from Prestige. Pseudoscholarship will browbeat audiences with credentials or bibliographies rather than let evidence trump both.

By that definition, all apologetics is pseudoscholarship. This does not depend on it being deliberately dishonest (a pseudoscholar might delusionally believe they are doing everything correctly), but it can be deliberately dishonest (and sometimes you can tell, but not always).

Also, though a pseudoscholar will by definition be someone who tends to produce (or only produces) pseudoscholarship, it is also possible for a real scholar to do so. In that case, they have and know all the correct skills and standards and rely on them most of the time, but resort to pseudoscholarship only occasionally (either out of laziness, or a dishonest agenda, or a particular delusion).

I provide another checklist for spotting pseudoscholarship in my Evo-Psych article, which I here have rewritten to apply to history:

• It pretends to be professional history (rather than amateur history or historical fiction).
• It declares a certainty far out of proportion to the evidence (it is not properly empirical).
• It relies on, and continues to defend, fallacious inference procedures (it does not learn).
• It makes claims that are unfalsifiable in principle.
• Or declares as known, claims that are unfalsifiable in practice.
• Or never allows its claims to be affected by falsification tests.

In short, pseudoscholars “don’t check” and “make stuff up” and “avoid logic-and-falsification testing.” And they do this repeatedly toward a focused objective (crankery), not on scattered occasions (error).

Calling research crank research is interesting. I have seen a lot of that, but I think the New Testament was written by crackpots, so you have people who get PhD’s and are experts in the writings of ancient crackpots. When modern crackpots discuss those writings, the scholars dislike their crackpot opinions, but ironically they are experts in the writings of crackpots. In 2,000 years, there may be people who are experts in the writings of today’s crackpots. You could reject their work today, but in the future there might be people like you who are experts in their work.

Oh dear… When I speak of phobia, I speak of fear that has roots in the subconscious. The irrationality comes from the need for the ego to rationalize, to abstract the subconscious, irrational fear. It’s similar to how “judenhass” became “antisemitism” or Lee Atwater’s famous spiel about how in the 50s, white supremacist political activists were culturally allowed to display their hatred for black people by openly using slurs against them, but then, in the 70s, they had to switch to talking about things like “forced busing.” In each case, an abstraction is employed for the purpose of papering over hatred. “Antisemitism” is merely an abstraction of judenhass that has taken on a life of its own! Just like Atwater’s abstractions for hatred took on lives of their own. You can point to any position on the tree, but the roots are planted in hatred. How the roots express themselves in the ego of the individual is less a concern than the subconscious roots themselves. The so called “hero’s journey” is merely for the ego to plumb the depths of the subconscious and flip the switch on their inner light and step through their shadow and all that sort of thing! When you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! Nietzsche’s abyss is only staring back at you because it is the subconscious, and the subconscious is on some level a distorted mirror of the conscious self, and vice versa! How can we get bigots to overcome their bigotry if they themselves, their egos are not willing to plunge the depths of their subconscious, because that’s how deep the roots of bigotry lie! It’s like how I didn’t noticed I was seeking external validation until I noticed that I had self-image issues because I was seeking validation from a completely external perspective that I had internalized! It took an extraordinary amount of focus for me to see past my own ego in a specific moment to see that that particular external perspective was absolutely worthless! And I might as well shake it off like a camel shakes off dust! That’s how I stepped through my shadow! Sure, I could’ve figured this out in therapy, but now it’s a story! 🤪

As they say, abuse begets abuse. The same abusive way Christians are indoctrinated tends to be exactly the way they epistemically abuse everyone else now. The insults, the veiled threats, the browbeating, the gaslighting, the exaggerated displays of confidence, and the misappropriation of prestige, thereby misusing arguments to sound well-reasoned, then attacking anyone who would call that out.

But as with anyone mentally ill, there is no path forward, no healing, without the victim first admitting they are a victim and need help. We can’t cause that to happen, except by continually rousing their cognitive dissonance until they realize it themselves (as every ex-Christian will attest is the only way they ever got out). And by the time they get to that point, they will get themselves out. So they won’t need any particular help from us, but what we’ve already done to make truth, reason, and information available to them.

In the sense that trauma is literally any bad thing that happened to someone (even an event the person doesn’t recognize as bad), sure, this could be true. We often cannot pinpoint our own core reasons for the way we are, and negative experiences are just as likely to build our character as positive ones. But using this definition, it doesn’t help anything. There’s no way to meaningfully group and address this level of negative experience, and there’s also likely no way an outside person (perhaps not even the person themselves) could ever even discover all the events that contributed here to “heal”. It also doesn’t follow that healing any particular “trauma” here will change one’s ideology (which is made of an entire web of beliefs and fears).

In the scientific definition from psychology, this is likely false. People do not require a true or perceived threat of harm or death to come to poor conclusions. They need not have a pathological fear (phobia) of something to be opposed to it. Now sure, certain segments of our political system tend to trade in fear in order to organize their base, but this is not necessarily pathological in nature. More often it’s simply misinformation (or lack of information). A midwestern dad who is voting to close the southern boarder likely doesn’t perceive a Mexican immigrant as an immediate threat to himself or his family, probably isn’t afraid of them, and if actually asked probably doesn’t have any particular problem with them. If they believe immigration is negatively impacting the economy and political landscape of the nation (misinformation), then it is a rational action to reduce or eliminate that immigration.

I think the narrative you are proposing actually provides value, but only half the actual battle. Using that way of thinking, it should help you to empathize with opponents and look for places to meet them where they are. It should give you more sympathy for opponents, which is much more likely to lower their emotional defenses. But if you follow that up by insisting they have been hurt and need to heal before they can see the light, it’s going to backfire. If instead you started with empathy, then moved to working on education, you would probably change more minds. You need both parts to actually change minds.

Lacking that kind of foresight (to forestall audience collapse with responsible research rather than clickbait) is why these people are doing this in the first place, though, so it is a death-loop.

If they were just grifters, they would either not depend on audience bases but just clickbait new eyes constantly for sales conversions, or they would stick to subjects they can maintain the appearance of authority in (and know how to couch everything they say to avoid undeniable falsification). But rather, people like Musk actually think they know everything and are good at this; so they cannot foresee that they will fail, and thus certainly cannot foresee the consequences of failing. And those who are untouchable (like Musk or Trump who can never become “not rich” no matter what disastrous decisions they make or outright crimes they commit) will never learn, because they can just burn a base they have lost and walk away, and not care.

Meanwhile, the things you and I are talking about, regarding their strategically inconsistent skepticism and claims of doing their own research, can be umbrella’d under a common strategy: cranks and the delusional (as well as grifters emulating them for cash—which is why these are often hard to tell apart) will trade on “respectable” modes of argument (to gain the prestige that attaches to them), fuck up the argument (use it fraudulently or incorrectly), but convince themselves or others that simply because they used a respectable argument, that therefore they have successfully defended whatever claim.

For example, ad hominem.

Accusing someone of ad hominem can be a valid critique and has prestige as such (even if they don’t know what it’s called, people recognize that ad hominem is a fallacy and why it is a fallacy); so cranks will mis-use the accusation, to claim the prestige of the argument without having actually used a valid form of the argument.

For example, they will be caught being incompetent and lying, and then accuse their critic of an “ad hominem” fallacy, for having “disparaged” them as liars and incompetent. But that is not the fallacy (catching someone relevantly lying or not knowing what they are talking about are pertinent critiques). But because it “looks” like the fallacy, they can falsely claim it, and thus convince themselves (or any ready dupes) that they have made a valid point and thus defended themselves.

The same thing happens when a target is a woman and any criticism of what she says is labeled sexist for “attacking her because she’s a woman” (without any evidence that that is why she was critiqued at all). The prestige of “that was just sexism” or “her critic is just a sexist” still attaches, yet without having been earned.

Likewise with “doing your own research,” which is a valid criticism (e.g. people who blithely remain ignorant of corporate or political or media manipulation need to “do their own research,” which is the whole basis of the actual concept of “woke” as waking up to what’s really going on), except when it isn’t (when the “do your own research” requested or completed is bogus). But the prestige of the argument still attaches even when it isn’t earned. This is why cranks resort to arguments like this.

This is also why they are inconsistent: they switch to whatever position they need to take to defend themselves, and as long as the resulting contradiction is more than two steps of reasoning away, they are immune to noticing and thus acknowledging it. If it’s ever called out, all they have to do is change the subject or move the goalposts or gaslight. Because it takes too many steps of reasoning to make it “plain in one go,” many “exit strategies” exist to rescue them psychologically. That none of them rescue them logically is irrelevant to maintaining the delusion or grift.

Notice that all crank “red pill” style language is under the same umbrella. Literally in the manosphere (who actually say “red pill”), but every conspiracy and crankery has some equivalent notion of “going woke,” and thus how everyone else is asleep and thus ignorant of “what’s really going on.” Hence every crank, even misogynists, invents their own version of “woke” (and doesn’t get the irony).

They do this because it is a respectable argument. The actual original woke folk were right, and as such, their idea spread across entire populations, to the point of becoming a threat to the cranks, grifters, and delusionals, who thus had to attack “the undesirable” woke while defending their own—which they can do by calling it something else (like becoming “red pilled” instead of “woke,” another example of hiding a fallacy behind more than two layers of reasoning so the average delusional won’t find it).

In this way cranks and delusionals (and the grifters mimicking them) can trade of the prestige of the “idea” of “going woke” without actually earning it (because real woke is based on a critical investigation of reality; whereas theirs is not, it is only constructed to look like it is).