The trouble with the Internet

"South Park did a decent job encapsulating a skeptics view of the Joseph Smith story, but in the main I would take Tacitus over South Park for historical accuracy, and South Park over Tacitus for poop jokes.

It's funny if you read The Annals (heh heh) of Tacitus that he's largely objective about events and other cultures, and saves all his mouth foaming for Christians. I guess Paul must have been as popular in Rome as he was with the Jerusalem church."

This is a quote taken from a rather popular Internet forum that acts as a sendup of dozens of contemporary news items. The first paragraph may be taken as strict opinion, and not subject to any meaningful comment.
The second paragraph is more interesting. The first sentence presents an opinion of Tacitus, a complete unknown to more one half of one percent of persons currently alive. It then states that Tactus is somehow historically accurate about "events and other cultures," and only irrational about Christians.
Well, someone reading this might then go and read a translation of Tacitus, or read some hideous scholarly article about Tacitus, but by and large that sentence will sit in their memory like some tiny, poisonous toad, unquestioned. In fact, Tacitus was a historian in the sense that what he said was accepted up into modern times as "historical," but some of what he says is factual, and some is just risible. In between, we have such things as his commentary on the Germans, who Tacitus chose to present as a moral model to contrast with the Rome of his own time, which he despised for its decadence and corruption.
The Germans were described as strong, simple, sturdy folk with good bedrock moral values and great integrity…in fact, superior in just about every way Tacitus could think of, except, of course, that they were barbarians.
This presentation of the Germanic tribes was taken out of its Taciturn context and was a standard reading in classrooms throughout Germany well into modern times. German youth were presented with an opinion (what was, in fact, simply whole cloth from some Roman who had never been near Germany or the Germans, except perhaps some he had run into in Rome) as if it were demonstrable historical fact.
Generations of German youth were persuaded to accept Tacitus' account as the basis for the superiority of the Germans and German culture, which was part of the foundation on which the Hohenzollern Empire built its theory that Germany was entitled to its "place in the sun," and on which the Nazis built their theories of race and world conquest.
So much for objectivity.

Science is in Intensive Care

Attempts to popularize Science and rationality as it was purveyed 30 or 40 years ago was invariably done by someone with credentials, and who approached it in a systematic manner (Martin Gardner comes to mind), and where what you learned invariably made sense in one's further readings*.
Now.....the best way to put it is that we are screwed. The popularization of Science has been taken over by movies, TV and the mass media, and there is so much that is twisted, rampantly Procrustean, or just plain wrong that there is literally nowhere to begin.
It may be that Mass Man never had any real chance of integrating Science with spirituality and a balanced view of the world, but we'll likely never find out.

*My citations here should in no way be construed as to apply any label of atheist or rationalist to me. Nothing could be further from the truth.