There is a new sport in town: Making claims by supposedly asking a question.

It started as a known advertisement technique. Are you looking for a quiet and inexpensive washing machine? Why do people buy XXX beverage? The late English comedian Benny Hill once had a quite amusing video clip about this. It naturally slipped into the political world: What did John Doe do for you?

With the combination of religion and media networks, this has boomed. There is the famous question-which-is-not-really-a-question “Why are you here?” (See here), there are other similar questions, and then came Quora.

The simplest method of implementing this emerging technique is by taking a claim you want to publish, and insert a “Why”, “How”, “What” etc. in front, with a bit of sophistication. Just treat the often-wrong message of your claim as if it is widely known as the truth. Let’s see Quora again: “If souls have free will, why do some souls choose to incarnate as cockroach?” Hmmm… So “souls” and “incarnation” are given. We only need to ask about their specifics.

And then of course there will be those who will seriously answer. There always are. We can encourage them by answering ourselves using a different ID. And after a while we have a whole thread, which we can use as a reference in future-such-questions, and so on and so forth.

Ever wondered how the Bible was actually written?