This is what I liked about the alternative presented on the Scott Creighton site (as a fun read), he at least proposed an alternative theory that was still about some kind of religion induced insanity. If they were vaults that were supposed to carry things forward past the end of the world, then it at least makes some sense that you’d make such a huge thing to house such a small space.
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That Grauniad list of Carson beliefs had me going for a while, before I worked out that the author is a sartirist.
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Civilization references aside - this is actually what people believed in Europe in the Middle Ages. So apparently Ben Carson holds literally Mediæval views on things.
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Apparently he has never played civilization. Granaries increase your food storage. Pyramids prevent unrest during revolution.
It’s just so hard for me to tell what kind of crazy is not possible!
I have to work tomorrow, with this non functioning brain. I fear.
FOR THE WIN!! well played Clyde, well played
Carson appeals strongly to Republican voters, because he’s the first candidate who can actually take his brain out and play with it.
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“My own personal theory…”
Thus the basis of religion and faith. Have a nice fanciful idea, then decide that it is true and convince others that it is true.
Believers are exactly that. They are told stories, and are inclined to choose to believe them.
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Now, this is just silly. Everyone knows the pyramids were built because the Egyptians had huge numbers of razors they needed to keep sharp.
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Oh Boing Boing you never fail to entertain me. 
Heck, I was literally raised a Seventh-day Adventist. Same as what Carson is now. I know all about the crazy.
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Not very surprisingly, the issue has come up on Reddit’s AskHistorians. That’s one specific quote as a starting point:
But that’s not all. It is a fairly well-known idea.
I’m not inclined to give Carson much benefit of the doubt; but I have to wonder whether that particular claim is nonsense; or whether it represents a position on the assorted touchy issues that led some researchers, public health types, and other interested parties to just throw up their hands on the matter of ‘identity’ and coin the brutally-unwieldy-but-strictly-behavioral “men who have sex with men” jargon.
If you are interested in empirical study of human behavior; or trying to run an STD prevention program, or similar; it’s a sensible if ugly coinage: sort of like the shortcut that biologists take by talking about ‘deceptive signalling’ rather than getting bogged down in the question of whether animals are ‘lying’ to one another or not.
Despite it’s utility, though, it hasn’t found especially ubiquitous lay acceptance: it’s both clunky as hell and, even among people who readily accept that ‘bisexual’ is a thing; it’s not uncommon for the homosexual aspects to be treated as having greater affective salience.
If you want to advance the claim that prison makes men gay-as-in-identifying-as-homosexual; you have just stumbled into the relative paucity of even self-report data on the subject(and it’s a subject where self-reporting might well be of limited worth); and the general problem that making ‘identity’ claims is a much, much, bigger can of worms than making behavioral claims.
If you merely suspect that prolonged confinement in an all-male environment without access to potential female partners might increase the relative attractiveness, and frequency, of homosexual sex acts by substantially constraining the alternatives; you are really looking at a hypothesis that is more banal than controversial.
If you do not see, or do not accept, any distinction between ‘being gay’ and, at least on some occasions and under some circumstances engaging in sex acts with other men; you’ll treat these two claims as equivalent.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Carson is not disposed to nuance in this area; which would lead to making the problematic identity claim as though it is supported by the much more plausible behavioral claim. This doesn’t make him right to do so; but it does involve a much smaller amount of overt disconnection from reality and paranoid fantasies of nefarious gayification strategies being employed upon the formerly heterosexual by the pink menace.
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i wouldn’t be so quick to count that as a point.
a lot of recent studies in the last few years show that if humans didn’t carry the defective gene and made our own vitamin c like many other animals, and if we made the average amount per body weight, that the amount we’d make would be on par with his recommended dosage. pub med is full of recent studies confirming a lot of his assertions. The study that “debunked” his initial dosage claim and that the human body could be saturated on a half gram has now been debunked 6 or 7 times and was never confirmed in any follow up study.
while not all of his hypothesis about vitamin c were correct, he did live a hell of a lot longer then most chemists of his era, and with an incurable terminal disease no less, graves disease and kidney necrosis (side effects of his chemistry career). his terminal disease is what got him interested in vitamin c and to his credit he lived 6x as long as his doctor gave someone with his condition, and that can be attributed directly to his vitamin c protocol.
so yeah, there is that.
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yeah, but good vegetarian food eh?
the island of dominica is beautiful and largely 7th day adventist and i had some amazing food there.
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but teff is a very small grain! 
i kid of course…
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For a nice overview, which also briefly discusses the theory of them being granaries you may want to consult the following:
Ray, J. D. “Pyramids: Egyptian Pyramids.” Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. 2nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. 7526-7528. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
According to “go there and look at it your own damn self,” there’s almost no empty space inside the pyramids. That’s an awfully inefficient and expensive way to store grain.
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I can cook vegetarian so well, even a variety of fake meats.
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Is there a consensus (or really any evidence at all) that they were built by some guy named “Joseph”, a Jewish ex-slave who once owned a coat-of-many-colors, as Carson claims?
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