We live in a world where slogans, sound-bites and soothing memes are increasingly being substituted for substance.

We live in a world where it’s increasingly common to find inverted commas placed around the word “scientist” by those who believe scientific method has a built-in liberal bias. So, these critics loftily claim, science’s findings can be discounted when it comes to everything from global warming to the biological basis for homosexuality if those conclusions challenge a particular economic, religious or political article of faith.

And we live in a world of increasingly short attention spans and a blasé disregard for critical thought and rational analysis.

We’ve bought into the notion that even the most complex issues can be reduced to a few catchy buzzwords and some comforting, pre-packaged marketing terms.

For every problem which is now facing us, solutions are being offered up which, as a wise man once said, are neat, plausible and entirely wrong.

It’s perhaps the ultimate irony of this information age, one increasingly dependent on science and technology for its everyday needs and one in which more data is more easily accessible to more people than at any other time in history, that science, reason and incontestable facts are now under such sustained assault.

This mounting disdain is evident everywhere.

From the high-profile anti-vaccination campaigners whose wrong-headed efforts are, in part, responsible for the current outbreak of measles in the US to the strip-miners who refuse to accept the dire environmental and health consequences of blasting mountain tops off, stunning exercises in denial are taking place everywhere around us.

Including in Bermuda.

Science, it’s been said, is the organised search for the truth.

If that is so, then the faith-based and pseudo-scientific rationales for “converting” gay people to heterosexuality put forward by visiting American proselytisers at the weekend was an entirely disorganised exercise in substituting self-deluding myth for inconvenient truths.

Panellists for Coming Out Ministries, invited to Bermuda by a local church, came out with a string of claims shocking to anyone with even a passing familiarity with genuine scientific research on homosexuality.

They insisted that the vast majority of gay men had been sexually abused and that if they were able to overcome the supposed traumatic experiences they encountered in childhood, they would be “healed”.

They reject the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and others in the legitimate scientific community who believe that same-sex relationships can be healthy, and that attempting to change someone’s sexual orientation is in fact damaging. They also reject findings which suggest no more gays than heterosexuals were sexually victimised as children.

They prefer to take their denomination’s particular reading of the Bible as the final word on the subject above that of any mortal man.

It seems utterly incongruous that a group like Coming Out could claim to be ministering to gay people while at the same time labelling them as sick and using dubious “science” and statistics to back up its claims.

An American commentator said recently of Coming Out’s simplistic approach to the complex and multilayered issue of homosexuality: “I have seen how damaging that narrative has been in my life, my family members’ lives and the lives of other (gay) people.

“Just this past year I’ve had friends attempt suicide, kicked out of their homes, disfellowshipped from their churches and been made second-class citizens at our schools and churches, all due to the overwhelming narrative that we have received from our churches.

“But none of these friends I’m referring to were abused. None have been living as sex addicts or doing drugs.

“None come from traumatic childhoods. Some of them even come from highly supportive homes. This narrative of ‘we need to heal the homosexuals’ is toxic, has been proven to be damaging and does not contain an ounce of Christian love.”

Coming Out’s strategy amounts to the worst kind of spiritual and psychological malpractice. It is offering the kind of fix which is neither neat nor plausible but is absolutely and entirely wrong.