The conspiracy of religion and the religion of conspiracy are forever intertwined in a dogmatic dance of superstition, rumour and hearsay. More and more people are being connected globally to the world wide web, each of them having access to the petabytes of information added to the network each day.
Everyday there are new converts to the cult of Conspiracy, the newly formed acolytes, nourish themselves on the wealth of conspiratorial information flowing through the information superhighway each and every day. Soon they sit back from the table, sated and nourished, ready to become the new disciples; spreading the word of their internet prophets.
I wrote this article partly as a response to Cryptoctopus's Flat Earth Post, however in the most part, these are views I have held for quite some time now. So after reading his wonderful post, which was clearly meant to be fun and tongue in cheek, I decided to finally write the post I have been meaning to for quite some time.
It wasn't so much the post itself, but the comments, one of which I replied to, that made me chuckle and raise my eyebrows in equal measure.
There is in fact a flat earth society and along with their many humorous traits, they cite the Old Testament as reliable evidence for our planet being a flat disk enclosed in a dome. I could write about ten articles on simply how funny that is, none more funnier than trusting an old book which has had hundreds of revisions over a billion dollar telescope; however for the sake of brevity, I'll restrain myself.
The most excellent thing about the flat earth society, is that it's difficult to tell if all, some, or none of them are serious or not. Some of them have extensive scientific knowledge, so they could all be sharing in a massive in-joke with each other, which in itself, is just plain wonderful; are they crackpots or does their humour simply exist on a higher plain than ours?
If it is the latter, I salute them; if it is the former, then I pity and worry for them.
Oh, by the way, we don't live on a flat disk, we live on a slightly squashed globe; I can tell you this, without the aid of NASA. I can tell you this because of lunar eclipses, if we do live on a disk, enveloped in a dome; then a lunar eclipse is the shadow the disk casts on the moon as the sun (presumably) revolves around us. If that were the case, then everyone on the planet would experience a lunar eclipse every night.
Add to that the fact that gravity would behave differently on a disc world. Gravity's attractional force is towards the centre of a mass.
Seeing as the center of mass for the Earth if it was a flat disc, would be a flat point in the middle of the planet, we would all feel an attraction towards that, the only time Earth's gravitational field would be acting straight down, would be if you were standing right in the middle, or on the outward facing edge.
The closer you got to Earth's "edge" you would have to walk at a steeper and steeper angle, as if trying to fight a strong wind. Buildings would have to be built at greater and greater angles from the perpendicular, in order to compensate. And if you fell over right near the edge, you'd go zooming back towards the center of the Earth at 9.8 m/s, until something stopped you of course, like a truck load of common sense.
Whilst questioning whether the earth is flat may be open minded, believing it is feeble minded.
There's No Such Thing As Coincidence
Apophenia - The genetic tendency of human beings to find patterns in coincidence.
The validity of one theory over another is not what's in question here, it's the structure of conspiracy theory; clearly the flat-earth conspiracy is a ridiculous one and barely deserves the merit I have given it above. However there are many more subtle and believable conspiracies to fill your mind with.
From JFK, to the moon landings; from suppressed alien technology, to 9/11 and of course the Grand Unifying Conspiracy Theory, Illuminati.
Oops, careful, they're watching me now; if I'm assasinated for writing this, then tell my story, aaarrrggghh....
No wait please, despite my mocking tones; I too was once a conspiracy theorist, perhaps not a fully fledged member, but at least a badge holder of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade. I was right there with the rest of them, and with the advent of the internet, Google and a gushing fire hydrant worth of information and misinformation, I believed I could deduce the truth.
I started to see patterns, I was shocked at the level of treachery I was discovering in the world, the same names kept popping up, Rothchild, Kennedy, Rockafella, Hitler, Dick Cheney, it all had to be connected.
Then one day, whilst intently watching Alex Jones reel off plot upon plot, from gun control to global warming, I had my epiphany. It was similar to the one I had had many years earlier, as a child listening to a preacher talking about the infallibility of God, our free will and the path chosen for us. I later identified this epiphany as my bullshit alarm going off, and once more I could hear it, ringing loud and clear, as I watching the foam-flecked Jones ranting on screen that day.
That got me thinking; are religion and conspiracy the same side of the coin? Do the two delusional states simply fill a need in our minds; either brought on by societal pressure and/or cognitive evolution?
Is it simply a case that the human obsession with religion and conspiracy, is just an evolutionary by-product of wanting to make sense of the world, and find meaning via pattern and oblique connection?
Then comes the big question; is it possible to be fundamentally religious, and a fundamental conspiracy theorist at the same time?
The question intrigued me enough to go and carry out some very unscientific research and begun to ask friends, family and whoever I met who was into conspiracy; whether they believed in a religious God.
My hypothesis was that by and large, conspiracy theorists would more likely tend to be aetheist, as this helped fill the need in their minds to have either a benevolent protector, or malevolent detractor, controlling every aspects of their lives.
I have a lot of hippy, new age type friends; so I decided to rule out whether they felt that the true God was being obscured by a religious conspiracy, or some kind of guiding energy hippy-shit, and set about my task.
The unscientific results of my straw poll where indeed that out of the people I knew who were into conspiracy, none of them believe in a religious God.
Hmm, might be onto something here...
According to American political scientist Michael Barkun, the appeal of conspiracism is threefold:
"First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what institutional analysis cannot. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.
Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.
Third, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracy theorists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracy theorists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions."
If we take each point on its own, you can see that each trait could easily be describing religion. Religious theories claim to explain what scientific analysis cannot, making sense from a confusing world.
Religion is pretty simple, there are good Gods and bad demons and Devils, and whichever religion a person may belong to, you can be pretty sure that that religion claims to be the only true one, and members of that religion are given special privileges.
I would add a fourth caveat to Burkun's list; religion makes no room for coincidence; everything relates back to the original hidden cause.
In the same way that the religious mind attributes unexplained phenomena to good; so too the conspiracy theorist attributes the unexplained to the, unseen they.
God is angry hence he made an earthquake.
Can easily be translated as...
They want to ban guns, so they set up false flag mass shootings.
So out of the shadows of non-belief, emerges Conspiracy Theory.
Enter The Shadowy Men
To quote the work of political scientist Michael Burkun once more; he talked of 3 types of conspiracy theory and we can see religious parallels in each.
Event conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is held to be responsible for a limited, discrete event or set of events. The conspiratorial forces are alleged to have focused their energies on a limited, well-defined objective.
The best-known example in the recent past are theories about a conspiracy causing the Kennedy assassination, as reflected in its literature. Similar materials have been developed discussing conspiracies as the cause for the September 11 attacks, the crash of TWA Flight 800, and the spread of AIDS in the black community.
Systemic conspiracy theories. The conspiracy is believed to have broad goals, usually conceived as securing control of a country, a region, or even the entire world. While the goals are sweeping, the conspiratorial machinery is generally simple: a single, evil organization implements a plan to infiltrate and subvert existing institutions.
This is a common scenario in conspiracy theories that focus on the alleged machinations of Jews, Freemasons, or the Catholic Church, as well as theories centered on Communism or international capitalists.
Superconspiracy theories. Conspiratorial constructs in which multiple conspiracies are believed to be linked together hierarchically. Event and systemic are joined in complex ways, so that conspiracies come to be nested together.
At the summit of the conspiratorial hierarchy is a distant but powerful force manipulating lesser conspiratorial factors. Superconspiracy theories have enjoyed particular growth since the 1980s, as reflected in the work of authors such as David Icke and Milton William Cooper
So looking at these three examples of conspiracy theory; In the first you may find a parallel with prayer, and perhaps you may draw comparisons with religious sects. While systemic and superconspiracy sits comfortably alongside any creation myth you care to mention.
Whether you draw the same conclusions or not, it is clear to see that shadowy men with mysterious and half-seen motives, have taken the place of an elusive man, living in the clouds; with the same hidden motives.
The conspiracy theorist are just as emotionally invested in being right, as the death cults which serve as adjuncts to main stream religion; from ISIS to the Westboro Baptist Church; from alien hunters, to the anti-vaxx brigade they all want to be right. They would love nothing more than the beginning of the end, so that they can stand proudly on their soapboxes and say; "See told you, we were right and you were wrong."
Conspiracy is the new religion and the internet its church; all hail the shadowy men!
Leaving The Cult
Scientific knowledge is often overturned, things we once thought to be true turn out not to be; however the overturning is done by other scientists, not by some guy in his bedroom on the internet.
--anon
In the end I became a backslider, and deserted the cult of Conspiracy; I allowed the possibility of coincidence into my life; and empirical well researched evidence became my friend and confidant.
I stopped listening to Alex Jones and people like him, with their circumspect evidence, which at best is wholly circumstansial and at worst, completely false. The way Jones and his disciples call everyone who doesn't agree with them sheeple, reminds me of religions who speak of the damnation of the heathens.
And therein lies the problem. Religion and conspiracy theory can prove to be just as destructive as each other, because they purport to be the truth, the whole truth and the only truth. Nothing outside either philosophy is given much truck, until of course insurmountable evidence is accepted, at which point the goalposts of meaning are shifted.
The main thing that I stopped doing, was caring; as when Laplace said to Napoleon when asked about whether he had factored in The Creator into his mathematical calculations; that he "...had no need for that hypothesis". I too realised that I had no need for the various hypotheses of conspiracy.
The world does have its flaws and indeed has its genuine criminal conspiracies, cooked up by governments and individuals the world over.
Though interestingly a criminal conspiracy is defined as: an incidence when two or more people agree to commit a crime at some point in the future, and require a high standard of evidence, are usually small in scale, and involve a single event or issue, directly linked to the criminal intent.
We can see the difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact, by comparing rumour to court records. Indeed this tells us that no conspiracy theory has ever been proven right. However we can also witness how several theories have been retrofitted to past events.
Funnily enough, when a conspiracy is uncovered, the fundamental conspiracist attempts to go deeper; evidenced in the fact that there is a Watergate conspiracy theory, which espouses the view that the people arrested at the time of the scandal, were in fact victims of a deeper conspiracy theory.
This reminds me of the God of the gaps theory; whereby God is pushed back into the ever receding gaps in human knowledge. So too the conspiracy theorist, pushes their theories further and further back, beyond any conclusion.
If there were ever a bunch of people arrested for conspiring to murder over 3,000 Americans in the 9/11 attacks, you can bet your bottom Steem Dollar that many people would not be satisfied and would argue that the only reason they were arrested, was to take the heat off the real conspirators. The truth, forever being obscured around the next hidden corner.
So I left the church, I excommunicated myself from the religion of Conspiracy and reverted to a state of non-belief; how I hear you ask?
I came to terms with 2 things:
My own insignificance as one of possibly several hundred trillion carbon life forms in a universe containing quadrillions of stars.
The second thing I came to terms with was, in such a universe where trillions of events are happening every nanosecond of every day; there will be a high likelihood that two or more random incidences will occur at the same time, appearing as if they may be connected, but in fact are not; we call this, coincidence.
So in parting; I will reaffirm Niche's affirmation that the need for God; is dead, whether that be an atheist one or indeed a religious deity; we simply have no need for these hypotheses. And so I leave you with a summary of the work of physicist, David Robert Grimes.
Grimes published in PLOS ONE journal an estimation of time required for a conspiracy theory to fail given the number of people that need to be involved. He then calculated the maximum time before failure for several large-scale conspiracy theories:
Moon landing hoax would require 411,000 people involved and would fail in 3.68 years;
Climate-change fraud would require 405,000 people and would fail in 3.70 years;
Vaccination conspiracy would require at least 22,000 people (without drug companies) and would fail in 3.15 years.
Suppressed cancer cure conspiracy would require 714,000 people and would fail in 3.17 years.
The equations used in calculations were fine tuned using data from real conspiracies (The National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM affair, Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and FBI forensic scandal).
sources
* * * * *
Fun fact: tinfoil actually increases your receptiveness to electromagnetic radiation; so um, yeah, you might want to rethink that strategy.