Conspiracy Theory Watch (believe, born, scientific, doomsday)
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Since we've had a lot of conversations here about the brain rot promoted by theism and allied forces in the US, I thought it would be useful to highlight some examples as they come up, since we're now in a target-rich environment.
We have a total solar eclipse coming up next Monday, the path of totality passing in an arc from Dallas TX to Buffalo NY and on up in to Canada from there. On the path is Carbondale IL, which also was in the path of totality of another eclipse 7 years ago.
A friar writing in the 1500s described the utter terror of the populace in the face of eclipses in the Long Ago. Much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth was common. He was writing, I believe, about the indigenous peoples, who believed the universe reflected messages from the gods. I point this out as background because in modern times, one would think that eclipses would become objects of scientific curiosity, and they have -- NASA for instance is sending sounding rockets into the ionosphere before, during and after totality to see how that responds to the sudden absence of sunlight.
But conspiracy theorists point out (rightly, and this is the nugget of truth behind any conspiracy theory) that the probability of any location being in the path of totality twice that close together are very small, and that the two paths of totality sketch an "X" on the US with Carbondale at the crossroads. From THIS they conclude that "a seismic event will be triggered when the eclipse arrives in this part of the state, known as Little Egypt, killing hundreds of thousands of people."
The relevance to this forum is as follows: Fear around celestial events, hundreds of years ago, were driven essentially by religious cosmology and beliefs. For a subset of the populace, this is still the case. Why would two eclipses crossing each other's paths in different years necessarily result in catastrophe? It could just as well be a good omen as a bad one, after all, since we're making things up.
But that the worst is assumed is a function of the assumption that a judging, wrathful, jealous god is subject to being fed up with humanity's antics and will at some point "smite" some or all of us in some big way. This in turn is a fulcrum of control over people.
On average a path of totality crosses every 400 years, but that is an average. It could be 4 months or 40 years or 2,000 years in any given location since the last path of totality.
That the two paths describe an "X" ... well, what else COULD it describe? I doubt that any two totalities would exactly track each other, and failing that you have an X -- either an obvious one, or one that's enlongated and takes a bit of imagination to see.
That the event would cause disaster by some unknown mechanism is just an assumption with no basis. And this is what religion excels at.
One could argue that human nature (confirmation bias, etc) would be likely to produce weird ideas on its own even without religion -- and this is arguably so. But for a conspiracy theory to gain any purchase it has to tap into something primal in people's thinking and assumptions, and in the US especially that is the fear of divine retribution. Since this trope has strong residual influence even outside of Christian fundamentalism and similar groups, it is effective.
I have to wonder about the conscious and unconscious motivation of someone concocting and promoting such a thing. If it's something other than religious ideation then it's even more demented and toxic than I'm describing, I'd think. I KNOW there are ancillary reasons -- the appeal of being clued into something "no one else" sees, and thus being in-the-know and special. But even that is a variation on the theme of being right -- as in correct -- which is also a big part of religious fundamentalist mentality. RIGHTeousness is important to them, and one "knows" what is "right" by accepting uncritically the assertions of the clergy.
The "divine retribution" thing has been a "human thing" for millennia. It has nothing to do with any one religion.
People will then line up "weird stuff they don't understand" to fit the "not being smited by the gods" thing.
Yes it's far from exclusive to Christianity ... I would even offer that it isn't as extreme in most of Christianity as in, say, those indigenous people the friar I mentioned was observing in the 16th century. But in the present-day US it comes largely from fundamentalist Christianity and its ideological forerunners, such as this from Jonathan Edwards in 1741 Enfield, CT:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.
So sure, all it would take for us loathsome spiders to fall into the Pit is a path of totality to cross the same spot too frequently. Although it happened almost the same distance apart in Turkey some years back, and happens in various spots on the earth (mostly over the ocean, since that's most of the surface area of the earth) without incident.
Many folks who have 0% religion or belief also fall for this doomsday nonsense. That's the bigger issue / bigger matter at hand. Y2K was just one other tiny example of this.
Why just stop with the religious, and ignore the rest, while they all do the same thing? And it happens in politics too, so again, the same widespread madness and psychosis. It's missing much to just focus on the 'knee' of the 'elephant'.
Many folks who have 0% religion or belief also fall for this doomsday nonsense. That's the bigger issue / bigger matter at hand. Y2K was just one other tiny example of this.
Excellent point about the Y2K fiasco.
At that time I was working as a manager in a major metropolitan municipal technology department which oversaw IT, 911 and OES communications. The department, to its credit, started looking at the Y2K issue, and its possible implications, in 1997. All of the research showed overwhelmingly that there was practically zero chance of any large-scale failure (with a few non-consequential exceptions, i.e. DST settings, local park lighting timers, etc.).
When presented with these findings, the executive branch of city government (Mayor and Board of Supervisors) asked if we were 100% sure that there was zero risk. Of course we told them that nothing is 100% certain, but our findings indicated that this was as close to a sure bet as they'd ever get. Not good enough. Suffice to say that they needlessly expended millions of dollars of taxpayer money to assure the public that they were prepared to handle a crisis that had basically no chance of happening.
I realize that they would have felt the obligation to put the public at ease; and yet I can't help but feel it was a senseless overreaction to a scenario that needed more critical thinking and less mass hysteria.
Many folks who have 0% religion or belief also fall for this doomsday nonsense. That's the bigger issue / bigger matter at hand. Y2K was just one other tiny example of this.
Why just stop with the religious, and ignore the rest, while they all do the same thing? And it happens in politics too, so again, the same widespread madness and psychosis. It's missing much to just focus on the 'knee' of the 'elephant'.
I think I was pretty clear that there are other factors that I certainly wasn't ignoring. I see religion less as a cause than a catalyst. Religious faith is a failed epistemology involving affording belief to things that are not only unverified, but inherently unverifiable. If you're willing to do that, then you've got practice and "muscle memory" so to speak, in believing any old thing.
As for Y2K ... it was not "doomsday nonsense". I spent a good deal of effort correcting the accounting software I was responsible for maintaining back then, to not have that issue come Jan 1, 2000. I had it fixed about five years in advance, in fact, at the expense of some 50 or 60 person hours of effort. (And no I wasn't the original author because it would have been utterly trivial to avoid the problem by design in the first place).
I think that this ended up being true of most systems ... it was not that there wasn't a problem that couldn/t have resulted in lots of mayhem, it is more that people outside the industry used it as an excuse to play Chicken Little and just assumed "they" wouldn't fix it in time. It was also nonsense that it was too complicated or extensive to fix. (As an amusing aside, there's a year 2038 issue coming up with old 32 bit versions of Unix that will run out of bits to internally represent dates sometime that year ... that will also be a non-issue by then. There will also be a year 9999 issue that I expect some descendant of mine will do his part to fix in about 9995, if we're still here at all).
Many folks who have 0% religion or belief also fall for this doomsday nonsense. That's the bigger issue / bigger matter at hand. Y2K was just one other tiny example of this.
Why just stop with the religious, and ignore the rest, while they all do the same thing? And it happens in politics too, so again, the same widespread madness and psychosis. It's missing much to just focus on the 'knee' of the 'elephant'.
Except Y2K was not a doomsday event, it was a problem that would effect some systems, could possibly effect others, but others accepted it would probably not be a problem.
There is a difference between a religious doomsday and something with evidence like the Yellowstone volcano possibly erupting, or the possibility of a man made ice age.
Maybe the elephant is there, maybe it is not, but I think it is better to presume it is there and be wrong than to presume it is not there and have it stand on my toe.
Methinks that the number of conspiracy theorists who actually believe that the Eclipse is of the wrath of their Gawd, or the prelude to the Rapture, or end times, is smaller than has been exaggerated by the press.
Consider this
Growing up in a Baptist church, we had a high percentage of science deniers, uneducated adults, people with no understanding of science and nature so they were of the less intelligent types to say "Oh Gawd Done it"
However, only one person I recall admitted outright and demanded that the earth was flat. Many denied evolution, scie ce, and many more insisted that the Buy-Bull was authored by Gawd hisself, and perfect...but only one admitted to believing in a flat earth.
Only One which I am aware. Now there could have been more, and there probably were, but only one vocal weekly proponent f a flat earth.
And I today, consider this individual to be the most excrementally-out stupid person I have ever met in my life. Low IQ? yes. Inability to understand reason, logic, even carry on a decent conversation? yes.
But the church loved him because he said "YEA-uss" to everything they taught.
SO I know flat earth is a current conspiracy, but I wonder how many people actually subscribe to it?
My thought is that they are probably a very small minority who get more attention thanks to the Internet than they should, and that they are likely few and far between, but none the less, still present in the back woods of fundy religions.
Methinks that the number of conspiracy theorists who actually believe that the Eclipse is of the wrath of their Gawd, or the prelude to the Rapture, or end times, is smaller than has been exaggerated by the press.
Consider this
Growing up in a Baptist church, we had a high percentage of science deniers, uneducated adults, people with no understanding of science and nature so they were of the less intelligent types to say "Oh Gawd Done it"
However, only one person I recall admitted outright and demanded that the earth was flat. Many denied evolution, scie ce, and many more insisted that the Buy-Bull was authored by Gawd hisself, and perfect...but only one admitted to believing in a flat earth.
Only One which I am aware. Now there could have been more, and there probably were, but only one vocal weekly proponent f a flat earth.
And I today, consider this individual to be the most excrementally-out stupid person I have ever met in my life. Low IQ? yes. Inability to understand reason, logic, even carry on a decent conversation? yes.
But the church loved him because he said "YEA-uss" to everything they taught.
SO I know flat earth is a current conspiracy, but I wonder how many people actually subscribe to it?
My thought is that they are probably a very small minority who get more attention thanks to the Internet than they should, and that they are likely few and far between, but none the less, still present in the back woods of fundy religions.
I know these people are real because I have FB friends that post these things. About a year ago I figured I had learned enough from watching them and deleted about 5% of my list. I still have at least one that is whopped up about the 4.8 earth quake and the 4.8 date while posting Biblical references.
I still have at least one that is whopped up about the 4.8 earth quake and the 4.8 date while posting Biblical references.
Coincidence? I think not!
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