It’s easy to be dumb. And the dumber you are, the more given you will tend to be to embracing conspiracy theories, which are Science/History/Politics for stupid people.
Conspiracy theories are popular because they allow lazy people to feel smarter than everybody else. They tell you that you can know the Hidden History of Our Time just by watching a Youtube video and without the hard work of study. They tell fearful people that they are wise to be terrified about Shadowy Forces instead of doing the hard work of learning courage, prudence, and wisdom. And they tell people with a raging inferiority complex that they are just as good as those people who have done the hard work of knowing what they are talking about.
So you can, for instance, waste your life chasing QANON, flat earthism, geocentrism, or this whack conspiracy theory that the Vatican is hiding the proof that Giants (as in Jack in the Beanstalk type giants) once roamed the earth.
No. Really.
(Fundamentalists like this one because it seems to them to “defend the Bible”–by which they mean “defend some Fundy theory about the Bible).
The Vatican is a popular target for such silliness. It’s theatrical. It’s foreign. It’s got Latin, incense, mystery and antiquity, plus cool art and a lot of Italian food. AND DID YOU KNOW THEY ACTUALLY BURY DEAD BODIES UNDER ST. PETER’S? LOOK IT UP, YOU FOOLS!!!!
But still and all, giants are not real. And the happy thing is that there are nerds out there who are eager to explain why. Because they did the hard work of learning why while the MAGA 2020 QANON SCIENCE IS STOOPID WAKE UP SHEEPLE COVID HOAX guys were out smoking dope behind the gym or sleeping through class like their president did.
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19 Responses
Unfortunately, in my fundamentalist, evangelical, Protestant days, I knew people who swallowed and passed on this stuff. Some of it I believed or was it least very curious about, but other stuff I looked at with skepticism. The problem with Protestantism is that it is every man for himself – a.k.a. individual interpretation (thanks Martin Luther) – when it comes to knowledge and belief. Protestantism makes cafeteria Catholicism look tame. Everyone is looking for truth and looking for the one who can explain it. They cling to their selected truth along with the purveyor of such truths like a drowning man clings to a rope.
The absolute and stunning relief I felt realizing that as a Catholic the truth has never changed, it is has always been taught as such, that it does not come from one faulty man but rather is held up by the collegiality of its bishops, and that I would never EVER again have to decide for myself what was true and what wasn’t true theologically, opened up an incredible freedom in my outlook which encompassed all areas of life and not just theological ones. Amen!
One of the things that deeply attracted me to the Catholic tradition is its intellectual liberty. One of the reasons I profoundly oppose MAGA Qatholicism is that it is an attempt to crush that liberty in favor of the dumb conspiracy theories of braindead American Evangelicalism.
Personally, i think it is far less about lazy people feeling smarter than it is about weak people feeling strong. It’s all there in in transactional analysis and Eric Berne’s “I’m OK You’re OK”.
More when i am actually awake and have time.
It’s both/and, not either/or.
@ mark
I agree. I just tend to look for more meta-general statements, myself.
jj
When I was young, we had to read real books to get our conspiracy theories! This lame modern generation that gets theirs in a few minutes of youtube – what wimps!
Do not listen to this man. he is one of the antipodes from a southern continent. Uncle Cletus posted images on facebook of these dog-headed men without ears and tongues.
Huh?
It toughens us to have to walk on our heads.
@ jj
Cmon, old timer. Yer rocker is out on the porch. It’s a nice day. 😜😜😜😘😘😘
@ jennifer
It’s a joke. JJ is from New Zealand, back in the days when europeans were finally bathing and discovering that the rest of the world existed, they had a lot of strange ideas about who lived in the rest of the world. One of the things that made Gulliver travels a great satire was that it played upon these very strange ideas.
LOL! Okay, I missed the reference. It has been literally decades since I had anything to do with that book. Thanks for the heads up!
@ Ben @ Jennifer
The maps were a bit off in the late middle ages, but baths were more common than our friend the enlightenment ideologue would admit :p
Even our bathwater whirls the wrong way draining clockwise.
@ John Thayer Jensen. I remember you. I remember you being rather helpful when I was converting and I was asking questions on Catholic Answers….. Hello again from the Niagara area of Canada, and yes, I am Catholic now!
Why would the Vatican have any incentive to cover up that part of the bible, about the Nephilim? Saying “There used to be super-large humans on earth” does not detract from “Salvation is via the sacraments administered by the Catholic Church”, so there is no need to downplay it.
This is a Fundamentalist equivalent of Types I and III Catholics saying “The Reformers unilaterally excised the Apocryphal books from the Bible so that, uh (checks notes) the common people would no longer know you can kill dragons by feeding them flour.” Okay, and how precisely did that serve Michael Sattler’s goal of enclosing all the common farmlands for the rich people? What’s the incentive supposed to be?
@Jennifer – Catholic Answers? Or was it ‘Called To Communion?’ God bless you. I have been a Catholic now for 25 years – Mark was instrumental in helping me come into the Church, at a time when the Internet mostly meant things like text chat rooms.
@John, hmmm well it could have been both or either/or because I frequented both sights as well as the Coming Home Network site. Lol. Anyway, it is good to reconnect. 😀