That’s a great point, yah. I agree that conspiracies always seem to end in horrible showdowns with authorities or everyone dying by suicide or something else horrible. Meanwhile, I have often looked at the Quakers and thought, “Okay, if more religion was like this, I’d be on board with it”. Maybe the problem is that “religion” is too broad a term now. It’s hard to look at Quakers and Evangelicals as being anything like part of the same thing, except that perhaps they both like to read the same book from time to time (but read it completely differently).
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Icke’s work is essentially the Protocols with Lizards subbed for Jews. It is perhaps the most traditional form of conspiracy theory. MJ-12 is both a conspiracy theory in and of itself and a common feature of broader UFO conspiracy theories (which include Icke’s Reptiloids).
Isn’t considered an inherent feature of conspiracy theories and isn’t terribly typical. The JFK assassination is sometimes cited as an origin point for conspiracy, or at least it taking hold in the US. But most of these ideas and the format itself are much older. This is one particular flavor of conspiracy theory and in terms of JFK, 9/11 etc relatively recent.
In terms of the Templars there isn’t any ambiguity there, and nothing screamed out for explanation the history is really, really well documented. Conspiracy claims come much later, fed by a combination of 18th century psuedo-history claims about race and 18th century social clubs like the Masons and occultism. Reignited in mid century claims about the Holy Grail and those ever loving secret world governments. So it doesn’t really fall into that catagory.
This is incredibly common. A lot of these things start with an anonymous prompt. A letter, a phone call, an unlabelled photograph, a forged document. Dropped to an active or influential member of an existing community, who subsequently popularizes it.
The entire Philadelphia Experiment/Montauk Project thing basically started this way. A single (identified) person sending a letter and later journals to some one in the UFO game.
I took a class in UFO culture in college, the professor was a believer and attempted to “prove” alien hybrids exist.
He showed us a picture of a man in a canoe. There was nothing else to it, just a normal man in a canoe. When pressed for info about the photo he explained it was sent anonymously, identified as a photo of a hybrid. And there was no information about who took it, who it was a photo of, when or where it was taken. But it was proof, cause the note said so.
In my understanding this isn’t a huge psychological factor in conspiracy or fringe and extreme belief.
Drives have more to do with establishing a feeling of control in circumstances where the person feels powerless and demonstrating social value in the face of feelings of inadequacy.
For the conspiracy theories specifically the core tends to be that access to secret knowledge, and a struggle against a power structure that seeks to supress it. Makes people feel important and smarter than everyone else. Actively participating tends to make people feel as if they are doing valuable work. Standing within the conspiracy scene replaces social standing people feel they lack in normal contexts. While turning it towards activism gives people an active response to societal factors they feel they can not impact.
Participation and popular interest in these things tends to surge in time of political and social instability as a result.
This is very similar to extreme religious beliefs and fringe political movements, which tend to be highly accepting of bunk. But it’s not a huge factor in main stream religions or religious belief. There’s some cross over, but there’s not a lot of play among actual academics in terms of this being how religions start or how routine religiocity functions.
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I do not! And thank you for the well-articulated perspective and question.
However, one thing I do believe is that the more we are discovering through scientific approaches, the more we may be seeing that they actually validate, not invalidate, some of those “common central themes” I spoke of. Nothing in modern science has, for example, invalidated nondualistic Vedanta or Buddhism, and I would argue very much reinforce the ideas of those belief systems. There are plenty of books on the subject out there, but I think my personal current favorite is:
Another few points:
Tesla thought nondualistic Vedanta might explain things in a fundamental way.
Schrödinger thought nondualistic Vedanta might explain things in a fundamental way.
Oppenheimer thought nondualistic Vedanta might explain things in a fundamental way.
Einstein was not an atheist. Darwin was not an atheist. Many great scientific minds were not atheists – and this can’t just be explained away as “well they grew up with it.” No, the reality is, these spiritual notions were an important part of their lives and thinking, nor did these great thinkers believe there had to be inherent contradictions between science and spirituality/religion/metaphysics.
IMHO the brightest minds in theoretical physics, metaphysics, and consciousness studies all seem quite open to thinking that reality is nondualistic and potentially panpsychist in nature.
Up until discovering our “universe” had a “beginning,” this possibility was among the least expected by scientific minds at the time, because it seemed so very, well, “religious” in nature (or I would say, sounded similar to other ideas that had arisen in spiritual belief systems, but not contemporary physics).
I’ll also remind folks that about 95% of the energy and matter in the universe that we can even detect is essentially utterly unknown. We call it Dark Energy and Dark Matter, but it really amounts to the 95% of stuff in all creation that we know exists, but know nothing about. And those are the known-unknowns, and doesn’t even include the unknown-unknowns (to use a Rumsfeldian ontology, probbly the only thing of value he contributed IMHO).
Here’s how I’d summarize my own feelings: That fundamental, nearly universal notion of nondual reality that is at the core of almost every human belief system, is a non-scientific way (in our contemporary terms) of coming to understand the absolute truth in relation to all that is. I personally believe this truth is available to all of us, personally, and these personal experiences are what is at the root of many religions – including ones that get highly distorted over time, or even contemporaneously with their founding.
Science is the set of tools we have that allows us to attack truth from the other perspective – all of the specifics of our relative reality, that allow us to work our way “back” to the core truth.
I do believe that not only can we attack truth from both directions, but to come closer to knowing it, we must.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read any Vedanta (especially Advaita) texts, Buddhist texts, read much about shamanic belief systems and indigenous cultures – I will simply remind that these too count as “religions” in the way being discussed in this thread, and they are quite different than the two Christian belief systems you referenced – which are quite different from one another, as you noted.
I swear I’m not trying to be an asshole when I say this:
Most religions that have been practiced by humans were not invented by white people. They were not invented since the birth of Christianity. Vedanta is at least 4500 years old, and I think is probably much more like 6000-10,000 years old (probably as an oral tradition predominantly). For us to label religions as “bad” and then repeatedly refer to white Judeo-Christian belief systems exclusively? Again, not to be an ass, but I really do believe that this “cancels” most of the belief systems that brown people came up with thousands of years earlier – and are still practiced by many. Many of them are quite different at their core than what many Westerners think of as religions, and in fact they are much more similar to what Jesus actually preached than the practices of the church that arose in his name hundreds of years after his death. They are worth study IMHO.
Well, I personally just have no opinion on any of that sort of thing. As soon as you get away from material observation, you’re in to things that don’t have any value to me personally. Generally you get into a soup of semantics an unfalsifiable statements that, for me personally, have no value. I guess that makes me “non-spiritual” or whatever.
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Perhaps, but here’s an idea to simply consider:
What if (some) ancient belief systems represented the best way these people had to describe concepts that were a bit out of reach to them in many ways, specifically because of their lack of certain types of scientific, technological development?
Isn’t it interesting that so many of our scientific, observed, verifiable findings reinforce these, let’s call them more “intuitive” systems? Of course you won’t be able to come to your own conclusion on this unless you take a look at the similarities yourself. Which is why I simply offer it as an idea to consider.
I should add that my day job is highly technical in nature, and involves very interesting (and broad) aspects of computing (and related fields). All of this has been part of the belief system I have “grown into” over the years. As some of the people here may have noticed in previous posts of mine on bb, my most comfortable set of descriptors for “metaphysical” concepts are computational in nature.
I guess it’s like any broad category, it encompasses a lot so can seem meaningless on its face. I guess when we say religion, we mean anything that deals with some sort of divinity, afterlife, ineffable, so there are a lot of ways of thinking about those things, and they’re all historically specific and contextual. But the larger term let’s us know that we’re dealing with specific kinds of truth-claims that aren’t the same kind made by science or philosophy?
Hell, even that term is pretty broad. It encompasses people like Jimmy Carter and Pat Robertson!
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yeah, it’s like they’re the same person.
sadly, i have some religious relatives who would like to try to convince me that trump is much more religious than carter. they’d try, if i let them.
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Jesus, talking about drinking the flavor aid! There are so many concrete examples of Carter’s faith in actin and literally none of Trumps.
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If it helps contextualize it I tend to group religions in with things like literature as co-equal articles or catagories of culture.
They are interesting and influential without regard to their validity or utility. And can not really be considered without the context or reference to other catagories of culture.
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I think Trump might be. It’s just a very different religion, built around a different messiah.
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Except I think there’s no such rule.
Lyndon “LaDouche” LaRouche ran from federal prison in 1992.
Some random federal prison inmate got over 40% of the vote in the 2012 Democratic presidential primary in WV.
(Granted, I suspect most of the voting population is likely to be somewhat turned off by a convicted felon candidate, but I thought the same thing about a corrupt racist shitbag like Donald Trump until 2016)
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That’s how I group them too. I wanted to make sure that was also how NickyG was doing it, because their post sounded like they might not be, and that’s what I took issue with.
This is not a semantic or trivial concern, which is why I raise it. We have a real problem in the world right now with Both Side-ism attacking science. Facts are becoming relative and people are treating science as “just another viable belief system alongside many others”.
Science is fundamentally different, and science is without a doubt the thing that is required to save us from climate change, pollution, disease, and all manner of other ills. Look at the train wreck of COVID in the US. This is because science has been undermined as being equivalent to random people’s opinions.
Science is the one that works. It is not a belief system. If we forget that, we’re all dead in another generation or two.
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Where Catholicism put a new face on Neoplatonism, Qanon just riffed on Alex Jones being their Dungeon Master… all the while actually helping leave red herrings to protect ACTUAL atrocities and harm to children in the developing world. I feel like if these drones knew the kind of monsters who were locked up for these crimes not that long ago, I would hope they’d be just as outraged and devote more energy to revealing the identities of actual criminals.
It makes me think of the day when these identities hiding behind aliases are revealed to the public, if they’ll be held responsible and made guilty by association.
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The sayings gospel of Thomas, not the Infancy Gospel. There are more than one! As I’m sure you know the Jesus Semonar scholars voted to replace John (the really anti-Semitic gospel, and the last written of the synoptic gospels) with it.
But that said what happened to the Jesus movements after Jesus died and the world resolutely failed to end is actually a good example. I love Paul, he never met Jesus and argued furiously with those that did, but he was sure that his truth about Jesus was the right one. Even if it conflicted with what James the head of the Jesus group in Jerusalem thought for example.
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I don’t disagree with any of this, but what I will submit is that on top of what you’ve said, treating other people as one would like to be treated – really the fundamental teaching of most religious belief systems, based on my own study – is a useful, non-scientific layer that may be more motivational to at least some people than science alone.
As I said before, I think both “spirituality” (or metaphysics, or philosophy, or religion, or whatever one wants to call it) and science play important, linked roles in our understanding of the world around us, and how this might motivate us to act in the world. I see absolutely no reason either ought to be considered outside of the context of the other. As a nondualist, this perspective is somewhat, well, unsurprising. 
Edit: Well, I do disagree with one thing – not all science is equally “good science.” I myself appreciate the highly skeptical approach of Forteanism. If science doesn’t have the answers to a specific problem, it should honestly describe these things as “unknown.” And many scientists do this. However, some scientists say if something is not specifically proven by science, it can’t be and really oughtn’t be considered at all. I find this somewhat common, and not actually scientific.
Yup. Donald Trump may be a self-deluded hate-filled anchor baby con-man professional-racist sociopath negative-billionaire, and lots of people are saying he might have a hidden felony conviction somewhere, in addition to all the other crimes he hasn’t been convicted for, but he was born in the US, is older than 35, and hasn’t served two previous terms as President, so he’s Constitutionally eligible.
Also, not everybody who ran for US president from prison is a scammer. Eugene V Debs’s last run was after he’d been convicted of sedition for making speeches opposing the US military draft for WW I.
and lots of people are saying he might have a hidden felony conviction somewhere
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(I’ve never actually seen someone make that claim)
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