Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Should God’s existence be
proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be Proven
Fideism vs WCG.htm
Does the Bible teach blind faith? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Gospel of John Theory of Knowledge.htm
Is There a Giant Secret Conspiracy Controlling the World?
Do
paranoids have real enemies? Is there a
giant conspiracy of this nation’s or this world’s mighty that aims to deceive
us, to enslave us, and/or to destroy us?
Should Christians be concerned?
Are we routinely accusing people who are different than us in race,
political party, religion, political ideology, social class, etc., of
conspiring against us? Many decades ago
the historian Richard Hofstadter in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
(1964) discussed this running theme in our political history. Many decades ago, people feared that the
Freemasons were engaged in a conspiracy to control others, a view that still
affects some analyses of the French Revolution of 1789. Diehard anti-Semites will still trot out
that old creation of the Czarist secret police, “The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,” to prove that the Jews are in a giant conspiracy to take over the
world. Conspiracy theories about, say,
the moon landing’s being faked, which seems to be inspired by the faked Mars
land in the movie “Capricorn One,” which I saw as a child, are relatively
politically neutral. Let’s examine
briefly why secret giant conspiracy theories aren’t plausible.
More
recently, many on the right have believed in some version of the John Birch
Society’s “Insider” conspiracy theory, such as proclaimed famously in Gary
Allen’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.”
This theory maintains, depending on the variations, that the
Rockefellers and/or the Rothschilds, i.e., super rich capitalists, controlled
the Communist leaders of the Soviet Union.
They also supposedly are seeking to impose a fascist dictatorship on the
United States (and/or other nations) in order to crush competition against the
companies that they control and/or own.
They are using or used such organizations as the Trilateral Commission,
the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
and/or the Bilderbergers as part of this process. Others in the right’s fevered swamps will say that Timothy
McVeigh’s terrorist action in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was a set up
to strip Americans of their right to own guns or strip them of other civil
liberties. The debate about President
Obama’s birth certificate come from the same kind of source.
When we see all the constantly poor or bad
decisions made by government leaders, do we really believe that the same
people are hiding a super-powerful conspiracy that aims to control everyone and
everything so completely? Gary North, in this brilliant opinion piece https://www.garynorth.com/public/10681.cfm) discusses why these conspiracy
theories can’t be true. If the elite was so smart and had so much power, they
wouldn't be dumb enough to REALLY believe in Keynesian economics.
Yet they do. They sure aren't Austrians.
The $2 trillion stimulus measure passed by Congress and signed into law
by Trump during the Wuhan virus crisis is great proof. And that's how
we're going to get an economic crisis when the bond markets deem most
of the West's advanced welfare states to be bankrupt. They
are intellectually empowered to spend like drunken sailors by Keynesian
economists like the New York Times’ well-known columnist Paul
Krugman. Many of them used this last financial crisis in 2008-2009
as an excuse to absurdly inflate their currency's money supply through
“quantitative easing” even after “the great recession’s” immediate crisis had
just ended. Are these
people so smart yet so dumb at the same time?
North explains why we shouldn't think that the
Bilderburgers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission,
etc., control America and/or the Western world ultimately. They will be
undone by their own belief in political liberalism, especially by their belief
in Keynesian economics, which preaches that we can spend our way into
prosperity regardless of the debt incurred in the process. The
world's governments need to learn to live within their means in order to
declare their independence of the bond market vigilantes who drive up the
interest rates on risky government bonds. Otherwise, they will all end up
like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Japan, the USA, and Britain may
well be next to join them. They will hit the wall
as their aging populations demand more government services and fewer
workers are around to pay for them. They will enter a
collective debt crisis that will destroy the U.S. dollar, the
Japanese yen, the British pound, and probably the euro as well, as
presently configured. It's about as predictable as the sun's rising,
except for the exact timing. The
coronavirus crisis merely has sped up the day of ultimate collapse by several
years compared to the old trajectory, in which Trump’s administration was
merely sinking a trillion dollars a year into the financial hole.
The
left has its own versions of this same explanatory phenomenon. That’s why a false belief in conspiracy
theories is an American problem, not merely a left-wing or right-wing
characteristic. For example, a number
of hard left blacks believe that the World Health Organization created AIDS as
a means to kill off the black race.
Other liberals will discuss, say, the sales of drugs in poor communities
by the FBI and/or CIA as having a similar goal. A liberal black conspiracy theory was central to how O.J. Simpson
literally got away with murder, as if the LA police would aim to frame a previously
non-political black (as opposed to, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton) for the
crime of murdering his ex-wife and her apparent lover. Other liberals (or perhaps libertarians)
will argue that 9-11 was a conspiracy of Jews and/or the Bush administration to
start a war in the Middle East to further Israel’s interests and/or to strip
Americans of their civil liberties.
Despite JFK ran as a solid Cold Warrior who outflanked Richard Nixon on
the right in the 1960 campaign, Oliver Stone and others have long argued that
the Vietnam War was the creation of a conspiracy in the CIA and elsewhere that
had JFK killed in order to intervene in that war. (The truth is that JFK felt he might have to run against
Goldwater in 1964, so he didn’t want Vietnam to collapse right around when he
would be running for re-election, so he authorized the coup against Diem for
this reason, since he was deemed to be an ineffective leader who was losing
support within his own nation).
The
real world simply doesn’t fit such categories well, especially after we realize
the contradictions about how we perceive the power of the conspirators in the
worlds of government, media, and business.
Long ago, the journalist Jeff Greenfield pointed out that once someone
knows the people at the top, one finds all sorts of dumb things done. His example concerned why the United States’
mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia: We had a bad map so it got bombed. The same government that supposedly can do
anything and spy on everyone, in the spirit of the TV show “A Person of
Interest,” can’t stop banal, routine street crime. The elites of America, despite giving Hillary Clinton an extra
$500 million dollars for TV attack ads and political organizing and
unaccountably more help through very biased media coverage from major TV
networks and major newspapers, couldn’t stop Donald Trump from being
elected. Instead of being nearly
omnipotent, the purported conspirators are part of government bureaucracies
that waste spectacular amounts of money, can’t fill in the potholes in the city
streets, and who can’t fire bad government workers, such as incompetent school
teachers and brutal police officers.
We
think that the secret police of America, such as the FBI, are omnicompetent
when in the hands of these conspirators, but in the real world, we see that
they are often the gang that can’t shoot straight. They didn’t follow up on tips that the Florida school shooter,
Nikolas Cruz, was potentially dangerous. The CIA, like the other major spy
agencies of the world, thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
just as Saddam’s own generals had thought before they surrendered and reported
their beliefs to those who interviewed.
The CIA also spent decades saying in their estimates of GDP that the
USSR’s economy was going to surpass that of the United States in size. In reality, the omnicompetent rulers are a
myth. In reality, they are like the
Watergate burglars who got caught in part because they taped a door’s
latch. Nixon couldn’t cover up
something that trivial by comparison; why do we believe something much bigger
and longer-lived involving many more people can remain successfully
hidden? Wouldn’t someone possibly feel
guilty and confess? Would someone
foolishly boast when under the influence?
In a world with camera phones and the internet, can anything really be
hidden anymore for long? What happened
when Romney said in a closed-door campaign event that half the population he
didn’t care about convincing them to vote for him since they didn’t pay income
taxes? It got around everywhere
nevertheless.
The CFR, the Trilaterals, the Bilderbergers, the Davos set, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, etc., couldn’t prevent the election of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and (in the College of Cardinals) a Polish Pope John Paul II from being elected. They combined with others to bring down the iron curtain. Theoretically, if the John Bircher theory was right, David Rockefeller should have called up Gorbachev and ordered him to “Send in the tanks!” when the Solidarity Union’s forces were taking over Poland in 1989. Clearly that didn’t happen, which shows the obvious falsity of that conspiracy theory’s main claim.
Of
course, for any claim that this or that set of conditions refute a conspiracy
theory, it can be made non-falsifiable by its advocates. Hence, the John Birchers can assert, after
the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and the USSR imposed in 1991-1992, that the
“Insiders” simply changed their tactics some.
Instead of feeding the Communist Beast, they decided to destroy it. Why did they change their minds in
1989? Did they feel that the “Insiders”
now could advance their cause of making the United States into a fascist
dictatorship by another means instead?
Why?
Sure,
the establishment and the mighty of the world network with each other to give
each other good jobs and lucrative contracts.
Just look at the contents of John Podesta’s emails that the Russians
phished successfully. He was like a
one-man employment agency for the families of the well-connected while working
for Hillary Clinton as a campaign manager.
Let’s zero in on a typical kind of rumor based on conspiracy theories. Was the Wuhan virus a deliberate creation of scientists working in a lab? Or does it have a natural origin, such as from (say) someone's buying meat from a bat or pangolin at the "wet" market in Wuhan, China? The genetics of the virus, at least for objective scientists, point to its being a natural virus, not a "Frankenstein's monster" product of a lab geared for making (say) weapons for biological warfare. Of course, as it notorious, conspiracy theories are not really falsifiable hypotheses. Someone who believes in them, once confronted with evidence refuting them, simply says the new evidence is a product of the giant conspiracy as well. At some point, we need to be sensible instead. https://www.yahoo.com/gma/sorry-conspiracy-theorists-study-concludes-covid-19-not-090026698--abc-news-topstories.html
I
predict all this 9-11 “truther” nonsense can be refuted easily once one grinds
a sufficient number of details. Popular
Mechanics has made a major effort to refute engineering analyses that claim the
buildings couldn’t have collapsed because airplanes hit them. See https://www.popularmechanics.com/9-11-conspiracy-theories/.
I simply don’t believe our establishment is
that malicious, for all of their problems.
We don’t live in Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Furthermore, why don’t they organize another
9-11 hit job every year, every month, every week, even every day, if it suited
their purposes so well? Remember, a lot
of people for months, even years, after 9-11 were worried that another major
terrorist hit would occur, but it didn’t.
For
a similar example of this, we have all the conspiracies surrounding JFK’s
assassination, including the Oliver Stone theory that comes from the same fever
swamps that the 9-11 “truther” claims emerge that it was the result of a
CIA-backed conspiracy to keep us in Vietnam.
I still remember one of my professors at MSU considering it such
nonsense because JFK had campaigned as such a cold warrior in the 1960
presidential election that he couldn’t have easily abandoned Vietnam. Furthermore, JFK knew that Vietnam would
likely collapse in time for the 1964 election and that he would could be up
against (well) Barry Goldwater, the supreme Cold Warrior of the right
himself. Consider the 1612-page effort
by Vincent Bugliosi, “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John
F. Kennedy,” which is a very systematic refutation of all and any conspiracy theories
related to JFK’s death. I doubt that
the 9-11 “truther” claims could really withstand a similar examination.
So can this conspiracy theory, or any other, be falsified, in the minds of its believers? I was willing to give up my belief in the Insider/John Bircher theory that the Rockefellers controlled the Communists after Gorbachev let the Iron Curtain fall. Likely a John Bircher, still believing in that theory, would simply say the Insiders changed their tactics and decided that Communism had to go after having had fed that beast for 70 plus years. Hence, the theory can’t be proven true or false and so lacks a proper scientific/historical status. (See the writings of the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper if you aren’t familiar with this kind of reasoning about falsification). So I have given up my faith in conspiracy theories. They ultimately are non-falsifiable hypotheses.
As
Christians, we should remember that the world’s destiny is in His hands, not
humanity’s. Therefore, we shouldn’t
worry about any conspiracy. The world
is in His hands, not ours. God will
send His Son, His kingdom will rule the world, and that’s the end of the
matter. Therefore, there’s no need to
be concerned or worried about conspiracies of the world’s mighty. God will take care of them, whether or not
they are actually conspiring about anything or merely just scratching each
other’s back.
Eric
V. Snow
Click here to access
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notes for sermonettes: /sermonettes.html
Why does God Allow Evil?
Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
Should Christians obey
the Old Testament law? /doctrinalhtml/Does
the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do you have an immortal
soul? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Here
and Hereafter.htm
Does the ministry have
authority? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
There an Ordained Ministry vs Edwards.html
Is the United States the
Beast? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Are
We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you give 10% of
your income to your church? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Does
the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
Is Jesus God? Click
here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
Jesus God.htm
Will there be a third
resurrection? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Will
There Be a Third Resurrection.htm
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