Why is it that Christians, who are so committed to truth, bite on Conspiracy theories so easily?

Anyone remember Y2K? The conspiracies were pressed hard on churches. Tim Lahaye (Dispensationalist) and Gary North (Covenant) BOTH lead many Christians into dispair with their conspiracies.
I almost listed that one, but to my recollection the conspiracies that were associated with Y2K were primarily related to the after effects of the crash and not so much with any entity intentionally orchestrating the bug. Do you remember otherwise?
 
Anyone remember Y2K? The conspiracies were pressed hard on churches. Tim Lahaye (Dispensationalist) and Gary North (Covenant) BOTH lead many Christians into dispair with their conspiracies.
I remember y2k. Had to download a patch for it. How were Christians lead to despair? I wasn't running with dispy crowds at the time. I would guess many were afraid the Rapture was imminent.

I read up on North. I wouldn't call him 'Covenant.' He was Preterist. There is a huge difference.
 
Actually, that's the reason for the blanket dismissals. Do you still read "Only Sky"?

I’m not advocating uncritically ignoring potential threats, only imploring believers to not believe every wind of doctrine, not to be tossed too and fro, as it were. And I have no familiarity with Only Sky so that’s a non-sequitur.
 
But it devolves into conspiracy theory once they start claiming there's a massive effort by the scientific establishment to cover up the truth,
Not massive in the sense of a centralized effort, but massive in the sense of a defacto effort by reason of their nature to, as Paul said, hold the truth in unrighteousness; - Romans 1:18

To borrow conventional terms, Intelligent Design and Meaning are so obvious in the natural sciences, that to deny it is a conscious act of suppression of key details.

This clause, τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικία κατεχόντων is differently rendered, “Veritatem injuste detinentes — unjustly detaining the truth,” Turrettin; “Who stifle the truth in unrighteousness,” Chalmers; “Who hinder the truth by unrighteousness,” Stuart; “Who wickedly oppose the truth,” Hodge; “Who confine the truth by unrighteousness,” Macknight
“They rushed headlong,” says Pareus, “into impiety against God and into injustice against one another, not through ignorance, but knowingly, not through weakness, but willfully and maliciously: and this the Apostle expresses by a striking metaphor, taken from tyrants, who, against right and justice, by open violence, oppress the innocent, bind them in chains, and detain them in prison.”
The sense given by Schleusner and some others, “Qui cum veri Dei cognitione pravitatem vitæ conjungunt — who connect with a knowledge of the true God a wicked life,” seems not to comport with the context.
“The truth” means that respecting the being and power of God afterwards specified. — Ed.
Further, we're told by the Apostle that they do it all the time, as many believing scientists testify.
 
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So, two things that God has told us: 1) The rulers of the earth do take counsel together, in other words, they conspire to oppose God and His Christ; and 2) They actively suppress key scientific facts that testify of God's glory.

I guess we could give David and Paul some tinfoil hats.
 
And I have no familiarity with Only Sky so that’s a non-sequitur.
It's kinduva hippie publication you cited sometime back.

Imagine there's no Heaven.
It's easy if you try.
No Hell below us.
Above us only sky.


I'm glad to hear you've forgotten about it.

And now you're citing a blog in Patheos, which could be easily renamed 1730201356880.png . It's an observation of mine that you tend to gravitate toward the MSM and an open spirituality who would have a vested interest in smearing political and religious conservatives when citing your sources.

It could be nothing other than that you just snatch up the top results in your Google searches blissfully unaware of their slanted algorithms. I hope that's all it is. Otherwise it raises some red flags about your reading material. ;)
 
The medieval and Salem witch hunts are perhaps the most obvious example. Along with its more contemporary counterpart, the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s, or the aforementioned Pizza gate and QAnon. I don't think the Satanic panic ever really left us. I Remeber hearing a former FBI guy on the radio in the mid-90s talking about ritual Satanic sacrifices being conducted in daycares.

G. A. Riplinger and New Age Bible Versions transformed KJV-onlyism into a full-blown conspiracy theory, if it wasn't one already.

A lot of "prophecy" study amongst pop-Dispensationalists transmogrifies into New World Order conspiracy theories.

And of course plenty of Christians buy into the popular theories, like flat earthism, JFK conspiracies, or moon-landing denial.

I think some Christians latch onto fringe pseudoscience like flat-earth theory or geocentrism in a good-faith attempt to stay true to what they believe the Bible says about the world. But it devolves into conspiracy theory once they start claiming there's a massive effort by the scientific establishment to cover up the truth, as if a bunch of geologists stand to gain from pretending the earth is a sphere orbiting the sun.
wasn;t hollywood a major contributor to the "satanic panic" phenomenon?.... ... they first started making movies about that subject in the 1930s with boris karloff in "the black cat"..... then in the 60s and 70s dozens of movies came out based on the satanic worship and demon possession themes... ....by the time the stories of people in hooded robes meeting in the desert to sacrifice kidnapped babies came out in the 1980s people were already well primed to believe it was happening... ..... .

the older couple i call my tin foil hat friends from college, believe in a lot of the conspiracy theories surrounding the government..... ..they have christian backgrounds but have not been around a church for a long time... .... they come up with things i never heard from anywhere or anyone else but them.. ..some things that are bizarre.... .. .they don;t buy into flat earthism but they do believe in all the jfk theories.... and also the moon landing denials ..... their claim on that one is that if going to the moon was so easy to do in the late 1960s and 1970s when technology was primitive ... then why does our government have so much trouble and meet with so many failures trying to do work much closer to earth now?.... like in the upper atmosphere... when todays technology is so advanced?....... ..

.i have no answers for any of that ...all of it was before my time... except to suggest to them that perhaps the idea that each new generation of mankind is smarter than the last one is false.... and in reality mankind sometimes starts moving backwards and gets dumber for a few decades rather than smarter?......


To clarify, the crucifixion was definitely a conspiracy. And no one denies that such events exist. Evil people collude to do evil things all the time.

Conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is more like a comprehensive worldview in which the evil men colluding to do evil things are the main thing driving history. There are no accidents in history, and major events must have major causes: there's no way a lone gunman could get close enough to the president to shoot him, or that 19 guys could sneak onto airplanes and kill thousands without inside help from the establishment, for its own purposes.

It's what psychologists call a monological belief system, in which the believers interpret new information and events in a way that reinforces their existing beliefs, or dismiss information that contradicts those beliefs. Which is a reason why ardent conspiratorialists don't generally believe in just one conspiracy theory.
immediately after the actual conspiracy surrounding the crucifixion - a conspiracy theory was started by Christ deniers that persists to this day....probably the most damaging conspiracy theory of all time... and that was the idea the disciples had lied when they reported seeing Christ resurrected.... and that they had actually stolen the body of Jesus and hidden it away... then made up stories about His resurrection and ascension into heaven... ...it;s one of the reasons i believe christians have been the targets and victims of conspiracy theories throughout history far more often than they have created them or bought into them..... .

george w bush himself.... combined with the history of the bush family - and the fact he was so ready and willing to envoke the patriot act following 9/11 are one of the reasons for so many 9/11 conspiracy theories still going on today.... . the whole bush family was definitely government insiders and had the keys to a lot of doors in the system... ....

and people really do want to believe that system they had the keys to is rock solid and fail proof... so much so that when it fails ... and fails massively like it did with regards to 9/11... it;s easier for them to accept that there might have been a conspiracy involved and criminal actors on the inside.. ...rather than accept the reality that our government is being run by idiots - who only went into government work because they couldn;t make it in the private business world or private industry - which pays much better..... ...

and it doesn;t help dispell those theories when the government over reacts and uses their own failure as an excuse to crack down on the law abiding public with something like the patriot act..... people tend to see that and assume it was their intention all along....
 
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the main stream news media... (aka legacy news media)... is definitely in bed with the democrats.... and they have been to one extent or another since world war 2.... today their high tech offshoots google... facebook...microsoft-msn etc.... and a majority of online news sources ... have followed the tradition and treat the democrats leftist ideology as if it were gospel truth... .... . .. .and that;s not a conspiracy theory it;s a well known fact.... a fact the main stream news and it;s cronies do not even deny.......

back in the day.... days so long ago none of us were alive to see them.... the press... (news agencies) ... were considered the 4th estate.... established to safeguard against government abuses and corruption by reporting the truth and the facts ... literally shining a light on things less than honest people in government might want to keep secret... ...

but today that has changed...... ... the news media has become nothing but an arm of one political party - and a major part of the problem with government corruption rather than a solution or answer to it...... ....it;s literally a case of the ones we trusted to be the watchers becoming the ones who now require being watched..... or ..like trump says... the enemy of the people they are supposed to serve....
 
I remember y2k. Had to download a patch for it. How were Christians lead to despair? I wasn't running with dispy crowds at the time. I would guess many were afraid the Rapture was imminent.

I read up on North. I wouldn't call him 'Covenant.' He was Preterist. There is a huge difference.
North was a Covenant Theologian who held to Theonomy and Preterism. An extreme Covenant guy.

Dispensationalists and Covenant Theologians (and evangelists of all types) were running around doing seminars in churches about the end of the world on Jan 1, 2020.
 
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I remember y2k. Had to download a patch for it. How were Christians lead to despair? I wasn't running with dispy crowds at the time. I would guess many were afraid the Rapture was imminent.

We lived in Rockford, Illiniois at the time. Large churches had seminars led by evangelists who were spooking the saints with the end of the world scenarios.

Grant Jeffery "Millenium Meltdown" a dispensationalist
Gary North "predicted" a meltdown and was nicknamed "scary Gary"
The Left Behind series sold alot of books. Not because they predicted Y2K, they are fictional eschatology books

North and Jeffery had websites where you could buy 25 year food, seeds and survival tools.

By February 2000, those website scrubbed all information about Y2K and just became survival tool websites

The charismatics in our city were especially spooked
 
Grant Jeffery "Millenium Meltdown" a dispensationalist

I think I've mentioned before that a Christian bookstore near my hometown was still selling Millennium Meltdown two years after the fact, and still at full price.

Jeffrey spoke at my church one 1999 Sunday about the "prophetic implications of Y2K." Interestingly enough, he also admitted the problem wasn't so bad, since by that time all the Canadian banks had fixed it. Hard to get behind the prophetic implications of a problem that could be fixed with a small software patch...

Pity so many of the Y2K doomsayers have died. I'd have loved to see how many of them pulled out a revised edition of their books in time for the Unix epoch rollover in 2038. (I'm sure John Walvoord would find an excuse to release about the 37th edition of Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis.)
 
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Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG, the Republican’s AOC) has bought into this:

“Yes they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

The number of Christian friends who have posted some version of this nonsense is staggering. And is the government controlling the weather you might ask. Because they want to prevent Trump voters from getting to the polls.

The same people who say that man has no effect on the climate are convinced that the government can steer hurricanes.
 
The same people who say that man has no effect on the climate are convinced that the government can steer hurricanes.

Or that global warming is a hoax, while at the same time we're on the rising edge of a natural cycle.

It's not uncommon for specific conspiracy theories to have multiple, mutually contradictory forms--witness the vast number of people alleged to have assassinated JFK. (Everyone got a shot off, even Jackie. The one innocent man was Oswald.) And there are people who hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously, such as Princess Diana both being murdered and faking her own death.
 
It's kinduva hippie publication you cited sometime back.

Imagine there's no Heaven.
It's easy if you try.
No Hell below us.
Above us only sky.


I'm glad to hear you've forgotten about it.

And now you're citing a blog in Patheos, which could be easily renamed View attachment 6062 . It's an observation of mine that you tend to gravitate toward the MSM and an open spirituality who would have a vested interest in smearing political and religious conservatives when citing your sources.

It could be nothing other than that you just snatch up the top results in your Google searches blissfully unaware of their slanted algorithms. I hope that's all it is. Otherwise it raises some red flags about your reading material. ;)

I would encourage you to address what was said without appealing to a fallacious argument by poisoning the well.
 
We lived in Rockford, Illiniois at the time. Large churches had seminars led by evangelists who were spooking the saints with the end of the world scenarios.

Grant Jeffery "Millenium Meltdown" a dispensationalist
Gary North "predicted" a meltdown and was nicknamed "scary Gary"
The Left Behind series sold alot of books. Not because they predicted Y2K, they are fictional eschatology books

North and Jeffery had websites where you could buy 25 year food, seeds and survival tools.

By February 2000, those website scrubbed all information about Y2K and just became survival tool websites

The charismatics in our city were especially spooked
I've always wondered about the companies that sell the seeds that are stored for you in a vault in Antarctica. Do they really think when doomsday come and all social order falls apart these seeds aren't going to be stolen by whoever can get to and access said vault in Antarctica first.
 
I've always wondered about the companies that sell the seeds that are stored for you in a vault in Antarctica. Do they really think when doomsday come and all social order falls apart these seeds aren't going to be stolen by whoever can get to and access said vault in Antarctica first.

When civilization breaks down, how are all the survivalists going to get to Antarctica, anyway?
 
I've always wondered about the companies that sell the seeds that are stored for you in a vault in Antarctica. Do they really think when doomsday come and all social order falls apart these seeds aren't going to be stolen by whoever can get to and access said vault in Antarctica first.
When civilization breaks down, how are all the survivalists going to get to Antarctica, anyway?
the global seed storage vault is actually not in antarctica..... ...it;s in svalbard on the island of spitzbergen... in the arctic..... close to norway at the north and opposite end of the planet from antarctica... ... in fact it;s under the governance and protection of norway.... and also under tight security.... . but apparently anybody can access it to either store seeds there or recover them.....


here;s a link to the seeds vault official page....


it would take more than the average army or navy to break through and steal something from that vault... ... not that it couldn;t be done... . but if social order broke down world wide....and things got that bad ...who is going to have time to plant those seeds and watch them grow anyway?.....:confused:
 
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