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2020: Year of Conspiracies, Real and Imagined (Unpopular Opinions Contained Herein)
The word “unprecedented” is going to need to be replaced, don’t you think? At this point, it’s pretty much worn its welcome out with me. I could really stand to do with some good, old-fashioned precedent rather than the continuous string of horrors this year has served up.
But stressful times can have the effect of separating the wheat from the chaff, and this year is no exception. We’ve seen considerably greater quantities of chaff (such that my hide is chafed)this year, especially with regard to the emergence of bogey-men in the form of conspiracy theories. This may be unpopular, but this series (for which @westernchauvinist gets partial credit) is about airing your unpopular opinions in a sort of… annual vanity bonfire. And I’m burning with the desire to make myself unpopular.
Today I have unpopular opinions concerning three conspiracies: One true, one false, and one that is… possible. Let’s get this one out of the way right now:
Donald Trump lost the election fair and square.
Don’t give me your sad-sack, shop-worn-from-2004, Randi-Rhodes-wannabe conspiracy theories about Diebold – excuse me… Dominion – Voting machines and software stealing the election from Donald Trump. They didn’t. You have zero credible evidence for a vast conspiracy involving thousands of individuals spread across entire states, in multiple counties and municipalities who are all so clever and smart that they somehow changed only the votes of 5,000,000 or so Americans such that Trump lost… but large numbers of Republicans nonetheless won.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t individual instances of voter fraud that crop up where a cagey daughter of a dowager votes for their aged parent in the manner they perceive to be all that is good and right. Or random precinct captains who engage in hinky business at the margins in an attempt to put a thumb, toe, or elbow on the scale. These things happen. They are unjust and when uncovered need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
However: none of that occurred in sufficient quantity as to swing the election in favor of Joe Biden, and there’s no logical necessity that all such marginal fraud was pointing in the same direction, either. An elaborate conspiracy isn’t required to explain the President’s failure to expand his coalition beyond his fervid base. Watching the President tell people to inject disinfectant in response to the ongoing pandemic might have had some bearing upon their decision to not vote for him. Or was that a joke? I can never keep up with how many moves ahead of the game he is today and his many japes.
If you examine the results of the election, you’ll notice that in many places, the President ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidate in that state, and there are many places (like Maine) where he ran significantly behind which should tell you that people were plenty willing to split their tickets. Not at historically high levels, but at statistically believable ones which sometimes even favored the President. Nowhere is this more evident than a state like Georgia, where David Perdue received 49.73% of the total vote, compared to Trump’s 49.26%. In the Senate Special Election, Republicans received 49.37% of the vote in total, slightly ahead of the President.
This is not evidence of a fell conspiracy to turf Trump out. It’s evidence of the fact that the more suburban a State’s electorate was, the less popular the President was compared to down-ballot Republicans. The more rural the state? The President tended to pace ahead of those same Republicans.
This is a bad conspiracy theory that needs to die. The President lost. Republicans didn’t, however. Perhaps there’s a message there we can build on?
But if that’s a fake conspiracy, are there real ones to worry about? What if I told you…
There exists an international cabal of pederasts consisting of people placed at the highest levels of well-respected and powerful organizations who have for decades perpetrated their crimes under the nose of law enforcement officials and within the very framework of the legal system itself.
You’re probably thinking right now: “I know what he’s talking about! Buell is joining QAnon!”
Sorry to disappoint. The truth is considerably worse than that fake conspiracy twaddle. Unfortunately, this conspiracy turns out to be all too real, is extremely horrifying, and centers on none other than… the Catholic Church.
What’s even more amazing? They admitted the conspiracy was real. Don’t believe me? Read the report, issued on November 10, here. When I say “reading this document is unbelievable” I literally mean that it beggars the imagination. How something like this could happen in a modern, civilized society is truly beyond my capacity… until you consider that some conspiracies are true.
At the center of this web of lies (to the extent that this abomination has a “center”) are no fewer than five Popes, 4,000 priests, (that we know of) multiple Archbishops and a bunch of Cardinals, who acted in concert (either wittingly or no) over the course of five decades to protect and promote through its ranks, men like George Pell. Also, the subject of this report: one Theodore McCarrick, the Jeffrey Epstein of the Catholic Church, who rose from the rank of Monsignor all the way up to Cardinal whilst furling about himself a systematic and illegal conspiracy, involving thousands of victims across dozens of nations whose lives will never be the same.
If the Executive Summary is insufficient to turn one’s stomach, I recommend fast-forwarding to page 39 where what I can only describe as “textbook grooming behavior by a serial pederast in a position of trust” is detailed. Keep in mind: this behavior was known about and alleged by witnesses as far back as the ’70s yet routinely swept under the rug, principally because of McCarrick’s close ties to large, influential, and rich Catholic families. McCarrick was repeatedly described as intelligent, affable, and hard-working, but also as an important and influential fundraiser, so the possibility of him being a criminal of this nature — plying children with alcohol and brazenly molesting them in their homes and on overnight excursions or abusing fellow priests — was, shall we say, outside of the Overton Window?
What is striking about this is just how closely the experience of “Mother 1” described in the report was replicated in parishes across the country… almost as if many of these abuser priests shared knowledge of their illicit activities and covered up for one another in some sort of conspiracy of silence that only really began to come to light in 2002 and beyond.
If you’re a fan of irony, consider the contrast between this situation and the “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s and ’90s which saw a sort of mass hysteria over “ritual sexual abuse” supposedly carried out by secretive covens of Satanists. The accusations were lurid; thousands of innocents were allegedly slaughtered in the course of carrying out these ghastly rites, with the accusations culminating in the false prosecution and ruination of the owners and workers at the McMartin Preschool before the panic was, thankfully, extinguished. Imagine, if you will, the delight of priestly perpetrators of such non-ritual yet very real abuse as they watched this drama play out on television and just how convenient it was for them that the energy wasted on this fruitless exercise spurred on by overzealous Church Ladies (today we might call them “Karens”) likely had the effect of discrediting potential accusations against them. They probably laughed and laughed at the bizarre confluence of events in which the media in concert with their vocation ended up burying even deeper the stain of their evil.
I mentioned that the conspiracy involved the legal system itself, because of course it had to. The perpetrators – no doubt under the watchful eye and assistance of various authorities in the legal system whom they had cleverly coopted and befriended – devised a system of binding Non-Disclosure Agreements to go along with payments to victims doled out by the Diocese in which the abuses took place, forming a legal “hall of mirrors” from which the light of their perfidy could not escape.
In 2017, I eulogized my Grandmother on this very website. It was painful to contemplate her loss, but I was forced after reading the bulk of this report to think again about my Grandmother, who always gave the “widow’s mite” to her local parish. To be frank, I’m glad she’s gone if only because it would make me sick to think of her horror and shame at seeing what that mite, given for years, had a hand in perpetrating.
This conspiracy was allowed to exist and grow to monstrous proportions precisely because people wanted to believe the best. Not the worst. Just make sure that the power of belief doesn’t overpower your rational faculties.
I’m sorry to be so maudlin, so I’m going to end with something I’ve touched on before which is a bit more fun…
It’s very likely that secret agencies of the US Government possess definitive knowledge that non-human intelligences are in control of vehicles that routinely violate our airspace and harass our military fighter jets.
Maybe this opinion isn’t unpopular anymore, yet there it is. No matter how weird 2020 has been, one of its more striking scenes had to be when the admission by the government that UFOs are real was met with a sort of yawn from the general public.
The CIA clearly thinks something is up — this is a link to their listing of declassified UFO photographs, which is nothing particularly explosive, given that they’re low resolution, grainy photocopies of the originals.
I promised a conspiracy, but isn’t this one sort of “out of the bag” at this point? It would be hard to keep something this titanic secret for long even if you a) read in as few people as possible, b) enacted strict compartmentalization of information, and c) outsourced many of the secret parts to private-sector vendors who can control their workforces with strict NDAs… there’s that word again. And to the extent that these procedures seem to have been followed, it has nonetheless broken down.
We already know about the existence AATIP program from the 2017 NYT revelations featuring Lue Elizondo and Harry Reid, but what we don’t know is whether there were antecedent programs. We also know, for instance, that the government has claimed (rather obliquely) to be in possession of “meta materials” possibly from a crashed UAV (unidentified aerial vehicle) and that Navy pilots and vessels have unequivocally recorded encounters with UAPs in several spectra, including visible light, infrared and radar; vehicles which exhibit flight characteristics impossible to square with currently understood notions of aeronautical engineering. So where’s the conspiracy?
It should go without saying that possession of such technology would place its owner in the position of having a type of strategic superiority in geopolitical matters unlike anything we’ve seen in world history… so you’d better believe that somebody at the Pentagon is interested in looking into this, and with a secret budget of over $50 billion, a couple million dollars here or there falling in between the military’s couch cushions ending up funding these highly compartmentalized research programs doesn’t seem incredible.
I know, this isn’t much of a “conspiracy.” But that’s the best I can currently come up with given the evidence we have in hand.
For my part, I want to remain as agnostic about this question as possible. If somebody asked me: “do you believe in UFOs?” my response would likely be that my beliefs about this or any topic have nothing to do with it. The facts as I apprehend them are:
Craft displaying extreme flight capabilities have been reported and recorded by highly credible witnesses for decades;
World governments give contradictory answers about these phenomena, which means there’s probably little cooperation;
No private individual seems to have credible, physical evidence of one of these craft in their possession;
There is no direct evidence that the source of these craft is extraterrestrial and not merely a highly advanced US R&D project:
There is precious little evidence that these “craft” are even “craft” at all and not an exotic weather phenomenon we cannot explain;
The government knows about these phenomena and understands that it is something real but is trying to gain a better understanding before going off half-cocked and possibly causing a major panic, and lastly;
There seem to be national security implications from studying these UAP which prevent the government from candidly admitting what they are.
But there is some good news: If it is true that these craft are actually controlled by non-human intelligences it seems unlikely they’re all that interested in us. And who could blame them? Are we all that interested in the comings and goings of ants? Obviously not. Ants are lucky if, upon being sighted in my lawn, they are not immediately exterminated with extreme prejudice… and the difference in intelligence and technological know-how between ants and us and a race of beings capable of interstellar travel has to be about as great, if not greater.
To advanced intelligences, we’re probably not that interesting, and that’s an underappreciated blessing.
Bring on the unpopularity.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
So historical math without photographic evidence?
Ok.
Don’t put yourself out on my account. I know what I believe.
He was making an epistemological argument. It is a valid point of inquiry without resorting to mischaracterizing his words.
It was a fairly weak one which relies upon appeals to authority rather than logic and moral reasoning, which I rebutted.
Everything which we deduce about the day-t0-day goings on in ancient times is mostly inferential due to the general illiteracy and lack of record-keeping. That reminds me of the old saw that you are free to interpolate but not to extrapolate. So, when faced with some relatively certain events documented by third parties, it makes sense to allow for interpolation.
I think Prager is not making an epistemological argument but rather an ontological argument. He seems to be saying that if there is no God, murder is not wrong and our opinions on the wrongness of murder are mere opinions.
But to say, “One should obey God’s commands,” is also an opinion. Also, the God of the Hebrew Bible commands people to kill infants and children. So, is Prager endorsing Divine Command Theory? Presumably this would mean that killing infants and children is morally right if God commands this.
The brief answer is: Yes. If God decrees something facially immoral to be moral it must be.
I get that some people like this as it places God as having ultimate power over everything… because if there are laws which bind even God, that implies something bigger than him, doesn’t it?
Yes. Moral reality would be existentially prior even to God.
The question is how do you “know” murder is wrong. That is a question about the nature of “knowing” versus “believing” which is epistemological.
This is akin to “reprisals” contained in the laws of war.
It is situation dependent in other words.
This is an absurd statement. Ridiculous on its face.
Peace out.
Not at all. If God exists and God commands someone to torture children, God’s command is wrong. Thus, the moral reality would be existentially prior to God.
Poorly. The logical fallacy occurs when one submits a faulty appeal to authority which this is not.
Paul was a third party, but you don’t count his documentation.
Nope.
Look up “reprisal” in the context of “laws of war” and get back to me.
That’s insane.
HW is not talking about laws of war, but about Euthyphro Dilemma.
Intro to the question, and to the available theories, below. One theory is indeed that G-d answers to moral law. Another theory is that torturing babies and enjoying it would be right if G-d told us to. There is, however, a third theory.
For example, perhaps the fresh look of the N. T. Wright book I just read? For my part, of course, I am capable of disagreeing with Augustine and Aquinas.
Hey, you know who critiques the medievals on this very point? N. T. Wright does.
But here are the points you seem again to have missed in responding to that particular comment:
–Some things you say you’ve heard from Christian apologists are things I’ve never heard anywhere, and are demonstrably bad theology.
–I think you need a fresh look at what Christianity actually means.
–If you are truly serious about your interest in learning, my advice is to read a book that might teach you some of things which I, most likely, will not be able to teach you. N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian just might do the job.
I have no clear idea what you think I said about what.
Let’s review once more.
You say this:
And I say this:
And you also say this:
And so I say this:
I can guess that you think I was talking about the very idea of hell as a terrible misunderstanding. I wasn’t. It is a real place. (From more recent comments it almost looks like you thought I was responding to your comments that came after my response, about the idea that heaven is better because you see the punishment in hell from there.)
Of course, when I said the thing about terrible misunderstandings I was only responding to your sentence–above–where you appear to think that Christianity (or some branch of it) teaches that G-d sends people to hell for the crime of not being sure the Resurrection happened.
That has almost nothing to do with the teachings of any version of Christianity I have ever heard of.
If you think it does, then your understanding of what Christianity teaches about Jesus and about hell is badly inadequate.
Augustine, Aquinas, and Tertullian, of course, do better than you, although no doubt they make some mistakes themselves. So do I, no doubt. In any case, either I lack the ability to explain anything to you, or you lack the ability to learn anything from me–possibly both.
Wright is wrong sometimes too. But he could be pretty helpful in giving you a fresh perspective on what Christianity actually means. Without even mentioning hell, he can give you a darn good explanation of the Gospel that covers more orthodox territory than many standard Baptist presentations of the Gospel that do focus on hell.
Of course. Tell someone who disagrees.
But it is still an important source of knowledge.
Isn’t it?
No, it means that their having witnessed the events is part of the historical record.
Now, as it happens, I regularly do hold in my hands the eyewitness testimony of four, another which is a piece of sober history from one who looked into it, and about four others who were known by the first-generation community also to have been eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses of the events. (At least two from this set are not even doubted by most skeptics.)
The events in the life of Socrates have much weaker evidence, of course–with only one first-generation witness producing any sober history.
Once again, I agree that extraordinary claims require stronger evidence. (It would be great to see Lincoln do those things, wouldn’t it?)
It’s like in some respects, unlike in others.
Well, good for you. But we’re talking history and theology here, not engineering. I, in turn, find somewhat frustrating your apparent inability to understand what I take to be pretty rudimentary inductive reasoning.
You’re changing the subject. If you follow the link back to the precise topic, you should find that we’re dealing with # 656’s “So, because” paragraph’s response to # 649’s “I suppose” paragraph’s remarks on the significance of the 500 mentioned by Paul in 1 Cor. 15.
[Sigh.] It was a more reliable testimony because in its day it could be fact-checked (and welcomed fact-checking), and the fact this was so has not changed.
It is not absurd. The newspapers mentioned the audience, various readers of the papers were there or knew someone who was there, and everyone who was there was available for the purpose of fact-checking the official narrative. That helps to support the reliability of the newspaper accounts. It matters that we can say “These things were not done in a corner;” the evidence would be somewhat weaker if the people who happened to write down their testimony had been the only ones present when Lincoln gave his speech.
As I’ve been telling you for years.
Of course.
Multiple independent accounts–I’ve also been reminding you of the importance of that for years. Subtract the photo, and we still have darn good evidence it happened. But the immediate point is that the presence of the crowd also contributes something, on which see above.
I take the evidentiary quality very seriously. I have been telling you for years–will you perhaps take me at my word for a change?–that if you can show me that the golden plates have the same sort of evidence then I will have to change my theology in some way.
The evidentiary quality actually is not as good. Go over the eleven criteria I listed, and tell me how many of them the golden plates actually meet. (Multiple witness–that is one criterion I do concede is enjoyed by both the golden plates and the aliens!)
Of course those things matter, and, as it turns out, all the available physical proofs for New Testament history support every claim open to being tested thereby.
But this takes us back to the question you haven’t answered:
Is there such a thing as historical knowledge relying on testimony alone? Do either of us have any knowledge about Socrates?
Of course I think it’s an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence (for the umpteenth time).
But of course I think it is not fanciful, and of course I think it could happen.
It appears you are approaching the evidence with the idea that a miracle is fanciful or impossible. That means you are evaluating the evidence with the a priori assumption that miracles do not happen. That is a mistake.
I profess empiricism. We can get knowledge from experience. We can know what the laws of physics are by experience, and the proper way to know whether they have ever been suspended is, likewise, by experience. Evaluate the evidence for a miracle on the strength of the evidence–in this case, its strength as ancient historical testimony.
Just to look at two of the indicators of strong historical testimony:
Are you aware of any historical event whose witnesses died for their claims? Not merely their for views on philosophy or whatever (as Socrates). I am asking about witnesses who died precisely because they claimed to have seen a particular event take place.
I know of one such event, and multiple such witnesses.
I appreciate the fact that you are willing to disagree with even icons of Christianity such as Augustine and Aquinas. I was not trying to imply that their views were your views.
That’s good. I acknowledge that many, if not most, modern day Christians hold views on some issues quite different from those held by prominent Christians of several centuries ago. Most Lutherans, for example, do not subscribe to Martin Luther’s views on Jews.
I think it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to talk of what Christianity actually means because Christianity is diverse. I’ve listened to lots of Christian pastors, especially over the past four years. I’ve listened to Eastern Orthodox pastors, progressive pastors, Calvinist pastors, Open Theist pastors and so on.
My point in bringing up Tertullian earlier was just to point out that his view was not a fringe view.
I’ll consider reading that book. Currently I am reading, “Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary,” by Kenneth Daniels. A few days ago I received from Amazon the book, “Salvation Outside the Church,” by Francis Sullivan. Maybe once I am finished with those books I could make time for N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian.
There are so many books I would be interested in reading. It’s hard for me to decide which ones should have priority.
It is also completely within the laws and customs of war. Why don’t you tell me the rank one has to be to order a reprisal under the current regime of the laws of war.
You should see what happens when an army creates a usable breach in fixed defenses and the defenders reject the terms of surrender. Now imagine, that instead of a fort, it was a fortified town.
Of course Christianity looks too diverse for that if you start off with no distinctions between what is actual Christianity and what isn’t. Do those progressives and open theists of yours recognize the historicity of the resurrection? Or agree with the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed?
I have heard lots of Christian apologists talk about the need to accept Jesus as lord and savior. Often the person the Christian apologist is speaking to will ask, “Why is it so important that I accept Jesus as lord and savior?”
The Christian apologist will often respond, “Salvation. Avoid hell. Enter heaven.” Something along those lines. Of course, the apologist will often mention some earthly benefits of accept Jesus too. Perhaps one’s marriage will be better or one will be able to stay away from addictions to drugs or alcohol or pornography or gambling. Or one will have a more positive outlook because one knows one will spend an eternity in heavenly bliss.
Once my sister-in-law, a Baptist who lives in East Texas, got word that I am an agnostic. She said to me, “Are you not a Christian? Because we want to see you in heaven.”
The point is that ones beliefs about who Jesus was, what Jesus said, what Paul said, whether the Bible is the authoritative word of God, all of these questions do play a huge role in Christian theology, which is not monolithic.
Generally? Yes.