Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I doubt that is true. I think most New Testament scholars view 1st and 2nd Peter as forgeries.
Many scholars doubt that Peter wrote 1st Peter. Virtually the only things that we can say for certain about the disciple Peter is that he was a lower-class fisherman from Galilee (Mark 1:16) who was known to have been illiterate (Acts 4:13). His native tongue was Aramaic. This letter, on the other hand, is written by a highly literate Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Old Testament in its Greek translation and with a range of Greek rhetorical constructions. It is possible, of course, that Peter went back to school after Jesus’ resurrection, learned Greek, became an accomplished writer, mastered the Greek Old Testament, and moved to Rome before writing this letter, but to most scholars, this seems unlikely, especially since we have no evidence of anything like adult education in the ancient world.
Some have suggested that the letter was actually produced by Silvanus, who is mentioned in 1st Peter 5:12. This is certainly possible as well, but one might then wonder why Silvanus is named not as the author of the letter but only as its scribe (or carrier). Others have thought that Silvanus penned the letter as it was dictated by Peter, and that he put Peter’s rough dictation into a more aesthetically pleasing and rhetorically persuasive style of Greek. If so, one would still have difficulty accounting for the detailed interpretations of the Greek Old Testament—and, indeed, for most of the detailed argument—without supposing that Silvanus, rather than Peter, was the real author.
There are an extraordinary number of pseudonymous writings forged in Peter’s name outside of the New Testament. In addition to the Gospel of Peter there are three apocalypses attributed to Peter, several “Acts” of Peter, and other Petrine letters. In addition scholars are virtually unanimous in thinking that the book of 2 Peter within the New Testament is pseudonymous. On balance, then, it is probably best to regard 1 Peter as yet another example of Christian pseudepigraphy, in which a later author took the name of Jesus’ closest disciple to lend authority to his own views.
Do you have the survey data to back up your assertion?
This ignores just about everyone with a divinity or theology doctorate. Absurd.
The Gospels themselves are completely anonymous. None of the authors identifies himself by name. The Gospels are all written in the third person about what “they” – other people – were doing (including, of course, and principally, Jesus).
There are only a couple of exceptions to the third-person narratives of the Gospels, and even in these cases the authors do not give their own names. The first is in the Prologue to Luke’s Gospel, Luke 1:1-4, where the author says:
The author names his recipient as “Theophilus” and calls him “most excellent.” We don’t know who this person is. The term “most excellent” is used elsewhere by this author in the “other” NT book that he wrote, the Acts of the Apostles, to refer to Roman governmental administrators (Acts 23:26, 24:3, 26:25). For that reason, it is often claimed that Luke is writing his Gospel (and the book of Acts) to a Roman official, possibly in order to show that Christianity had a completely innocent beginning, that Jesus was not a threat to the state, and that his followers are not either. But another view is that Theophilus is a code name. Literally it means either “Lover of God” or “Beloved of God.” There is no way in the world that the author of two such long books (together Luke and Acts take up one-fourth of the entire New Testament!) could possibly imagine that a pagan official would be in the least bit interested in reading through them. More likely, these books are written for internal Christian consumption, and so are addressed to those – Christians – who are Beloved of God.
The author speaks in the first person (“us” “me”), but he does not say who he is.
He claims that many others – whom he also does not name – preceded him in writing an account of “the things that have been fulfilled among us.” These “things,” of course, are the events of Jesus’ life. The predecessors based their accounts on traditions that had been handed down by “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” Luke does not say that he himself has had access to eyewitnesses, only that the materials that both he and his predecessors provided in their books were based on reports that ultimately go back to eyewitnesses and “ministers of the word.” It is not completely clear whom this latter category covers, but presumably it means those who proclaimed the word – that is preachers of the Gospel stories before the Gospels were written.
Luke implies a dissatisfaction with the work of his predecessors. They have written their accounts, he knows about them (presumably from having read them), and now he wants to do a better job than they did. He has followed all these things closely for some time, and now he (in contrast to his predecessors?) wants to write an “orderly” account of what happened. It’s not completely clear if that means that he wants his account to provide the correct chronological sequence for the things that happened, or if, somewhat more likely, he wants to provide a generally more correct version. This comment of his, however it is to be specifically interpreted, clearly means that he thinks that his predecessors did an inadequate job when they wrote their accounts. The reason that matters is that scholars have established beyond much of any doubt that “one” of his predecessors was the Gospel of Mark, which Luke used as a source for many of his own stories of Jesus. It seems to suggest that Luke did not think Mark’s Gospel was reliable and that he needed to improve upon it (the mere fact that he changed it so much points in the same direction). That would suggest some “critique” of Mark even from within the New Testament itself.
Or to some guy who used the Greek name Theophilus.
Not true. But you give no reason for it; do I owe you a reason against it?
And that he has followed these things from the beginning.
No, he only says it seemed good that he give his own account.
Neither of these supposed improvements on other accounts is implied by his use of the adverb kathexehs.
That does not follow either.
[Sarcastic voice on.] And of course Silvanus the amenuensis could not possibly have added any knowledge of Greek grammar, idioms, and customary translation of the Greek OK. [Sarcastic voice off.]
[Sigh.]
Because Peter gave us the ideas, and Silvanus made the Greek language pretty. Because Peter was the senior partner in the enterprise, and Silvanus was quite content to jot down his name at the end.
[Sigh.]
Peter didn’t have much formal education, which has next to nothing to do with his ability to make a good argument.
He likely enough knew the OT as well as your average Jew who’d been steeped in it since birth, and had added to that–even not accounting for the help of the Holy Spirit–rather a lot of advanced discussion of the OT with Yeshua and others.
Now if you can find some reference in 1 Peter that depends on the LXX as such and not merely on the ideas in the OT–and if you have some reason Silvanus would not have been able to include his knowledge of this bit in conversation with Peter–you might have some sort of a case.
And that’s bad? Here is Justin cementing the tradition which ascribes them to the Apostles or to close associates. You complain because he doesn’t use their names. If he had used their names but not said “Memoirs of the Apostles,” you would probably complain that he didn’t mention that they were Apostles or close associates.
Hey, what do you think is the earliest source we have that attributes the Nichomachean Ethics to Aristotle?
The identity of the author was well known to the original readers. They identify themselves to their readers.
Is your standard for “anonymously written” that you personally don’t know who the author is? If I write a post on Ricochet–where a link on my profile page identifies me as Mark J. Boone–and if everyone on Ricochet knows who I am, would you say my writing is anonymous on the grounds that I don’t explicitly give my name?
And their opinion is their opinion. I am less interested in appeals to the authority of scholars than in the evidence those scholars use.
Yes, they are. This particular putative delusion, however, would require mass hallucinations on the part of the eyewitnesses. How often has a mass hallucination happened?
Of course, aliens could have faked it with their advanced technology. The eyewitness testimony is not in itself a 100% guaranty of anything.
So why not talk about one or more of them?
But if your point is that you personally have reasons for your views you’d rather keep to yourself, then why not just say so and then leave me alone?
There you go changing the subject again, completely ignoring the point at hand.
And who’s credulously accepting anything without strong corroboration? I’m not. That’s the whole point of those criteria I keep mentioning. (And of much more–but, again, I haven’t written that book yet.)
And suddenly Luke’s historiography is good enough that some fact he cites can be affirmed with certainty?
All it would take would be for many people to have similar subjective experiences. One person “feels” the warmth of Jesus. So does another and another and another.
Lots of people of a wide variety of religions have subjective “experiences.” That’s fine as far as it goes. No mass hallucination is required. Just a lot of people being mistaken about some experience.
We’ve already talked about “alleged contradictions.” You wave them away with “harmonizations.” Those harminizations are convincing to you, but not to me. So, we are at an impasse.
So, I will leave you alone.
[Facepalm.]
The testimony is not “I felt the warmth of Jesus.” You know, I’ve felt the warmth of Jesus myself, and the warmth of tea too. It’s not the same thing as seeing and touching a living human body. It’s not what the testimony is.
On the contrary, I refute your lousy arguments, and you ignore the logic.
An impasse indeed.
You are always welcome to try a better argument.
Maybe not. Maybe that verse in Acts is nonsense. But if we believe that the anonymous author of Acts is writing nonsense, that doesn’t really support your case that Jesus rose from the dead.
After all, if we begin our evaluation of the claims made in the New Testament with a healthy dose of skepticism, instead of presuming from the outset that the New Testament (and the Hebrew Bible) is god-breathed, then it is going to be tough to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead. Why? Well, it’s the New Testament where we read the story of Jesus rising from the dead and ascending into heaven (in Acts).
If we set those sources aside, we don’t have anything else on which to base a claim of a resurrection.
Very strange. You don’t seem to agree with yourself, as cited here.
[Sigh.] The entire point of everything I have said in this thread on the subject is that I do not presume that.
Will you please consider taking me at my word? Or, alternatively, leave me alone?
One person writes down that 500 people saw X. That’s hearsay coming from 1 person, not eyewitness testimony coming from 500.
You arguments are lousy. I can react to each insult of yours with a similar insult.
If that’s a good use of your time, cool. I will accuse you of being blinded by religious indoctrination and a inability to engage in critical thinking about the religion you were brainwashing into believing.
You have never pointed to any verse in the Bible and commented, “I think this is probably wrong.” No. You subscribe to inerrancy.
Now you want to convince me that you are viewing the bible from a skeptical, critical lens. You can’t have it both ways.
A topic I’ve addressed above. Instead of repeating yourself, why not respond to the logic?
Don’t forget the other testimonies from the eyewitnesses.
If my arguments are indeed lousy, why not respond with better logic instead of insults?
And, of course, I have never insulted you. I’ve stated facts, like “Your logic is bad.”
You did insult me on at least one occasion, in an earlier thread, calling me a fraud, not to mention this apparent ad hominem attack:
As a conclusion, not as a premise.
My wife has asked me to spend some time with her.
As much as I would like to continue this discussion so that we can both fail to convince each other and get pissed off in the process, I will have to get back to you later.
Here’s a movie about the election. https://www.thedeeprig.movie/
I met Patrick Byrne’s father Jack Byrne when he was CEO of Firemen’s Fund.