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On 5/12/2011 12:59 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 11/05/2011 19:55, Warp wrote:
>
>> It's not surprising. Conspiracy theories have all the same features and
>> symptoms as fundamentalist religions. So much, in fact, that I do not
>> only
>> consider a conspiracy theory *like* a religion, but more over *a*
>> religion.
>
> I was expecting this to end with "because religion *is* a conspiracy
> theory"... ;-)
Well.. What was it one of the characters by Mark Twain said, something
like, "Things are always run by a minority. The reason is that most
people either find, or convince themselves that there exists, benefit in
it for themselves (even if that is only that they are not currently the
victims), or are afraid of the consequences of apposing those with the
power (because they know they can easily become such)." It doesn't take
much of a conspiracy to control people, if people never wake up and
realize that they are losing as much as what the people you where a
afraid to stand up for are, and that they really do outnumber the ones
that are doing it. Since religion's purpose tends to be to control what
people do, think, say, etc., of course it is a conspiracy, but its the
sort of loose type, that can start out by accident, and not always with
negative intentions.
In such cases, you simply have to hope its a benign one, and gets
replaced, before it becomes malignant, sort of like cancers.
Both are attempts to build, while generally failing, a consistent, and
plausible, structure, around which ideas, beliefs, and semi-random,
unconnected, facts are framed. Its Rube Goldberg, without the
plausibility that the result would actually work, from the stance of an
actual engineer. But, as someone once said, I don't remember which one,
paraphrasing, "Humans have a need for answers, and will be satisfied
with bad ones, if they don't have good ones."
So long as people refuse to look for the good answers, or believe them
when found, we will have a mess. But, another commonality between
conspiracy theories and religion is that most only survive well if they
present, and one of their premises, that good answers, which fail to
support the original premise(s), cannot be trusted, nor can those that
suggest them.
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