The text of this post started from the sentence: “Is looking into this conspiracy redeeming the time?”
and ended with: “We should follow God’s example in Genesis 18, not Satan’s pattern in Genesis 3.”
The complete 7 part series is now available at the link below. Please view the series there. Feel free to comment below on this sixth part, however. Thank you.
–TDR
By the way, I could see someone reading the comments in part 5 that involve personal attacks, refusal to follow Biblical methods of evaluating both sides of an issue, etc. and thus concluding I wrote the information in part 6 as a response to that. However, I wrote this entire series about two months ago. Unfortunately, refusal to look at the best arguments on both sides of an issue is characteristic of advocacy of conspiracy theories.
Hi Thomas,
I’m always a little leery when people speak dismissively of “conspiracy theories,” for a couple of reasons (and I’m just speaking generally here),
1. The term “conspiracy theory” has morphed in recent years to the point where it essentially just means, “Something I disagree with and am giving myself the justification to dismiss out of hand.” In that sense, *dismissing* a “conspiracy theory” is the exact process involved in what you’re saying here is the characteristic of advocacy of conspiracy theories. Blithely calling something a conspiracy theory has become a way for people to refuse to even consider evidence that might contradict some ideological position they hold for whatever reason.
2. “Conspiracy theory” becomes a catch all for trying to associate beliefs that might well be completely justified together with obviously wrong out-of-mainstream beliefs, hence the use of the term becomes an example of a poisoning the well fallacy. Something eminently reasonable like “I’m not really sure about these vaxxes and it seems mighty odd that the powers that be are so rabid about trying to force them onto everyone because of a disease that has a 99.5% survivability rate” can be mentally associated with something like holocaust denial or all our politicians being reptilian aliens or whatever. In many cases (and again, I’m not saying it is here) it’s just a dishonest attempt to narrow the Overton Window to exclude creditable by politically inexpedient viewpoints.
Hello there, Tim!
Did you notice the way I defined “conspiracy theory” in the complete version of this series at FaithSaves.net and in the initial parts of this series? What do you think of the definition I gave from the dictionary