Maybe I’m imagining it. I recall a thread on this board years ago where some folks got super upset at the suggestion that religion was harmful and should be discouraged and shamed. It’s the oldest conspiracy theory of them all.
newbrof
1954
yeah, for me, religion is fake, too. If I would accept religion, I would have to accept a lot of other fake things…
I have shat on religion since I was a little kid and first noticed it wasn’t true.
I used to enjoy streaming old episodes of the Art Bell show while playing X-COM and Dwarf Fortress, especially when drunk listeners would call in and either 1) repeat the things Art said every episode back to him as their own revelations or 2) angrily insist that aliens must be demons. But after watching the same trash demographic storm the Capitol I no longer find it funny.
This is apparently a sincere belief amongst a certain group of Senators that killed the initial AATIP program.
Art Bell’s whacky circus spawned a lot of good things too. He was in some game, Prey maybe? Without Art Bell and that loony Montauk myth that played out on his show we don’t get Stranger Things.
Wondering about the unknown and what could be is how a lot of the games and movies and art we love and talk about here get started. Again, same argument about religion. It’s spawned incredible beauty, kindness, and creative inspiration throughout history as well.
There’s always going to be bad actors and lunatics. A bunch of dudes got way too into My Little Pony and now we can buy pony plushies with rubber vaginas sewn in and Nazis came back.
Enidigm
1957
I have but one… (looks down)… nay… no likes to give, but take them anyway!
Houngan
1959
I kinda don’t think you’re wrong in a broad sense, but just specifically wrong in this forum. We’re a bunch of nerds, so we know far more than the average Joe about various mythologies and whatnot, but that’s a pretty specific thing. By and large, scoffing at the supernatural, which for convenience sake I will lump all religion, supernatural thinking, magical thinking, and UFO thinking (and I do think those can mostly be collapsed into a single category) is the same general intellectual thrust. Religion gets a rider put on it, because you know you’re suddenly offending millions or billions of people all at once. It doesn’t make them any less wrong, but it does carry a lot more weight.
Are you trying to say that questions of correctness/incorrectness are, unless about some immediately pressing matter, less important than not mocking or upsetting people?
I’d be careful with that kind of “nice person” talk on the internet. If you keep it up the internet police will be along shortly to collect your modem!
Houngan
1961
Not entirely, just that while I categorize all those supernatural arguments the same in some ways, I also recognize that religion carries enough weight to merit some additional consideration and delicacy.
In addition, secular arguments based on pseudoscience or similarly unverifiable assumptions (and untestable hypotheses) have the potential to appear more universal and appeal more broadly as they do not demand any a priori adherence to a particular web of belief. Instead, they offer their own web of belief open to anyone with minimal barriers to entry, while satisfying many of the needs that traditional frameworks like religion usually meet, without any of the formal or informal error correction that traditional religious institutions generally possess.
Thanks for that link. The Art Bell segment, while only 11 minutes long, does a nice job of describing why people loved that show so much, including myself.
Back in the day when Art was the primary host, I looked at it as relaxing entertainment, and I figured everyone else did the same. Now, I’m not so sure about everyone else. I knew everything being talked about was nonsense, generally speaking, but it took me out of my everyday worries, and allowed my mind to wander to strange new places, having the same kind of effects that some drugs were rumored to do, only without the drugs. So to me, I guess I’m saying that that show was like a harmless drug. Pure escapism. But when it was over, I returned to the real world, and didn’t think anymore about it until I would tune in again.
And I still think it was harmless. At least, to me.
But now, with all of the folks around me spouting off conspiracy theories as gospel fact (even people I work with, the number of which still amazes me), I’m beginning to realize that maybe there were more people than I thought who actually believe some of the stuff that seemed to me to be obvious entertainment.
How did innocent storytelling turn into harmful brainwashing?
Because there is no such thing as innocent story telling. Of course, there is story telling with no ill intent, but creating and disseminating narratives is a powerful engine of culture creation and propagation whether intentional or not, and regardless of the positive or negative impacts (which of course are usually in the eyes and ears of the beholders).
The difference between telling stories and brainwashing isn’t the content, or even the intent necessarily, it’s the context and the method.
The lure of the conspiracy theory and the mythical and mysterious has always been strong. The lure of feeling as though you belong to a community has also always been strong. Why else do you think so many religions have survived for thousands of years? Or tales of monsters and bigfoot?
It’s certainly not a new phenomenon. If anything I think the 1900s were somewhat of an anomaly where reason had its day and the conspiracy theorist was shunned into hiding for the most part (and even then, CTs abound regarding JFK, the Moon landing, Area 51, etc). With the advent of the Internet, and especially social media, that day is over. Now you can shame a conspiracy theorist all you want, but they’re no longer bound to the community they live in. Now they can just hop on the net and have 250,000 other wackos stroke their ego.
That echo chamber is an abyss you don’t want to gaze into.
But we have to (not that I know what to do about it). It’s shaping events now, promoting fascism, spawning coup attempts, crippling our response to a plague.
Our only hope seems to be that the differential in death rates will kill enough of the willfully misinformed to remove the threat they pose, but unfortunately COVID isn’t quite deadly enough.
I agree that something needs to be done about it. I made a thread about that very topic at the beginning of the year.
To that I would also add that one of the greatest lures of a good conspiracy theory is that it’s more-or-less impossible to disprove. Like Trump’s election fraud bullshit. If you gathered every ounce of evidence, every single vote, every single machine, every single router, and inspected them top to bottom…they could just say that the “real” data was erased, and the conspiracy would live on forever.
To a conspiracy theorist, that’s the safety net they need to protect their ego. They do not ever have to prove to you that they’re right—they just need to form an argument that’s essentially unfalsifiable to ensure that they never have to be faced with the prospect of being proven wrong.
Houngan
1968
The primary draw in my experience is that no-knowledge people suddenly feel like they have knowledge. I knew a guy, we called him Heroin Luke so you can make pretty accurate guesses about his general demeanor, and it wasn’t so much that he was a conspiracy guy. It was that he was an aggressive conspiracy guy, rolling his eyes at me when I questioned ley lines and pyramid power and shit. It’s all well and good to believe dumb shit as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, but aggressively stupid and impressionable people generally do that.
Fun aside, Luke was also notable for going to his heroin dealer, they had a disagreement, Luke said, “Then shoot me motherfucker!” So he shot him in the leg and Luke nearly died. Kind of a poster boy for this stuff.
eliandi
1969
I never had never heard of Art Bell. So I listened to the linked This American Life show. Then I looked on the website http://www.coasttocoastam.com/.
Like a doomed character in a Lovecraft story, I have stated into the abyss and I cannot un-see what I’ve seen. WTH!
Which is the perfect definition of “not science,” as for any hypotheses to be science it has to be able to fail.
