Conspiracy Theories (so many of which have become fact)

This past year I have had many discussions and conversations with friends and watched various docu's and googlevids about conspiracy theories. During that time I discovered that one of my neighbours was a freemason and a member of the Amsterdam lodge, a friend pointed out chem-trails to me, I learned about the power of mass mind-control and all about the fear-mongery of the dark forces of the world. Quite sensational and enthralling I assure you and worth taking into consideration too but all rather hopeless and gloomy aswell.
It's all "mind" as far as I am concerned and a means of distracting you from the truth and immobilizing you with fear.
The following text is from The Shattered Realm blog and it sums up my thoughts on the subject perfectly. Read the whole post now here: Conspiracy Theories

...By Afagddu
Whatever the nature of a Conspiracy Theorist’s faith, whether based on the belief that the world is run by lizards from another planet; that the pure-bred, Aryan descendants of the Europids are held hostage in an underground network beneath China; that an unholy alliance of Freemasons and Satanists are sacrificing 13% of American newborn baby boys to Elvis; that the American Government and the Catholic Church are locked in a bitter struggle over the ownership of the Holy Grail (which the Americans tried to cover up by catapulting gliders into some of the buildings where it could have been kept, thus foiling a raid to free it by John Dillinger and the Secret Masters of Tibet in the eleventh hour); or whether it is any one of the numerous other countless, less spectacular - but still unbelievable - conspiracy theories that abound, they all have a few things in common.

• They’re the product of Paranoid thought.
• They have a thick air of delusion woven about them.
• They appeal to a sense of fantasy.
• They are usually connected in some way to a hatred of the traditional enemies of Christian (more specifically Protestant) society. Be they the Illuminati, the Jews, Freemasons, Satanists, Catholics or anyone else other than those who could really be responsible for some of the events attributed to them.
• Those interested in them are often far removed from the events in question, which in reality will only have a minimal or distant effect on their lives. Opinions will have largely been shaped by the media, whether mainstream or underground .
• The accused rarely take the accusations seriously. Buckingham Palace has yet to issue a statement in response to David Icke’s claim that Queen Elizabeth II is a lizard. Scientific or historical data is often deliberately skewed by the leaders and formative members of such movements and attempts to correct their data by the better qualified is refuted or ignored. Margaret Murray’s deliberate doctoring of trial data relating to the supposed ‘burning times’ and the formative mass belief of the made-up accounts of 19th Century ‘historian’ Lamothe-Langon for instance, led to an entire generation of Wiccans forming opinions about the history of religion, tradition and Initiation that are completely laughable to anyone who studies such things objectively.
• They favour the over-complex and under-realistic over good sense and applying Occam’s Razor.
• Their adherents all believe that they are indefatigably right about their chosen cause. Yet how can every single conspiracy theory possibly be true?
• They’re never about good or pleasant things. Like certain elements of the media, those who form and deliberately propagate Conspiracy Theories magnify their attention on sensationalist, horrific or ‘evil’ phenomena.
• They manipulate evidence and fabricate information as a means of creating scare tactics to assume psychological or ‘memetic’ control over people.
• They're in the same category, memetically speaking, as chain letters and urban legends.
• They’re all bullshit.

I dislike Conspiracy Theories for the same reasons that I dislike any other single-issue cause or pressure group; they tend to require a blinkered, limited, biased view that becomes unshakable leading to a devotion equitable to that of any religious cult.

None of this means that people shouldn’t doubt ‘official’ versions of events, which are also usually biased to a specific agenda. To question things and to wonder – or even doubt - whether we are being told the truth by politicians and the state are natural things for an intelligent and inquisitive mind to do. But to assume the polar opposite must be true to any statement that you don’t quite agree with is unhealthy, as is allowing fantasy and paranoia to assume too large a grip over one’s views and opinions.
The Shattered Realm