Religion, Conspiracies and Elvis: Why I Can’t Jump on Board With Most of This Nonsense

I feel pretty certain that I will be forgiven by those family members, friends and acquaintances who feel my “blasphemy” here has stepped over the line because they understand that the extraordinary faith they abide in is not going to absorb everyone’s thinking.  I will no doubt be forever vilified by those however who are not comfortable in their own skin and need to project their fantasies onto the real world.

I believe people who read too much misinformation into things often don’t know what they they don’t know.  It’s an age old practice that’s has been around pretty much since the dawn of pre-civilization.  Believing that spirits are responsible for our existence and all that that entails is pretty much why innocent people have been killed for centuries, either through the sacrifices of innocent young virgins to the mass carnage of religious crusades.

Believing in the unknowable can be an art with some and if a certain belief endures overtime and with sufficient numbers buying into it, there can be an entire imaginary culture that evolves and perpetuates pure and utter nonsense.  Since every aspect of reality cannot be cogently explained and proven, most people are comfortable with imaginary tales that pique their fantasies.  They can neither be proven or disproven because they are fantasies and only “non-believers” would ignore such contrivances.

An unseen force wipes out the earth save a few loyal subscribers because everybody else didn’t get on board with this fantasy.  The son of God is born of a virgin, walks on water and rises from the dead in the minds of Christians but when Greek and Roman accounts of such occurrences are recorded they are easily dismissed as myths.  Hitler never really died in Berlin back in 1945.  He was secretly removed to South America where his genes have been used to clone his replacement.  Elvis is really not dead either because, well, there have been accounts by true believers that they saw him at the laundromat or grocery store they frequent.

On all of these there are no discernible physical records or documentation that would survive close scrutiny from skeptics.  Remember, skeptics are not cynics.  They simply believe that the sun doesn’t rise in the east as much as the earth rotates clockwise every twenty four hours to expose the big fire ball millions of light years away.  If a thing is really true it will be apparent regardless of who sees or experiences it.  No amount of preparation or manipulation is necessary to convince everyone that a thing is what it is outside of what people think.

Today we have a new belief matrix that Osama bin Laden has either been dead for years or is still safely tucked away out of everyone’s reach to continue his menacing fear on the civilized world.  His death by Navy Seals last Sunday will be dismissed by those who hate Obama and by those who don’t necessarily but who thrive on conspiracies.

The quick kill took months to piece together and implement once the mastermind of 9/11‘s whereabouts was determined.  Yet these pertinent details and the recent news that bin Laden is dead and floating at the bottom of the sea somewhere is too much for complicated thinkers to wrap their brains around.  It cannot be that simple and will be blown every which way by those who Wynne Parry of Live Science says are “people who feel like they don’t have power in the world, they feel like they have been victimized, they often come up with these explanations how somebody must be behind it”.

I’m sure the Obama White House anticipated this and will more than likely release the DNA evidence they took from bin Laden’s body along with some of the pictures following the assault so rational people can put such notions to rest.  They would be ill-advised not to.  But this will not quell people whose world exists on the fringes of reality and require fantastical and often super-human elements to explain what they either can’t or choose not to accept.

It would be laughable if we were talking about a few errant souls but the reality is that their numbers are quite high.  A recent survey by Guido Stempel of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that some 60 million people think it’s very likely the government was involved in 9/11 … “because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East. That’s an awful thing for people to believe,” Stempel said.

Hey,  it’s no worse than some 2 billion plus christians believing at the end of every century for the last 2000 years that the Rapture is “really going to happen this time”.