Does radical christianity prime the brain for conspiracy?

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I've been pondering this question trying to understand the apparent spread of conspiracies throughout America.

For example Jim Bakker ministries has an audience of millions in the US and here's one of the followers (a preacher) recounting how her husband turned into a reptile and Jesus saved her.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/11/reptili ... saved-her/

If conspiracies like this can be considered "normal" on christian TV does this suggest people like Trump were preaching to the converted in middle America when he was peddling wild and outlandish stories to the electorate?

Does this also explain the spread of QAnon like wildfire in the American bible belt?

this is an alien federation acting alone and therefore has nothing to do with conspiracy.

this however does:

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD and his anointed, saying,

"Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us."

Psalm 2:2-3

ALL religions prime people to believe outlandish conspiracy theories.

In what other social institutions are natural events ascribed to malevolent supernatural beings?

I believe I've read there is a statistical correlation, and you can find articles discussing possible reasons why. Like most things, it isn't simple or uniform.

This is the origin of religion: trying to make sense of all the dramatic phenomena that occur in the world.

I also believe people really don't want a total cessation of life once they expire. They want their life to continue, somehow. I know I do. I wish I KNEW there was somewhere to go after I die.

I wonder if the puritanical streak that runs through American Christianity from the time of the Mayflower was a type of mental self-medication? a kind of antidote to the dissonance they felt experiencing war, famine, pestilence, poverty and persecution they faced in their homelands and in the settlement of the US which was also a struggle.

It explains the ease that QAnon conspiracies have run wild while concurrently a strong resistance persists in facing social fractures created by the very creation of the American state.

In some ways the americans of the 19th century had it easier to believe in manifest destiny attributing their new life to god's plan and making everything else (the square peg) fit into this round hole of ideology.

In 2022 as they witness changes happening around them (that they are unable to do anything about) that is eroding the edifice of the institutions/spaces created by their forefathers they seek comfort in the bible but also in conspiracies that however outlandish they can hide behind and internalise because it self-medicates the dissonance they live with everyday.

no, I make drama, dig it up, bring it. forget understanding.

Here at midnight while on pain meds and having painsomnia I wasn't sure what exact understanding to have of radical Christianity so I plugged that phrase in to Google and it appears it is used several different ways by different authors.

I'm looking at the thing from the point of a view of a Christian who has judged that flavor of Christian TV to be anything but normal.
And found the 1970s and 1980s televangelists to be more of a circus sideshow than any kind of legitimate ministry.

So, rather than, "Does radical Christianity prime the brain for conspiracy?"
my question is, "Does a brain primed for that kind of conspiracy seek out that kind of Christianity?"

Experience when I was on Facebook 2009 to 2017 and in conservative Christian groups, and on independent web forums at that time and up to last month, showed me that saying, "Hey y'all, I'm not so sure that's either true or Biblical, and here's why ..." will get you banned from the forum by the same people who talk about liberals not wanting to listen to opposing viewpoints and blocking out anyone who offers one.
Fascinating, is that not.

While on FB I got so fed up with friends who both proclaimed themselves Christians and happily shared documentably false memes about various things, especially culture and politics, that I wrote and posted a note to keep at ready to respond with.
And while the topic is conspiracies, I found it quite interesting that it would repeatedly vanish from my notes and need to be re-posted to my notes.
Anyway, here it is,
"
Yes, it is indeed and directly about faith and religion -->
What is it with so many professing Christians being so blind to the subtle, insidious, guerilla tactics of the spiritual war and being (from what I have seen in around 13 years of email and 4 years of Facebook) the biggest myrmidonic dissemenators of hoaxes and untruths?
And in irony of ironies, it is the Atheists who I have seen to be the lesser spreaders of these internet untruths - the people who are Not about "The way, the Truth, and The light" are in fact appearing to be the most truthful - Amazing! And not at all graceful.
It is well clear how some militant atheists are only too happy to demean and discredit believers and the church - but, hey, saves them time and effort when the Christians themselves slander the church the avenue of distributing untruth.
Don't you get it, people, are you so blind that you can not see how you are aiding and abetting the enemy?
When the people who proclaim themselves to be devoted followers of "The way, the truth, and the light" spread gossip, hoax, and rumor, it supports Satan's goal of slandering the Church and driving people away from Christ -- The "if-then" logic in the unbeliever flows like this - "Well, if the Christians are spreading around so many of these things which are not true, then maybe those things they claim about creation, God, sin, Jesus, and salvation are also hoaxes." And that certainly is not making the cause of Christ look appealing.
There is zero excuse for followers of "The way, the Truth, and The light" to be spreading internet gossip, hoax, and rumor - and doubly so in an age where the veracity of the message can be determined in mere seconds with a copy, paste, and click, in their favorite search engine.
And I've had my fill of the people of my faith slandering my faith.
"

A certain segment of people are Christians and there is a certain segment of people who reject true things.
At some point on the Venn diagram those circles overlap.

Back to talking about my forum experiences, in just the last couple weeks it appears I've been kicked off another one when after I posted an article about some of the covid long haulers ending up what looks a lot like the ME/CFS I've had for 20 years and Dad has had since the early 1980s.

Well ...

What happened was ... my thread got invaded by the rabid anti-vaxxer contingent of whom some went so far as to say that nobody ever died from covid & the dead people had all died from those vaccine "Death Jabs", et cetera, et cetera, yada, yada, yada.

I said that I was offended, my thread is not about vaccines, kindly remove your garbage from my thread.

Ohhh baby, did I get hate mail from the moderators calling me out for my un-Christlike behavior and my intolerance of my Christian bretheren.

Apparently my fatal error was asking a moderator if he had the same beliefs/attitude as the bullies who spammed my thread.

The result looked a lot like a case of, "Do Not Question The Clique Who Control The Forum, They Are The Infallible Elite."

And that brings to mind a couple things which happened during the 6 years I was married to a gal I'd known for about a decade before we got married.

One was when she told me about when she realized that Pastors could be wrong.
Her family church had been one where the congregation's operating attitude was something along the lines of, "The Pastor is called by God and God is never wrong therefore the Pastor is never wrong."
And nobody bothered to brush the dust off their Bibles and check what the Pastor was saying against what was written.
And then my wife told about what happened when she had an inkling that something the Pastor had said during a sermon was a bit off.
Turned out it was a bit off.
She asked about that.
Then the fireworks flew.
Hmm, interesting.

Second thing was something I participated in, which involved one of that kind of Pastor.
Sunday School at a church we were trying out after getting married, one couple in class had the elderly parents of I forget if it was husband or wife, visiting and the father/father-in-law was a retired Pastor.
Well ...
At some point during class discussion of the now forgotten topic my wife made some deep and accurate commentary & retired pastor guy just about came unglued, there was no way SHE could understand scripture that deeply "because she was a woman" and furthermore "Because he had three degrees including his doctorate and she was still slowly taking college classes as an adult and they were about social work not about the Bible".
Oh?
Let me get this straight, only white AngloSaxon protestant males with multithousand dollar pieces of paper on their walls can have any clue what the Bible says?
Umm, NO.
Sorry mate, your world ain't the real world.
Leave my wife alone ya damn misogynistic fool, she's got brains and plenty of them.
I ended up leaving the room and going for a very long walk.

I'm willing to wager (yeah, I know, the Bible is against gambling)(but this isn't much of a gamble) that contrary to how they say they are 'outside the box' in believing the conspiracies, the conspiracy believers are actually quite deep in the box of just accepting whatever someone in something at least looking like a position of authority
says & they do not bother to apply much of any effort to truly check it against reality.
"This person in authority said it so therefore it is true because this person is in authority and therefore they must by definition be smarter than me." appears to be the extent of deductive reasoning the followers have ever applied to the thing.

And then I could get all theological and go on about how the conspiracy believers may at least partly be susceptible to falling for those conspiricies because of a lack of well-grounded Bible teaching in their lives.

But, I'm tired and hurting so I am stopping here after leaving a quote from one of the letters to Timothy,
"
For the time will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires. So they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.
"
Is it just me or does that pretty much hit the bullseye on the conspiracy believers

This is also a valid point. There are people who seek out this type of christianity (I have met plenty of them in christian groups in my 20s) who were primed to "want to believe"

The TV character of Fox Mulder comes to mind where the trauma of his sister vanishing made him seek solace in alien abduction but during the series his mind was reaching a point where was willing to believe anything and was vulnerable enough to join groups who might have linked Jesus to aliens.

But my interest here is in correlation between the strand of christianity so valued by the first fleet pilgrims made them believe in demons and witchcraft (I imagine the christians of Jamestown Virginia believed in witches/demons and would also have believed this evangelical TV woman that claimed her husband turned into a reptilian)

These are the type of people to get addicted to newsfeed that puports to claim democrat politicians run cults and that Trump was cheated of victory by shapeshifters, schools are teaching CRT and the end of time is coming.

Faulty reasoning about the Puritan settlers of colonial America.

All of Europe was obsessed with finding and burning witches by the thousands in the Fifteen and Sixteen hundreds. The Puritan Pilgrims who landed in America -if anything- were rather tame in comparison. They only executed a handful of witches.

Catholic nations were at war with Protestant nations. In both they were obsessed with rooting out heretics, witches, Jews, and members of enemy Christian sects, for torture, and execution. In the Netherlands you were free. So Jews flocked to the Netherland. Where they began to persecute each other. Spinoza got beaten by chains by all the male members of his synagogue for expressing unkosher views on Jewish theology.

But America today is a more religious society than western Europe is today.

And modern Americans who gravitate toward modern Evangelical type Christianity probably do gravitate toward seeking simplistic explanations for things...especially bad things. And that may well lead to conspiracy theory believing.

A crazy buddy watches Evangelical preachers. He also has paranoid tendencies. Chicken or egg? Maybe they just go together. hand in hand.

I've known christians here who believe stuff but whom are quite "normal"
spirits walk among us
freemasons are devil worshippers and demons
going into an ecstatic state while praying will make you speak in tongues
baptism in bath water will cleanse you if you are an adult convert

---

Wow, The Human Condition is So Dam Fascinating.

'Thing' is, While We Can And Will Observe The Rest of the Universe
Through A Telescope, How Difficult it Will Be For Us to Understand
Someone Else's Inner UniVerse, When We Don't LiVE iN IT And Don't Experience

Our Multi-Universe Nearly the Way They Do; Living Almost 62 Years, i Will Surely

Relate to this in Empirically Measurable Ways at Least in Someways, in 2010, Scoring a 45 on the
Simon Baron Cohen (AQ) 'Autism Quotient Test' That Measures Systemizing More "Left Brain Restricted"

Minds as Opposed to More Social-Empathic Holistic "Right Brain Expanding Minds"; True, Yes,

The View of my Multi-Uni-Verse is Still Expanding Now that i have More Social-Empathic-Real-
Emotional, Feeling Sensory Spiritual, Artistic Intelligences That Are Greater Associated with Less Left-Brain
Thinking Systemizing Minds That Tend to Analyze the World in Quantities now in Dualistic, Black and White

Limited Ways
of Viewing
the World;

Yes, in 2013, Scoring
An 11 On that Test After

Finally Moving More into Right
Hemisphere Intelligences With Free
Verse Poetry and Free Dance That Science
Shows Now Opens Up That Aspect of Epigenetic
And Neuroplastic Potentials of Additional Human Intelligences;

Not only Gives me A Much Expanded View of my Personal Reality;

Yet the Flow of on Task Focus it Provides may Surely Be Measured in
Terms of Original Creativity and Productivity too; as Yes, i Continue to

Entertain my Systemizing Ways of Intelligence By Measuring in Quantity,
The Creativity And Productivity increases All the Way Through my Case-Study

Experiment on What Human Potential May come to be in my Individual Expanding
Multi-Universe Now...

It's True, Our Views
Are Limited to How
Far We Come to Use

Our Human Potentials;

It's Hard to Quantify How Much Larger
My View of my Reality is As Opposed to When

i Was More of a Limited Systemizing 'Left-Brain Thinker';

It's Beyond Measure, in Fact, it is Ascending And Transcending the 'Other
Order' of Human Potential Moving into an Area of Internal Locus of Control

That is Far Beyond What my Human Potentials Were Before; For Instance, i Used
to have difficulty With ADHD and Even Picking Up a Text-Book at School to Read
it For Upcoming Tests; No Problem, Focusing on What the Pretty Teacher Said in Lectures;
And That Was Generally Enough to Make Grades Close to the Top of the Class With Rote Memory

Through Three College Degrees;

That Amount of Intelligence, i Gained
Through 19 Years of School is Likely Less
Than 1 Percent of what i've Done since then in
Just an 'Autodidact Way' of Increasing Human Potentials....

It's Like This; There is no TL;DR;DC For me; i have to really Reach
Back to try to remember What it was like not to Stay Focused Enough
in Flow to Read on Average of 20 Times Faster than 'Normal' Human Beings.

As My Psychotherapist Said, Who Helped me Through my MUCH More Limited Depressed,
Anxious, And Work Stress Related-Life, Culminating in A Life Threat Synergy then, of 19
Medical Disorders That Yes Literally Almost Killed me, in that 66 Month Shut-in Stint of Life;

Yes, She Assessed my Intelligence As 'Off the Charts,' Once i Started Using More than Half A Mind then...

It's Real And Science Assesses These Differences of Human Potential Now; As Far As Neuroscience Shows,
We All Basically Co-Create Our Realities By Basically Hallucinating Our Realities As We Go Based on the Realities
We Hallucinate Before; True, Some Folks Obviously Hallucinate their Realities More Than Others; Yet the Truth is

Humans Are Story
Creating Creatures
Who Bond and Bind Over Common

Group Thinking (Religion) Ideologies and
Co-Created Abstract Rarified Concepts, Yes,
God Yes, Often Steeped in Language, in What Some
Folks See As Concrete immovable Text And Associated

Beliefs for All the other 'Arti-Facts' Modernly Humans Co-Create
to Support Their Meanings and Purposes of Life That often are Totally

Co-Created By Someone Else; For Anyone Who Has Global FRiEnDS Who Find Their
Meaning and Purpose in Multiple other Religions, It's Easy to See That Some of the Most
Intelligent Empirically assessed Individuals in the World Have Beliefs As Diverse As A Dude

Called God Came Back to Life Who is All Loving and Merciful Who Burns Folks Forever Who

Do Not Clothe

And Feed
the Homeless
Dude on the Street;

Who Suggests 'They' Love
Enemies Same as An Loving
God By Being That All Loving God
And Torturing Folks Forever By Direction
According to Part of A Ghost Author(s) As Pen Named

Matthew in A Thousands of Year Old Dusty Book Story...

Oh Yeah, And 'They' Also Believe This Life is Not Nearly as Great
As Life After Death; Talk About A Slick Snake-Oil Sales Person's Way
to Subjugate and Control Other Folks With A Non-Sensical Story For Real...

Yet It's True As the Circus Great, Wheeler Dealer, P.T. Barnum Said; Ya Can
And Will Count on the Fact that there is a 'Sucker' And or 'Minion' Born Every

Minute who Will Swallow the Whole Hook, Line, And Sinker When it Comes to What

Ever the Next
Snake Oil Salesperson

(Or Despicable Demagogue Story)

Brings to the Table of Plenty of BIGGEST LIES...

AND THIS IS ALSO in part at least WHY CLOSELY KNIT
NEIGHBORS
ARE SLAUGHTERING EACH OTHER IN TWO COUNTRIES;

PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN SCARCITY ARE PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE
TO THE ADDICTION OF DOPAMINE AND ADRENALINE EXPERIENCES OF LIFE;

As That is the Way Many of them Ascend And Transcend The Moment of Anxiety Together

In Addictions of

Living in Fear,
Anger, And Hate
That Brings more
Adrenaline And Dopamine

Stimulus to Live Through the
Next Second of Scarcity, the Best they can and will...

And True as Science Shows, it is More Limited Systemizing
Left Brain Thinking Ways That Are More Subject to Believing,
Ironically, Delusions of Life; Such as When the Right Hemisphere
is Damaged and Refusing to Believe Their paralyzed Arm Belongs to them...

Well, It's True,
There are Innumerable
Lies Like this That Limited
Views of Human Potential Will Come to See...

It's Harder to Assess All of Reality With Less than
Half A Mind, utilized For Potential in Effect of Metaphor...

"We are the Cosmos Unto Itself"; iNdeed, Less or More now...

Mileage Varies, DePending On Model and Make of Being Human Now...

i've Experienced A Much Smaller World than i Do Now; i Still Can And will Reach
Back and Have Sympathy for Folks Who Experience Smaller Human Potentials as i once did too...

i Only Hope other Folks Find Ways to Evolve to a Larger View of existence too; Yet It's True It's

Not Gonna
Come with
The Modern Science
Average Assessed Human

Attention Span Now of Less
Than A Gold Fish; Yes, Less
Than Three Seconds; Whereas,

Yes, It's Possible to Stay Focused
in Flow And Read 20 Times Faster
Than the Average Human Being And

Originally Create More in Productivity
Than Most Folks Can Even Wrap Their
Mind, Body, SPiRiT, HeART and SouL Around

Depending

On How
Many Elements
of Human Potential are Used...

-ReFormed 'Goldfish'

~And It's Worth Noting

'Blue Whales' Are Rare
And Still Hard to See, 'These Days'
More than ever it seems, At Least to me...

Hehe, Yet Ever Once in a While, God Yes, there
is Usually A 'Fisherwoman' Who Is Able to Capture Most of my Ocean Whole Ways of Being...

Simply Because Women Folks Are overall, More In-Tune with Social-Empathic-Spiritual
Artistic Intelligences

(Particularly, in More
Malignant Toxic
Patriarchal
Associated
Societies)

As even
Simon
Baron
Cohen
Agrees Per the
Yin of the Anima
As More 'Eastern
Philosophies And Religions' Assess too...

In 'His' Terms, The Male Brain Versus the More Female Brain...

Where i LiVE iN Deep South "Trump Country," Oh How Dudes

Fear More

of 'God'

Within;

It's AMuSinG
As the Metaphor
of Jesus is the One
Way they May come Close to REAL Love...

And That's Surely Not all Bad; As I Damned
Sure Wouldn't Wanna Live Among these Folks
Who LiVE iN Scarcity Inside and Out Without the

Magic Password of 'Jesus' to Defuse Almost Any Conflict....

It Works for A Very Safe Culture Locally; At Least if Ya Can
And will
find a
way to
'Blend' into 'Rome';

Generally Speaking,
All Ya Have to Do is
Look Like You Could Hit
A Home-run on the 'First Baptist Softball Team'...

(Note: i Don't Play 'Group Think' Sports 'Normally',

Doesn't Even Matter if You Wear A Tie-Died Shirt)

Or Kill Somebody With Your Bare Hands and Feet
if Called Upon to Protect The 'Desert Tribe' from Invaders
from Another 'Group Think' Tribe... Life is Different in the

Desert and
Cold Snowed
in Areas; People
Are Less Comfortable And Trusting Overall,
In Areas of Scarcity of Abundance This way;

Like the Great Band 'Styx' Suggested in the Song,
"Lord of the Rings." It Doesn't Matter What the F
The Story Reads; It's the Essence of the Hope it Brings
That Counts...

When 'in Human,'

Ya Do Whatever
Works to Get through
The Next Moment of Life in One Peace And Love or Less...

If it Ain't 'Christianity'; It's Harry Potter, Jordan Peterson, or
Joe Rogan; Or 'Joe Namath' back in the Old Time Religion
of the 'New York Jets'; or 'Elton John' and 'Benny And the Jets';

or 'WTF'

ELSE

Gets
Folks
Through the
Current Moment of What is...

Most Everyone Has Religion of Some'kind'
Some'way' to Just Survive and or Even Thrive...

i Write, Direct, Produce, And Actually Do my Own Story;
And As An Anthropology Participant Observer, Actually Engage in Many Others too...

The Q-Anon Conspiracy Theories Are Surely No Less 'Strange' Than Believing
In Life After Death More Than Life Now; And An ALL Loving Enemies, ALL Merciful,
ALL Forgiving God That Sends Folks Who Don't Clothe and Feed The Homeless Dude

(Per Matthew
And 'Other
Books')

To Burn
'em Forever
in Torture of
Hell for "Water-Board
Max-Evil" as Stories Folks
Believe Continue to Tale Now...

In Frigging Terms of Billions of Humans...

And Again, Indeed This is Part of Why Two
Neighboring Countries Are Slaughtering Each Other Now...

Give 'em Something

Greater to Believe in Like Peace And Love For All With Least
Harm; (And US too) Such An Innovative Human Idea to Come Again...

~Coca-Cola

Maybe Just A
Frigging Commercial
to Sell Another Soft-Drink...

Or Maybe Something Really Real to
Give, Share, Care, Heal, And Really
Do For All With

Least Harm...

iNHaLinG Peace
ExhalinG LoVE
Silence of Dance
Brings So Much
Beauty of Song...

One Day Perhaps
We Won't Buy and
Sell Each Other Out The

Way We Do

Now...

~The Circus

It's Nothing New;
Just Being Human;
Naked, Enough, Whole,
Complete, Moving, Connecting

Co-Creating Peace and Love Now With Least Harm...

Yet, There Will Always Be 'Mad Men' to F iT up too...

~"Mama's Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be 'Cowboys'"
Without the 'Cowgirl'...

And Sure Per
A Gnostic
Gospel of
Thomas
'Verse 114,'

Vice Versa too...

-'The BAtMaN'

~And 'The Riddler' of Course too...

~'Luke' From 'Star Wars' and All that 'Other Jazz' too...

---

Havent thought about that song in decades. But am old enough to remember when it was current.

Back then I just tuned it out as being just another commercial jingle on TV. But yeah...it is a rather inspired, and inspiring, few seconds of music (and video). What can I say? Even an adman pitching carbonated sugar water can hit upon...the real thing...sometimes. Lol!

Not sure what the film clip has to do with the topic of the thread though.

---

The 'Buy
And Sell' of
'Religion' for 'Profit';

Or Power And Status;

Or Reproductive Control;

And Really Anything Associated
With Influencing Others for Personal/Group Gain...

Also, Generally Identified As Politics and Philosophies...

The List Goes on, AND ON, AND ON, Directly on ToPic....

Hint:
The Overall
Human Condition...

It's All About Religion;
Bonding And Binding Over
Common Ideologies And Rarified
Abstract Constructed Other 'Figurative'

And Or 'Concrete' Symbols

For Humans Surviving
Together Stronger;
Even Thriving,

Depending
On How Truly
Intelligent Groups
And Individual Humans
Evolve And Come to Be in One Lifetime Now;

Cooperating, Collaborating, Corroborating As Such...

Yawn, The 'Religion' Of 'Original Coke' is Not my 'Thing'....

Yet, True, Meditating in Dance And Song Free in Autotelic Flow
Is A REAL Difference

'Tween

'Goldfish' and

Potential 'Blue Whales'...

As Even Science Shows Now, True;

No More Woo; An Actual Real 'More

Fully Human Experience,' Some
Folks Do As Real 'Heaven' Now.

---

My man St. Paul warned us about this: For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths.
(2 Tim 4:3 NIV)

So your saying that...

religion has gone from prophets...to losses?