RichT
New Member
Hi
This might be a bit long for a first post and could easily be tacked on to the “what to do when family members believe in bunk” thread but I´m not asking any specific questions so despite its length, it still qualifies as a “Hi, this is me and this is how I found myself here”, post.
My story.
We are born believing everything we are told and it would seem to be part of our genetic makeup. This makes sense as disbelieving everything we are told would be chaotic. “Don’t eat that! It will make you sick, eat this, it’s good for you”. So when we are told a story about a mystical guy up in the clouds that, if you are good, will be good to you, we believe it. Later in life we find out that Father Christmas was actually your dad and that your parents had been lying to you. A bit later on you find out that the other guy in the clouds is God….what do you do now? Do you continue to blindly believe what you were told or, now with you recently acquired knowledge that parents are not as truthful as you thought, question the validity of this guy’s existence?
One by one, the stories of tooth fairies, Easter bunnies and storks delivering babies are uncovered as lies but I am now old enough to be able to tell the difference between childish stores and the truth.
I was approaching 30 and hadn’t given too much thought to religion (being British from non-religious parents). I was working with a guy who claimed to have had a deep religious experience where all of his questions were answered and he fully understood everything about the bible. He used to go to sermons and correct the vicar when he ‘interpreted’ passages different from what he now knew was its true meaning (needless to say, he was soon excluded from any future gatherings; nobody likes to be told their beliefs are wrong). We used to chat about evolution and I was firmly on the monkey side of the fence but found myself struggling with how complex things like the eye could evolve out of thin air. My logical brain said you either have a fully functioning eye or you don’t. Take away the ability to focus and what good are eyes? My problem was that I was trying to figure it out for myself using the reason and logic that I had leaned so far. I didn’t have the expert knowledge or scientific facts to hand so lost the argument because “If you can’t explain it, then God must have done it”.
A few years later the internet, the world’s largest repository of information, was at my fingertips. I started researching about evolution and the eye and sure enough, I found out that it was perfectly possible for the eye to evolve and had done so into thousands of variations. It was when I hit 40 that I really started to take a closer look at religion (particularly Christianity and the Bible) and after many months of study, realised that I could now refer to myself as an Atheist (I´d never labelled myself as that before)….and then those pesky lies, that I thought I had seen the last of in my childhood, started to appear.
I had seen the film JFK many years before and it was quite a compelling story packed full of evidence. I´d read about MLK and seen Malcolm X and a pattern seemed to be emerging. Was it really that far-fetched that an organisation like the CIA could be behind these assignations? I didn´t think so and I certainly didn´t think I must be a fruit cake for thinking so. I then saw a video of JFK himself warning of ´secret societies´ so was HE now a fruitcake? My genetic default position of “I will believe what I am hearing is true until my knowledge of the facts proves it to be false” was now quite engrained and although I didn´t believe everything I heard from any random on the street, if it was presented clearly and concisely in a film like this, or by the president himself, I had no reason to disbelieve it. Then 9/11 happens, then Chemtrails, then Geoengineering, then banks, then the AIDS conspiracy…the list went on and on. The more I searched the internet, the more I found. I stopped at the moon landings and holocaust deniers, in my mind there seemed to be a line that I would not cross, or at least left them on the shelf for further investigation but in truth had no real intention of ever going back to, some things just seemed too far-fetched).
I´ve always considered myself to be open minded and a liberal kind of guy. I have no time for racists and have always treated woman as equals so in my mind, I did not fit the mould of some nutjob conspiracy lunatic with mental health issues (which I have none) but I was being labelled as one and it didn´t feel right.
When I spoke to other people around me that were also questioning things, they were all educated, sensible people with good jobs and respected by others. When I spoke to others about my new found knowledge and was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, they tended to be people who had no previous knowledge of what I was talking about (chemtrails for example) but where confident in their belief that it must be rubbish and said so through hails of laughter. I quickly observed that those who knew nothing of what I was talking about were those saying the loudest that it was rubbish and that I must be a lunatic and a conspiracy theorist. If I was able to get a word in after that I would say that their reaction is not uncommon. The first people to suggest that the world wasn't flat were also laughed at; so were the ones who suggested the sun didn't go round the earth (but the other way round) and so were the ones who suggested we were not the creation of a God but the result of millions of years of evolution. So why do you so quickly dismiss what I am saying and laugh in my face without any knowledge of the subject?
Last year I got to a point where, after taking in so much stuff about the Islamification of Europe, I told my wife that I have to stop this. It´s not a matter of whether it is true or not, it´s just that it is taking up far too much of my time and it is starting to get me down….and now to the point of this post.
I am new to this site and I can´t even remember how I found it but I´ve been reading a few threads over the last few days, particularly the one about “What to do when family members believe in bunk” and I´ll admit I only got as far as the top of page five before feeling the urge to write this post. What I was picking up on in this thread was very much an “us and them” and it doesn´t sit comfortably with me. In this post I have seen conspiracy theorists referred to as ´fruitcakes, delusional, down the rabbit hole, mentally ill and ´not open minded´. I glossed over the mentally ill bit but noticed that some of the Non CTs? Have had or still have mental issues which kind of negates that one (which if I recall correctly Mick also said) but I did take offence at the ´not open minded´ bit as to me it seemed completely backward. It was my open mindedness not to blindly accept what I believed to be true that led me to investigate whether it was or wasn´t. The people I found to be completely closed minded were those who refused to listen to an alternative view because in their mind everything is fine and everything is exactly as it appears on the news. To question the validity of it makes you a conspiracy theorist lunatic so in my experience, those who weren´t open minded were not those searching for the truth but those who didn´t even want to know. To get away from the “them and us”, maybe it should be viewed more as a path?
If there is a path then surely it is:
1) I believed everything I was told,
2) I then found out some of it wasn´t true so learned to question
3) I then found out that after questioning, I had to work very hard to find the truth
Those who searched for answers and found all the stories about 9/11 and Chemtrails are simply on the path from 2 to 3 but the problem is, the information on the internet that says 9/11 was an inside job and that Chemtrails are real dwarf the stories that it is bunk by a thousand to one (pure guesswork, could be much higher).
So where am I at? Do I believe everything I read on this site? Of course not, I'd be naive to do that. Stage two has shown me that not everything I read is true. Am I ready to find out that 9/11 went down exactly as they said on the news and that chemtrails are just contrails? Sure, I'd love to find out that it's all bunk but at the moment, the jury is out as I haven't read the evidence for the defence, apart from Micks short video that contrails have been around for 70 years. Is that alone going to wipe out those images of the interiors of planes with large canisters? Or pictures of planes with strange pipes emitting chemicals? Or the chemicals found in the soil that shouldn't be there? Of course not, but I'm open to persuasion, with facts of course. So here I am, a fully paid up conspiracy theorist (or as I say, someone who doesn't blindly believe everything he is told) ready to be turned away from the dark side. But please, referring to people like me as fruitcakes and delusional is only going to force a wedge between us when what you should be doing is opening your arms and welcoming us in. We are not that different, we just haven´t found the info to move from point 2 to 3 yet as it is buried at the bottom of the internet below all the CT stories.
RichT
This might be a bit long for a first post and could easily be tacked on to the “what to do when family members believe in bunk” thread but I´m not asking any specific questions so despite its length, it still qualifies as a “Hi, this is me and this is how I found myself here”, post.
My story.
We are born believing everything we are told and it would seem to be part of our genetic makeup. This makes sense as disbelieving everything we are told would be chaotic. “Don’t eat that! It will make you sick, eat this, it’s good for you”. So when we are told a story about a mystical guy up in the clouds that, if you are good, will be good to you, we believe it. Later in life we find out that Father Christmas was actually your dad and that your parents had been lying to you. A bit later on you find out that the other guy in the clouds is God….what do you do now? Do you continue to blindly believe what you were told or, now with you recently acquired knowledge that parents are not as truthful as you thought, question the validity of this guy’s existence?
One by one, the stories of tooth fairies, Easter bunnies and storks delivering babies are uncovered as lies but I am now old enough to be able to tell the difference between childish stores and the truth.
I was approaching 30 and hadn’t given too much thought to religion (being British from non-religious parents). I was working with a guy who claimed to have had a deep religious experience where all of his questions were answered and he fully understood everything about the bible. He used to go to sermons and correct the vicar when he ‘interpreted’ passages different from what he now knew was its true meaning (needless to say, he was soon excluded from any future gatherings; nobody likes to be told their beliefs are wrong). We used to chat about evolution and I was firmly on the monkey side of the fence but found myself struggling with how complex things like the eye could evolve out of thin air. My logical brain said you either have a fully functioning eye or you don’t. Take away the ability to focus and what good are eyes? My problem was that I was trying to figure it out for myself using the reason and logic that I had leaned so far. I didn’t have the expert knowledge or scientific facts to hand so lost the argument because “If you can’t explain it, then God must have done it”.
A few years later the internet, the world’s largest repository of information, was at my fingertips. I started researching about evolution and the eye and sure enough, I found out that it was perfectly possible for the eye to evolve and had done so into thousands of variations. It was when I hit 40 that I really started to take a closer look at religion (particularly Christianity and the Bible) and after many months of study, realised that I could now refer to myself as an Atheist (I´d never labelled myself as that before)….and then those pesky lies, that I thought I had seen the last of in my childhood, started to appear.
I had seen the film JFK many years before and it was quite a compelling story packed full of evidence. I´d read about MLK and seen Malcolm X and a pattern seemed to be emerging. Was it really that far-fetched that an organisation like the CIA could be behind these assignations? I didn´t think so and I certainly didn´t think I must be a fruit cake for thinking so. I then saw a video of JFK himself warning of ´secret societies´ so was HE now a fruitcake? My genetic default position of “I will believe what I am hearing is true until my knowledge of the facts proves it to be false” was now quite engrained and although I didn´t believe everything I heard from any random on the street, if it was presented clearly and concisely in a film like this, or by the president himself, I had no reason to disbelieve it. Then 9/11 happens, then Chemtrails, then Geoengineering, then banks, then the AIDS conspiracy…the list went on and on. The more I searched the internet, the more I found. I stopped at the moon landings and holocaust deniers, in my mind there seemed to be a line that I would not cross, or at least left them on the shelf for further investigation but in truth had no real intention of ever going back to, some things just seemed too far-fetched).
I´ve always considered myself to be open minded and a liberal kind of guy. I have no time for racists and have always treated woman as equals so in my mind, I did not fit the mould of some nutjob conspiracy lunatic with mental health issues (which I have none) but I was being labelled as one and it didn´t feel right.
When I spoke to other people around me that were also questioning things, they were all educated, sensible people with good jobs and respected by others. When I spoke to others about my new found knowledge and was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, they tended to be people who had no previous knowledge of what I was talking about (chemtrails for example) but where confident in their belief that it must be rubbish and said so through hails of laughter. I quickly observed that those who knew nothing of what I was talking about were those saying the loudest that it was rubbish and that I must be a lunatic and a conspiracy theorist. If I was able to get a word in after that I would say that their reaction is not uncommon. The first people to suggest that the world wasn't flat were also laughed at; so were the ones who suggested the sun didn't go round the earth (but the other way round) and so were the ones who suggested we were not the creation of a God but the result of millions of years of evolution. So why do you so quickly dismiss what I am saying and laugh in my face without any knowledge of the subject?
Last year I got to a point where, after taking in so much stuff about the Islamification of Europe, I told my wife that I have to stop this. It´s not a matter of whether it is true or not, it´s just that it is taking up far too much of my time and it is starting to get me down….and now to the point of this post.
I am new to this site and I can´t even remember how I found it but I´ve been reading a few threads over the last few days, particularly the one about “What to do when family members believe in bunk” and I´ll admit I only got as far as the top of page five before feeling the urge to write this post. What I was picking up on in this thread was very much an “us and them” and it doesn´t sit comfortably with me. In this post I have seen conspiracy theorists referred to as ´fruitcakes, delusional, down the rabbit hole, mentally ill and ´not open minded´. I glossed over the mentally ill bit but noticed that some of the Non CTs? Have had or still have mental issues which kind of negates that one (which if I recall correctly Mick also said) but I did take offence at the ´not open minded´ bit as to me it seemed completely backward. It was my open mindedness not to blindly accept what I believed to be true that led me to investigate whether it was or wasn´t. The people I found to be completely closed minded were those who refused to listen to an alternative view because in their mind everything is fine and everything is exactly as it appears on the news. To question the validity of it makes you a conspiracy theorist lunatic so in my experience, those who weren´t open minded were not those searching for the truth but those who didn´t even want to know. To get away from the “them and us”, maybe it should be viewed more as a path?
If there is a path then surely it is:
1) I believed everything I was told,
2) I then found out some of it wasn´t true so learned to question
3) I then found out that after questioning, I had to work very hard to find the truth
Those who searched for answers and found all the stories about 9/11 and Chemtrails are simply on the path from 2 to 3 but the problem is, the information on the internet that says 9/11 was an inside job and that Chemtrails are real dwarf the stories that it is bunk by a thousand to one (pure guesswork, could be much higher).
So where am I at? Do I believe everything I read on this site? Of course not, I'd be naive to do that. Stage two has shown me that not everything I read is true. Am I ready to find out that 9/11 went down exactly as they said on the news and that chemtrails are just contrails? Sure, I'd love to find out that it's all bunk but at the moment, the jury is out as I haven't read the evidence for the defence, apart from Micks short video that contrails have been around for 70 years. Is that alone going to wipe out those images of the interiors of planes with large canisters? Or pictures of planes with strange pipes emitting chemicals? Or the chemicals found in the soil that shouldn't be there? Of course not, but I'm open to persuasion, with facts of course. So here I am, a fully paid up conspiracy theorist (or as I say, someone who doesn't blindly believe everything he is told) ready to be turned away from the dark side. But please, referring to people like me as fruitcakes and delusional is only going to force a wedge between us when what you should be doing is opening your arms and welcoming us in. We are not that different, we just haven´t found the info to move from point 2 to 3 yet as it is buried at the bottom of the internet below all the CT stories.
RichT