Religious conspiracy theories

Those who follow any of the world’s media regularly are constantly being bombarded these days with dozens of comments about how stupid it is that so many people continue to believe in conspiracy theories. Without a doubt, most of those theories, like the one about how the Americans never really landed on the Moon after all, are completely bogus and were indeed invented by weak minded people to help them deal with the unbearable anxiety caused by not always having all the answers to every question. Other conspiracy theories, however, like the one about how President Aristide of Haiti was overthrown back in 2004 by a military conspiracy involving the USA, France and Canada, are most likely true, even if they have not so far been proved.

As I pointed out several years ago in one of my published books, real conspiracies have been happening throughout recorded history, not only in the political sphere of human discourse, but also in the economic, social and cultural spheres as well. Since the rise of capitalism, the most frequent conspiracies are the ones constantly being concocted by the world’s most important companies of investors, who are always trying to make more money than everyone else by keeping their various investment strategies a secret until it is too late for the competition to do anything to thwart them. Modern political ideologies like liberalism, nationalism and socialism have also created hundreds of their own conspiracy theories over the years, the libertarian conspiracies for running the world by doing away with the state altogether becoming a mirror image of totalitarian conspiracies aimed at abolishing the private sector instead.

But the conspiracy theory that I like the best is a lot older than those ones. This was the “Donation of Constantine”, a document written by the first Christian emperor of Rome that granted hegemony over all Christianity to the bishop of Rome, presumably starting with Saint Peter as the first pope and continuing right up until the Apocalypse. It was not until John Paul II’s reign that the Church officially admitted that the whole thing was based on a fake document written by Catholic monks during the Middle Ages, several centuries after Constantine’s death. It turns out that the first time that anyone really believed that the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head of the universal (catholic) church was when Gregory the First became pope towards the end of the sixth century, AD. In reality, the Christian emperors, from Theodosius I to the fall of Rome, adopted a form of imperial control over the Church (Caesaropapism), a practice continued later both within the Orthodox churches of the Byzantine and Russian empires, as well as the Anglican church of the British empire, but not at all by the theocratically inclined popes of the Catholic Church.

But anyone who thinks about such things from a social science point of view soon realizes that all religions are, in and of themselves, conspiracy theories on a gigantic scale. Fearful and anxious people have always tried to reassure themselves about the world that they live in by inventing all sorts of metaphysical or supernatural myths about creation, procreation, death and the end of the universe. This has been going on since our first Paleolithic ancestors tried to control their fear of the dark by creating belief in magic and the spirit world, as exemplified in the various kinds of prehistoric animism, shamanism and totemism. The somewhat newer, state-sponsored, official religions created since the rise of urban civilization 6000 years ago are simply more recent variations on a long-standing theme.

In all the official religions, the aristocratic founders of the state invented either polytheist pantheons of divinities, or a monotheist God with a human face, whose one common characteristic was to recognize the ruling aristocrats as the sons and daughters of the creator(s) of the universe. That way, any social upheaval among the inferior classes could be condemned as sacrilegious. Anthropomorphic surrogate parents dwelling in the sky (heavens) also helped reassure their earthly children that all was well and that the menacing manifestations of the natural world were nothing more than divine toys being manipulated in mysterious ways by their benevolent, immortal ancestors.

Later on, more enlightened human beings in various cultures began developing the rational view of the universe instead, attributing natural phenomena to natural causes and doing away with metaphysical explanations of reality altogether. Rational explanations, however, always seemed too cold and insufficiently nurturing to the fearful among us, who much preferred more comforting explanations of events. In recent times, even the compromises between science and religion adopted by more moderate believers were judged woefully inadequate by literal believers, who desperately needed a more fundamentalist version of the written word to deal with the nightmares caused by modern, urban living.

In today’s world, the rise of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish ultra orthodoxies, combined with a syncretic rise in belief in magic, threaten to forever eliminate science, the Enlightenment, critical thinking and, ultimately, technology itself. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are finding it exceedingly difficult to come to grips with all of their problems, because they are still reading (if at all) at a grade-school level in a world run by post-doctoral computer geeks and their high-financial employers. The fundamentalists absolute faith in heavenly intervention helps them deal with the fact that they do not stand a chance in today’s world, and leads them directly to their only alternative, which is to destroy today’s world completely and replace it with a return to antediluvian, old-time religion. Even if it means wiping out most of the world’s current population, which has become so pitifully dependent on more modern ways of thinking.

All the Muslim countries, as well as Muslim minorities in other parts of the world, have been particularly stricken by the fundamentalist disease, resulting in atavistic attacks on secular constitutions established during the twentieth century. As a result, the status of Muslim women is under worldwide attack, tribal customs and Islamic theology being combined to maintain or to reintroduce such abominations as excision, unpunished rape, forced marriages, cloister clothing and denial of access to basic education. But the fundamentalist epidemic has also broken out in Christian countries as well, exemplified by similar attacks on secular constitutions, women, gays and other minorities, not only in Africa and Latin America, but also in the USA and Europe. Hindu fundamentalists in India are set to take power again in that country, attacking women and gays as much as, or more than, any other fundamentalists, while pursuing their ongoing vendettas against any authors or publishers (such as Penguin India) who dare diffuse works that describe the mythological origins of Hindu divinities. Buddhist authorities in Burma (Myanmar) are also putting the lie once again to the myth of Buddhist pacifism in their ongoing treatment of Muslim minorities within that country. Israel is also under constant attack by its own ultra-Orthodox true-believers, even expelling one particular sect for its  outrageous treatment of women and children, the same sect going on to commit the same crimes in Quebec before doing it all over again in Ontario, and now moving on to Guatemala.

All over the world, fundamentalist organizations have succeeded in imbedding themselves within modern politics, taking power through theocratic revolution or through democratic election, whichever method works best in their own particular neighborhoods. In North America, they have taken over almost complete control of the Republican Party in the USA as well as the Conservative Party in Canada, but they also have strong constituencies within the other major parties. Their influence can be felt not only in domestic policy but also in foreign policy.

Israel, for example, practically owes its very existence not only to its own patriots but also to the ever-increasing numbers of Christian Zionists who back everything that the Israeli government does for their own peculiar reasons. They say that they like Israel because it is much more democratic than any of the other countries in the Middle East, forgetting what many Israeli scholars have already pointed out, that it is impossible for any state with an established religion to be genuinely democratic in any meaningful way. Israel’s ongoing successes in industry and its very large percentage of scientists within the overall population are also not the real reasons for their support of that country.

In reality, they like Israel because for literal interpreters of the Bible, the second coming of Jesus Christ cannot take place until Greater Israel has been firmly re-established within its entire Biblical territory. Nor does this mean that they particularly like the Jews themselves, since the Book of Revelations predicts that the Jews at Armageddon will be given one last chance to redeem themselves by converting to militant Christianity. Those who refuse to do so are slated to suffer torture for several hundred years during the Apocalypse, and eventually perish forever, along with every other kind of unbeliever in the world.

This may have been what was going on in the minds of Conservative true-believers in Canada recently, when leading ministers of their government compared Putin’s recent seizure of the Crimean peninsula with Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939. On the face of it, that comparison was not too outlandish since both the Germans and the Russians successfully conspired to occupy territory ostensibly to protect national minorities living inside Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine. Political opportunists in the USA may also have repeated the same comparison in order to help people there to forget recent American territorial conspiracies in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But for Christian Zionists that same comparison could be inspired by a subconscious desire on their part that the Russian occupation of the Crimea be soon followed by the outbreak of World War Three, just like the Sudetenland occupation was soon followed by the outbreak of the Second World War. That would certainly go a long way toward fulfilling one of the most important conspiracy theories originally written down in the Bible. If God and the Son of God do indeed exist, as good Christians so ardently believe, how could they ignore such a magnificent opportunity to establish the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven?

It would be nice to believe that even Christian fundamentalists could not possibly be thinking nowadays in such old-fashioned, apocalyptic terms, nor that they too could some day pull off such diabolical schemes as the one that their Islamic cousins committed in the USA back in 2001. But as long as conspiratorial religions keep on getting stronger and stronger, and rational methods of thinking keep on getting weaker and weaker, even crazier things than 9/11 may become increasingly possible. Those who still feel like reasonably accommodating the more exotic antics of the different kinds of true-believers these days would probably do well to re-read some of the most hair-raising sections of the world’s most sacred religious literature. There may very well be a few passages in those works that could lead to attempted wish fulfillment on the part of some of the more deranged conspiratorial minds among us.