The Kennedy-Lincoln Parallels

I have just finished listening to Chris Rosebrough's conversation with Joseph Atwill, not an easy thing to do given Atwill's stream of logical fallacies. His final argument is one that I took particular notice of, not because it was any good, but because it is such a wonderful example of a logical fallacy. The argument was basically, "look at the parallels between Josephus' account of his three crucified friends and the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Christ." 

It happens that tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and that reminds me that there are startling similarities between the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946, Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Lincoln was elected President in 1860, Kennedy was elected President in 1960. Both men were shot on a Friday, both men were shot in the head. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were succeeded by Southerners called Johnson. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon B. Johnson was born in 1908. These are far more compelling parallels than those between the Josephus account and the Gospel crucifixion accounts, which basically come down to "both feature three blokes getting crucified, and one of them lives afterwards while the other two die." Now I have checked, and all of these are facts.

Other parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy have been made, often becoming more and more strained as one or other President's history is shoehorned into the other's to make the parallelism more complete, e.g. "Booth shot the President in a theatre and fled to a warehouse, Oswald shot the President in a warehouse and fled to a theatre", this fails because equivocation is required on a number of words, yes Oswald was in a warehouse when he shot Kennedy, but he did the shooting with a rifle at long range, while Booth shot Lincoln at close range with a pistol while both men were in the theatre. Lincoln was shot in a theatre of the type where they put on plays, Oswald fled to a movie theatre. But even the genuine parallels are completely without meaning, merely interesting coincidences. Some are less surprising than they appear, for example a man first elected to Congress a century after another is, if he is later elected President, very likely to be elected President about a century after the other fellow. there are only seven days in the week, so the probability of a President being assassinated on a Friday is one in seven, and perhaps given that Sunday was a day of rest the true probability is closer to one in six. Johnson is a very common name. Then a sitting man is more likely to be shot in the head than anywhere else by a man trying to kill him - it's the most obvious lethal target.

Of course the list above is a list of similarities, carefully chosen for that reason, and therefore it would be erroneous to base any argument whatsoever on the list. It would be especially foolish to base an argument on any sort of probability of such a chain of coincidences having happened, irrespective of eyewitness testimony. But that's what Atwill does with the New Testament and Josephus. Any list of parallels may be factually interesting, but is probably factually meaningless. To attempt to subject the whole to a sort of statistical analysis and present the resulting analysis as something meaningful is quite simply an abuse of mathematics, for maths was never intended to be a tool through which we analyse history, discarding what we find mathematically incredible.

The very real, often surprising, similarities between the lives of these two Presidents are merely accidents of history, and the very slight similarities between two accounts of crucifixions are the same thing.

'Covert Messiah' and conspiracy thinking.

I have deliberately given no free publicity to the 'Covert Messiah' non-event that happened in London's Secularist cathedral, Conway Hall (our picture is the back door, and does not do justice to the building, but is the only one I have on file), on Saturday, quite simply because the "evidence" presented was nothing more than an alleged code "discovered" in a correspondence between the writings of Josephus and the Gospels, a code that, like Lowell's "canals on Mars", exists solely in the eyes of the beholder. But what interested me, particularly as I had been reading The United States of Paranoia recently, was the use of the language of the Conspiracy Theory.


Again and again in the 'Covert Messiah' promotional material, we hear comments about "government control" and state conspiracies. This is no accident, it is the deliberate us of such language to appeal to the zeitgeist (no pun intended). Distrust of governments and police is high on both the left and the right, and the appeal of conspiracy theories in the west is undeniable. It is of course simply a fact that governments have in recent times conspired in a variety of ways to exercise control over what they deemed "undesirable" groups; there is no denying this. During World War II, for example, the British Intelligent agency MI5 secretly took control of the entire German intelligence network in the UK and used it to systematically feed false information to German military intelligence. In a less obviously benign example, the FBI used moles within organisations deemed to be "un-American" to disrupt the groups. Thus the idea of the Roman Emperors creating a fake religion to control the Jewish people is appealing to those with little knowledge of history and minds receptive to conspiratorial thinking, something that describes a large proportion of the Western population.

Conspiracy sells. The X-Files sold for that reason, The da Vinci Code sold at the bookstores (but not so much at the cinema), and an alarmingly large number of people believe that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim plotting to make himself dictator of the United States (though admittedly any number of people believing that is alarming). Even holocaust denial sells. And in Christian circles, The Two Babylons sells, despite being not only arrant nonsense, but antiquated arrant nonsense at that. Which brings us to another point; conspiracies sell on left and right, though of course rarely the same conspiracies. Despite the best efforts of certain left-wingers to depict right-wingers as conspiracy nuts and themselves as the rational types, in fact belief in conspiracy theories is at least as common on the political left as the political right. For every right-wing conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, I can give you a leftist one about George W. Bush, and in many cases the same theory about Bush.

Of course conspiracies happen, and to suppose that governments are always above-board and honest with their people is naive. But at the same time we should always try the claims, not accept them because they happen to agree with out own particular political ideology, religious belief or our worldview. In particular we ought to be suspicious of claims of grand conspiracies, for such claims are usually disguised attacks against a disliked party that the claim's originator wishes to destroy. The claim that Barack Obama is seeking to enslave the US populace is far too similar to the claim eight years ago that George W. Bush was claiming to enslave the US populace for me NOT to think that the motivation is not so much evidence of Obama's evil plan as a simple dislike of the man's politics, and the claim that the Flavians created Christianity to control the Jews is far too similar to Jack Chick's claims that the Vatican created Islam to control the Arabs for me NOT to think that the motivation is in reality a mere dislike of Christianity. In all these cases the common element is a fear of the party at the centre of the conspiracy is going to destroy "our America", and since the normal methods have failed, extraordinary methods must be adopted against the foe. The danger of this train of thought should be instantly apparent.

The accusation of the vast conspiracy takes the place of actually engaging with the other side; it seeks to imitate the act of Alexander the Great with the Gordian Knot, rather than untying, it tries to cut. By painting Christianity (or Islam in the case of Jack Chick) as the deliberate fabrication of a cynical conspiracy, it says in effect, "I do not need to address the claims of the other, for the other is merely deceived by an ancient plot of which they are ignorant, but I know the truth". Convenient, but a dodge at best. The Conspiracy is a pseudo-history that takes the place of the actual history, and justifies unthinking hostility in the place of serious intellectual engagement. At worst it places the other in the position of a delusional mental patient who needs to be restrained for his own good, justifying in the mind of the one holding it the most oppressive measures.

What therefore we need to do is to challenge the conspiratorial mindset. Not the idea that there are such things as conspiracies (there are such things, and governments do engage in them), but rather the mindset that regards government conspiracy as the first port of call when there is a school shooting or a terrorist attack, as the default explanation, so to speak, for all troubling events (for example, when the Boston Marathon was bombed there were websites that declared it to be a "false flag attack" even before a "flag" was announced). And more than that, we must challenge the conspiracy narrative that looks to a grand conspiracy as the cause of these events, whether that grand conspiracy is the Roman Catholic Church, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Knights Templar (and the Knights Templar are always involved somewhere in these things). Instead we must teach history, study history, respect history, and treat the grand conspiracy as pseudo-history. Why? Most notably because the Grand Conspiracy is historically unprovable, there is no evidence for it. And its advocates reply that if it existed we should expect to find no evidence. At which point my scientific side comes in and points out that a hypothesis that is unfalsifiable is to be regarded as false. Or in more historical terms, if all evidence against a theory is to be regarded as evidence for a theory, then the theory has become a presupposition, an axiom, and as such has passed from the realm of history to the realm of metaphysics. The conspiracy has become, to all intents and purposes, an article of faith. And that's not a good idea. For it makes those who claim to be sceptics entirely unsceptical of their own conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy Mania

As one who still recalls the frequent bomb attacks by the Provisional IRA that were so marked a  feature of my childhood (all the more so since we lived close to a military base, though mercifully one that was never targeted), I cannot help but be variously amused and disgusted by the fact that certain persons in the US seem incapable of hearing about a terrorist outrage without immediately declaring that it is a "false flag attack". This makes no sense, of course, when no "flag" has been shown at all! So why do it? Well, the cynic in me (whom I must be careful not to feed too often) suggests that this is in order to boost ratings, but the alternative suggestion arises that in fact it is because the people who make these suggestions have so entered into the conspiracy mindset that to them all things must be linked to their notional conspiracy, in other words that they presuppose the conspiracy. It cannot be that there are real terrorists setting off bombs, it must be the conspiracy, it cannot be that anyone really decides in a moment of mental derangement to go into a school with guns, but there must be the conspiracy there behind it all.

And so begins the search for anything at all to "verify" this, anything that (to a totally untrained eye, mind you!) seems "wrong". And here we hit another problem; the "reality" that is at the back of the mind in these cases is oftentimes not reality at all, but fiction. Based upon the way well-rehearsed actors backed with state of the art special effects portray a scene, the conspiracy theorist assesses what he sees. Now reality, it is important to say, does not look realistic by the standards of Hollywood, for effects in action movies are bigger and more spectacular than the real thing, explosions are less destructive (unless they are CGI) than the real thing, while they are at the same time flashier, and guns all too often have unlimited ammo, or at least clips with wildly varying numbers of rounds in them (which is odd, as even blanks have to be fired from real guns with real magazines).

And there is another point to consider; we must postulate, must we not, that the conspirators cannot at one and the same time be diabolical masterminds and total idiots, that doesn't even work in Get Smart, let alone real life. A conspiracy that manages to fool most of the world must be very, very good. That means they will not make stupid mistakes that any fool could spot; thus anything that appears unrealistic must be considered very carefully, for it may very well be, so far from a sign that something is fake, a sign that it is not.

Not that the conspiracy maniac ever considers that, of course, for he is looking for confirmation, not for anything that could destroy his theory. And that is why the most insane suggestions have been taken up enthusiastically by otherwise sensible human beings, as witness those who bought the Sandy Hook Actors Conspiracy theory, a theory that, if thought about only works if we assume that Sandy Hook Elementary School either never existed, or that at least for the last decade the school was being set up for the shooting. For you see, whilst the TV viewer in California (say), has never been there, New England exists, Sandy Hook exists - if it did not, people would have noticed, and we would have to question the reality of everything, which way leads to madness. That means that the fake families would have to be introduced to the school as real, and so on and so forth. In reality it would have to be done in such a way that the fake families resembled real ones in every way. The alternative is only credible to someone who has not actually thought about it, or who has let Conspiracy Mania addle the brain.

And that is the real tragedy of all this - people abandoning critical thinking in the name of critical thinking.

The Tyranny of the Non-Expert

It is one of the ironies of our modern society that we are simultaneously far more reliant on experts than we have been in the past and far more distrustful of experts. Our technology is so complex that most people simply cannot understand it; we drive cars that we cannot fix ourselves and I am writing this using a computer the working of which are to me a deep mystery. So we rely upon the expert. On the other hand, resenting this, we do not trust the expert. This can be a good thing; sometimes the expert is a rogue as well as an expert, and sometimes he is only pretending.

The trouble comes when non-experts try to be experts. Since about 2005 I have followed with interest the conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist atrocities of 9/11. I first came across them in that year, with people remarking on how things "looked wrong". Being me, I immediately asked "in what way?" What it came down to was people on the internet who are not air crash investigators drawing conclusions based upon what they thought the incidents should look like, without any actual understanding of what was going on; particularly painful to me was the remark, then common, that there were "pyroclastic flows" at the World Trade Centre collapse. A pyroclastic flow, for those interested, is a phenomenon associated with volcanoes and is basically a flow of hot gases and rock, so hot that it will incinerate any living thing it touches. Yet there were these conspiracy theorists using the term to mean simply a dust-cloud! The non-expert, the armchair detective, is hampered by the fact that he really does not know what he is doing, but believes that he has watched enough thrillers and read enough sensational fiction to know what a crime is like. He is mistaken.

The attempts to locate the Boston Bombers by internet non-experts followed precisely the same pattern that the majority of such efforts do; wild mass guesses and people following their own prejudices. Far more useful were the reports of actual eyewitnesses on the ground.

As we should really have come to expect since 2001, there were those who instantly wanted to suggest that it was a "false flag attack", never mind that no flag was really identified until yesterday! The great argument used was that certain images "felt wrong". Any terrorist attack, by definition is wrong; thankfully they are also quite rare in the West. It is a different story in other parts of the world. However, the very rareness of these events means that most people's understanding of how these things "should" look is based upon fiction. And here is the crowning irony; based on a comparison with fiction, non-experts are pronouncing images fake! All because reality does not look like Hollywood's version of it. At the same time people like Alex Jones, chief promoter of all things conspiratorial, have created a narrative of their own lives that reads like a Hollywood thriller, except of course that it is, like the Hollywood plot, fiction as well, and the forces of darkness they are fleeing from exist only in their own minds. Do you want proof? The fact that Alex Jones is still broadcasting is proof enough, for in the police state he believes he inhabits he would long ago have been arrested.

A non-medical person with no experience of dealing with major injuries simply does not know what such injuries really look like; he or she has no competence to comment one way or the other based on a single news photograph. But because that person does not think it looks right, or (more likely with people we tend to meet) a person they follow thinks so, again without medical experience or knowledge, they will pronounce a picture fake, and then look around for reasons why.

This is the tyranny of the non-expert; for the non-expert is so unwilling to defer to the expert that he or she cannot be shown to be wrong.

Why I don't think Barack Obama's a Muslim

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a link to a video on YouTube which he feels gives evidence that Barack Obama is in fact a Muslim. I disagreed with him and pointed to Obama's social policy, particularly his advocacy of homosexuality (evidence here). This is not compatible with Islam, which punishes homosexuality with the death penalty. On the other hand there is one solution that takes all the evidence into account, and that is that Obama is a liberal protestant. I have heard a liberal minister in a British chapel say that "Christians should reverence Mohammed." There was no doubt that the man was not a Muslim, yet he used a service on Ascension day to bewail the fact that Christians did not accept Mohammed as a prophet. Liberals, as we have been reminded by the recent actions of the Church of Scotland and the PCUSA, are accepting of and even promote homosexuality. So, if Obama is a Muslim his promoting homosexuality is inexplicable, but if he is a liberal protestant - which, it must be remembered, is his own testimony - then everything makes sense, it fits.

The reply I received was rather surprising to me, it was in effect "he's hiding the truth". Given that Obama has actually said "I am a Christian", we would have to say that if he is really a Muslim, he is flat out lying most of the time and pretending to be a Christian with a foolishly high level of respect for Islam. We would have to say that he attended Chicago's Trinity UCC for many years as part of an elaborate deception. That make him more than just a liberal Muslim, it would necessitate the conclusion that he is really a villain masquerading as a liberal. It would require him to really be a radical playing a part in order to further Muslim ends. Now of course if you think that he is really a Kenyan-born Islamic extremist who has been systematically infiltrating the Democratic party to further Muslim aims to dominate America, that would make sense, but for myself, I find this hard to believe, given how flimsy the evidence is. It's on a level with believing that the World Trade Centre was not really brought down by a terrorist attack. If you adopt a conspiratorial view of history you can of course believe all sorts of things on the flimsiest of evidence, but I am not sure that this is a good idea. In effect that is to say, "Because of this tiny amount of evidence here (which can still be explained if he is, as he claims to be, a protestant liberal) we should ignore everything else as just deliberate deception and conclude that he is a Muslim."

I'm afraid I can't do that. It is incumbent on us to examine all the evidence, not just that which agrees with our conclusions. To dismiss his voting record on homosexuality as a deception, to claim that his record as "the most liberal senator" is a smokescreen, seems to me a little perverse.

The claim has been made, "well, look at all the things Obama's said about Islam!" Look at these quotes:

"America treasures the relationship we have with our many Muslim friends, and we respect the vibrant faith of Islam which inspires countless individuals to lead lives of honesty, integrity, and morality. This year, may Eid also be a time in which we recognize the values of progress, pluralism, and acceptance that bind us together as a Nation and a global community. By working together to advance mutual understanding, we point the way to a brighter future for all."

"Islam brings hope and comfort to millions of people in my country, and to more than a billion people worldwide. Ramadan is also an occasion to remember that Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind."

"Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith."

"We see in Islam a religion that traces its origins back to God's call on Abraham."

"All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith -- face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It's a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's a faith based upon love, not hate."

The answer, of course, is President George W. Bush! The quotes, with many others, can be found here. I suspect that for every pro-Islam Obama quote that can be found we can find a very similar Bush quote - yet no-one is claiming that George W. Bush is a secret Muslim.

I do not know why there are people I regard as otherwise sensible who wish to believe that Barack Obama is in fact a Kenyan-born radical Muslim masquerading as a liberal protestant born in Hawaii. It truly baffles me that anyone would protest that the Hawaii certificate produced by Obama is an obvious fake and then, in the same e-mail promote a couple of clumsy forgeries claiming to be from Kenya as absolutely genuine!If you dismiss the Hawaii certificate (and I am not entering into the question of whether that is genuine or not), you must also dismiss the Kenya certificates.

Conspiracy theories are a form of false world-view, whether they make the great enemy Islam, Roman Catholicism, or the New Age movement. Instead of dealing with the world as it is the conspiracy theorist interprets evidence based on the conspiracy - the conspiracy becomes to him or her the necessary presupposition of his or her thought. Thus the interpretation of facts becomes a sort of game, one is required to "read between the lines", to take sentence fragments out of context, and even to weave them together into new contexts, because the true "context" is the conspiracy. That's not how you do research, that's how Harold Camping was able to say that we can know the date of the end of the world.

And where do you stop? Logically you end up with a vast, world-wide conspiracy, everything that happens is orchestrated by them, and the conspiracy theory becomes un-falsifiable. The conspiracy theorist's world becomes a private construct in which nothing is as it appears. In other words, taken to their logical conclusion conspiracy theories end in madness. Now, I am not saying that all conspiracy theorists are crazy, because most people who hold to some sort of conspiracy theory are inconsistent at some point. It is, however, dangerous, partly because it leads us to take our eyes off the ball. All the world's evils are not the result of Rome, Jack Chick (Jack Chick thinks that the Roman Catholics invented Islam, by the way), there are atheists, there are secular tyrants. The world to more complicated - but God is on the throne.

I don't think Barack Obama is a Muslim because there isn't enough evidence that he is, and the evidence that he is not is far more compelling. That's not the same as saying he's a fine upstanding Christian man - he isn't, he's a theological liberal from the Protestant tradition. It's certainly not the same as saying I think he's wonderful - I don't. But it is to say that I cannot accept the conspiracy theories!

Why I Don't Believe the Conspiracy Theories

Yesterday the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden, today the conspiracy theory in my inbox! I was somewhat shocked to see who the e-mail came from (but probably shouldn't have been, given that he had sent me a series of e-mails about the Obama birth certificate casting suspicions on the Hawaii certificate while championing two forged certificates purporting to come from Kenya). I was not surprised to find that there are people doubting the truth of the news of Bin Laden's death - I would have been more surprised to find that there were none.

So why am I not convinced? Simply because of Occam's Razor - the principle that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

Let us lay out the options. The claim that Osama Bin Laden was killed by US special forces the other day is either true or false. If false, then either Bin Laden is still alive, or he was already dead. Now, the claim has been made that the death of Bin Laden was announced to help the Obama re-election campaign - this is what the e-mail in my inbox suggested. If so, Bin Laden must be dead - otherwise Obama has in fact prepared a sword of Damocles to hang over his head - a living Bin Laden would sink the re-election campaign far more surely than a dead Bin Laden would help it. Assuming that Obama is not a gibbering idiot (as a gibbering idiot would not do something as devious as he is accused of), then it follows that Bin Laden must be dead, or at least Obama is reasonably certain that he is dead.

If Osama Bin Laden is dead, then it follows that either he was killed the other day, or he was already dead. So we follow the conspiracy theorists, what if Bin Laden was already dead? Then it follows he either died of natural causes, or he was killed by allied forces. Now, if he died of natural causes while with his own people there is no reason this would not have been reported - it would have denied the West a propaganda coup for one thing. So we have the option that he was killed by allied forces. That Al-Quaeda would not have reported this is unlikely, however - a dead leader is a martyr for the cause, after all, and I have lost count of the number of senior Hamas figures who have been killed and whose deaths were reported at the time. A non-US operation would also have reported this.

Granting for the same of argument that Al-Quaeda would not have reported Bin Laden's actual death, then it must have been by US forces. If it was not the operation reported in the news it would have been an operation that happened some time ago - which means either under the Bush administration or under Obama's. Indeed, there is a conspiracy theory circulating that says he was killed as far back as 2001, and the body was kept on ice until now. This is laughable for the simple reason that there has been a change in US administrations. If Bush had killed Bin Laden, then the death would have been used to back the McCain campaign. Unless one believes that the US is really governed by a secret cabal, and that presidential elections are all shams, in which case nothing really matters at all anyhow. So we are left with the option that Bin Laden was killed by American troops at some point during the Obama administration. In other words, it is all a question of timing.

Now, if Obama is the master-manipulator that the conspiracy theorists claim, the man who covered up the secret of his Kenyan birth in order to become president, surely he must be a very intelligent man. In fact he must be the most monstrous and cunning villain. Thus he would have carefully planned when to release this news if it is in fact faked. The contention is that the news was released now to help Obama's re-election bid.

There is just one problem with this: The date of the next US Presidential election is November 6, 2012, roughly 18 months away. That's an awful lot of time in an era when the public forget so soon. Now, the first Gulf War ended on February 28th 1991 in a resounding victory for America and her allies. Yet President George H.W. Bush lost the Presidential election in November 1992. On the other hand, the Falklands War ended on 14th June 1982, and one year later, give or take a few days. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration was returned to office. Given this, it is plainly a good idea to have the victory fairly close to the election date. If Obama had the power to stage the death of Bin Laden at any time of his choosing, to have done so in November of this year, or later, would have made more sense.

Finally, the actual events surrounding the death of Bin Laden are so antecedently improbable. That he should have been found, not in a cave in Afghanistan or in a tribal village, but in a Pakistani garrison town is surely a scenario no competent script-writer would have created. And that is to say nothing of its effect on the Pakistani government. In addition, we are now told by the Pakistanis that there are survivors, including Bin Laden's teenaged daughter, who witnessed her father's death. So we have witnesses. And consider the alternatives - that the US government staged the whole thing and risked antagonising the Pakistani government should it all have gone wrong, or that Pakistan, a nuclear power, knowingly allowed itself to be so humilated by the US for no reason - given that a staged 'killing' could have taken place anywhere with as much, if not more, believeability.

So I do not buy the conspiracy theories. The options are these: either the US government killed Bin Laden at some point in the last couple of years, managed to conceal the fact, and then staged a commando raid and killing in a sensitive part of a friendly country in such a way as to shame that nation internationally, all in order to possibly help the re-election of a president in 18 months' time, or the news story that we have all heard is true. Now, you may believe whatever you want to - it's a free country - but I find the conspiracy account to be so inherently implausible that it ought not to be taken seriously without good evidence in its favour.

I do think, incidentally, that the summary exection of even a man who has done what Bin Laden has done, in front of his teenaged daughter, is highly problematic ethically, but that is another matter!

Zeitgeist - or, another bad conspiracy theory

Recently, on the way to the dentist, I saw a spray-painted graffito directing people to the Zeitgeist film on line. This film is frankly one of the best arguments against the internet available. Containing nearly no factual information at all, it argues that Jesus did not exist, and is a composite of various ancient gods. The film points in particular to Horus of ancient Egypt, and points out a number of "compelling" similarities between Jesus and Horus. In fact, hearing the Zeitgeist account of Horus, you think "that sounds like Jesus." The reason for this is of course that it is Jesus!

Yes, the people behind Zeitgeist have presented an entirely fabricated Horus mythology that is founded on the Biblical accounts of Jesus (for the most part), and use this as if it proves something. It proves nothing beyond breathtaking duplicity.

One of the best sources on the subject that I have found is here. The author is not a Christian, and for that reason the site is a useful one to point those who are thinking that Zeitgeist may have a point to. This author has no pony in this race. Of course this means there are statements in the article that I would not agree with, but it removes the impression that this film is based on truth. There is also a very helpful anotated Bibliography. Inexplicably, the author seems to think the King James Bible is really, really bad. I do not know on what basis.

Conspiracy! Two Babylons Revisited

Presenting a second post on conspiracy theories:

Alexander Hislop's book The Two Babylons is sadly still regarded by many as a work of outstanding scholarship and a great help in the controversy with Rome. Ralph Woodrow, among others, has shown that it is neither. The great problem with Hislop's approach is that it is arbitrary and can be used to prove anything (and therefore it actually proves nothing).

Put simply, the Hislop Hypothesis is that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church today is practically identical to that of the ancient Babylonian Mystery Religion, and that the Roman Catholic Church is nothing more than paganism Christianized.

The greatest problem with Hislop's thesis is that it does not fit the facts, and therefore the facts have to be massaged to fit it. All must be placed on Hislop's Procrustean bed and forced to fit! The second problem is that the method, if applied consistently, ends with the claims of Dan Brown that there is nothing original in Christianity! Why? Because similarity (even a similarity that, on closer examination, proves to be nothing of the kind) is enough for Hislop to establish a link. The Babylonians had a celibate priesthood, so does Rome! No, the Babylonians had priests who were Eunuchs. There is a slight difference here! Where this sort of thing leads those who do not hold on to Hislop's relatively orthodox Presbyterianism is to make like Dan Barker in the now-notorious debate with James White, claiming that Mark must have borrowed from Homer because in Homer's Oddysey they got into a boat and sat down, and in Mark's Gospel they got into a boat and sat down. Really? You know what I did last time I got into a boat? I sat down.

Let me repeat, that two people do something similar does not prove a connection. The Medieval dualist sect called the Bogomils believed that Jesus and Satan were brothers, sone of the most high God, but Satan disobeyed and became evil, while Jesus was obedient. The Mormons believe essentially the same thing. Does this prove that Mormonism is nothing other than a continuation of Bogomilism? Of course not! As Yuri Stoyanov has shown in his book The Other God, the dualist heresy has resurfaced time and again through history with no apparent connections to previous dualist groups. Thus similarity, even of belief, cannot prove a connection. How much less can a mere similarity of form? And that is even if one exists!

And another thing, there was no "Babylonian Mystery Religion". The Mystery religions (plural!) originated in many areas, Greece, Egypt, Phrygia, Syria and Persia (see Romanld H. Nash: The Gospel and the Greeks [P. & R., 2003]. Nash is undoing some of the damage caused by Hislop's recklessness). None of the chief mystery religions originated in Babylon, and the Persian mystery was that of Mithras, not a worship of Nimrod. Hislop conflates dozens of gods from a score of nations to produce his own mythic Nimrod. In his zeal against Rome he forgot the first rule of controversy - be fair. If you can pick and choose bits from all over antiquity to make your "Babylonian Mystery Religion," you can make it look like anything you want! Which of course fits very well if you want to make Rome look pagan.

Hislop was not a historian or a student of Babylonian culture, he was a parish minister with a bee in his bonnet about the Church of Rome who was not too particular what arguments he used against it. The main thing was that the arguments were against Rome!

To summarize. There are many faults with the Church of Rome, and these have beeen laid out in such books as Dr. James R. White's The Roman Catholic Controversy, Eric Svedsen's Evangelical Answers and McCarthy's The Gospel According to Rome. The objections are doctrinal, rooted in Rome's exaltation of the pope, her doctrine of justification and merits, and her undue exaltation of the Virgin Mary, to name just three points. None of these are derived from Babylon. It may fairly be argued that Romanism is "Christianity paganized", to paraphrase Thomas E. Peck, it cannot be argued that it is Paganism Christianized.

Christians ought not to read Hislop's book. As he was Free Church minister of Arbroath, I can only conclude that the book is the result of too many kippers! Joking aside, The Two Babylons will not prepare any Christian to answer the claims of Rome, and Rome has no doubt answers to it - such as the obvious one that it is chock-full of errors. Thus, if a person's opposition to Rome is built on a myth, they can easily be shaken from it. But, if it is based on facts, then it is going to be much more stable.

Conspiracy Theories

One blog I frequent is Screw Loose Change, a blog devoted to debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is a secular blog, and particularly in the comments there can be some use of profanity. But what is fascinating about it is how the conspiracy theory is a sort of substitute religion. Instead of a benevolent deity in control, there is some sort of malevolent conspiracy. The identity of the conspiracy differs between theorists, but still, the common theme is a conspiracy. A conspiracy theory is a worldview, and the conspiracy theorist filters reality through the theory.

The trouble is, it is a false worldview. This is demonstrated by its inability to make sense of the world as it really is. To take an example, until this year it was practically gospel among the believers in 9/11 conspiracy theories that the men behind the conspiracy were George W. Bush and Dick Cheyney. They staged 9/11, as the theory went, to seize power in the United States. Now, since the US constitution only allows a man to hold office as president for two terms, obviously the 2008 election, when Bush would not be allowed to stand, was a crucial test for this theory. As the election approached, it became a widely-held opinion that Bush would set up another 9/11, call off the election and declare martial law. Of course that didn't happen. After the election, in which the Republicans lost, there was speculation that Obama would never become president, that Bush would impose martial law. Never happened.

And I have yet to find evidence that any of the people who were speculating that Bush was in reality some sort of evil dictator who anted to suspeced the constitution ever apologised or admitted they were wrong! In fact, they go right on using the language of "coup". It is possible for an elected government to perform a coup, but this would necessitate that Bush, with military aid, adopted extra-constitutional powers and took direct control of the courts and the legislature, which he did not. Nor is Bush in power any more, having surrendered his office according to the constitution. Thus the world-view is revealed to be false. None of which is to deny the possibility of governments conspiring to seize power (Hitler was democratically elected), but to say that there is no evidence that Bush sought to do so!

So what are the Conspiracy nuts saying? That it was all a secret power behind the government. But that secret power must have already been in place, and so did not need to seize power. The worldview fails completely.

Should Christians entertain such conspiracy theories? No. Do they? Yes! But they ought not to. To take another example, there are some Christians who promote the idea that Obama is a secret Muslim. In fact that makes no sense, because Obama not only promotes Islam, ne also promotes so-called gay marriage, which is an abomination to Islam. Now, a cospiracy theorist could say, "Bell, that just proves how devious he is," but what makes more sense is to say that Obama is a religious liberal. You see, 'Obama is a Muslim" might explain Obama being pro-Muslim, but it does not explain his support of same-sex marriage. That he is a religious liberal explains everything! I have heard a liberal minister in the URC (the UK body of that name) say that Christians ought to "Reverence Mohammed." Religious liberals also hold that cultural acceptance of homosexual behaviour should be mirrored by the Church. Thus Obama as a religious liberal makes more sense than Obama as a secret Muslim. It also explains why he was a member of a liberal church in Chicago!

And the fact that there is no vast conspiracy explains better why the government can be extraordinarily incompetent at times. Also why we still have free elections, and why Mr. Brown, unless he can do something amazing in the next few months, will be on the lecture circuit this time next year.

Of course, as Christians we do believe that there are evil powers moving behind the powers of this world, but we also believe that there are angelic forces fighting for us, and that finally all history is controlled, nit by human conspirators, or by Satan, but by God. And what I have said about political conspiracies also applies to the idea of the New Age conspiracy beloved of Gail Riplinger. Because I had to get her in somewhere!