Are Some Truths Too Heavy to Hold?

The word “conspiracy” simply means “to breathe together” or “to share the same spirit”. When good people breathe the same air (i.e., “conspire”), good things can happen. Going a step further, when Christians are operating “in one spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13) to “motivate one another to acts of love and good works” (Heb 10:24), beautiful, transformative, society-shaping things will happen– even when done in secret. History and the Bible prove this true

Inversely, when evil people conspire, evil things transpire. When the evil people are also very rich and powerful, the result is exponential evil. That said, if you subscribe to the Christian worldview, you know that these monsters-to-society are merely puppets to the supreme diabolical Menace.

Yes, Christian conspiracy theorists tend to believe in the Devil. And they believe it is his foul breath that inspires men to conspire for evil. And that it’s not a theory. Consider the account of Judas the Traitor, where Satan “put into the heart of Judas” the evil that he would do. Judas conspired with the Sanhedrin to concoct a plot that would make Watergate seem like child’s play.

Does that mean every bad thing that happens in the world is a conspiratorial plot, i.e., the breath of Satan animating the heads and hearts and hands of some sharp-dressed evil puppets?

No.

And kinda, yes.

No, because that would downplay the destructive dominos of a fallen Creation, as well as the mass cumulative effect of individual immorality (by mostly benevolent people).

But also, yes. Because history tells us that the good in the world tends to rise up from the humus while the bad usually rains down from the dark clouds orbiting the ivory towers. It’s not that there aren’t bad folks on the ground, but grassroots malice usually dies soon after germination (e.g., Seattle’s CHAZ in 2020). And it’s not that there aren't good people at the top, it’s just the bad people (with Satan’s inspiration) employ force to keep their influence to a minimum.

Malice from the palaces of the powerful elite is executed slyly, with sophistication using an elaborate web of tentacles that descend down the rungs of the power ladder with certain orders and manipulations. By design, we don’t know about the inner workings of a diabolical plot until…. well, we usually don’t find out. Because ivory towers have thick walls, wide moats, no windows and snipers at every angle.

So, we are left wondering how that bad thing happened. The mainstream media love to tell us how bad things happened. The non-conspiracy-theorist (the coincidence theorist?) will drink it all in as fact… or at least be less likely to doubt the information they are hearing. And they will assume that any misinformation discovered later was an honest mistake (committed by the benevolent hands that operate the jaws of the talking heads).

I am often jealous of people that don’t question things. Life seems simpler for these people. Weather is weather. Food is food. Politics are politics. Pandemics are pandemics. Wars are wars. Sports are sports. Entertainment is entertainment. Mainstream pop music is good. Hollywood is just telling us the stories we want to hear. The next president will fix things. If he/she doesn’t then the next one will.

Life would be easier, for sure. Here’s the problem. Once one conspiratorial rabbit hole has been opened to you and you see a flicker of light in that hole and you suddenly have doubts about the nature of reality for the first time, a question arises deep within you. Something like, “wait, how deep does this go?” Once you discover (or uncover) a second or third perversion of reality as you knew it, the centipede of cynicism quickly sprouts its legs. It’s hard to escape its grasp as it consumes you from the inside out.

For sanity's sake, you know you need to find some safe middle ground between hardcore conspiracy theorist and naive sheep. But every time you reach for it, the next tantalizing theory knocks you back into the deep end.

That was me.

Every conspiracy theorist has an origin story– something that broke through their neat, ordered existence and got them questioning everything. My “Makings of a Conspiracy Theorist” biography began 23 years ago. I started with  bad acne and a seed of doubt. After 5 years of non-stop antibiotics as a teen and several courses of a now-banned-lawsuit-ridden drug, I still had acne (and weird side effects). One day I ran into an Asian woman who told me to change my diet. She said, in broken English, “sashimi, Brazil nuts, cranberries, water. Nothing else for one month.” I smiled politely, thinking “poor lady doesn’t know that Dermatologists have long debunked any acne-diet connections”.

Then I found myself in conversation with a biology professor from a university in Colorado. He bluntly told me to change my diet. Since I was a nice guy and he was a tenured university professor, I gave him a moment to explain himself. He told me about the studies of people groups around the world where there was no processed food of any kinds. “Hundreds of teenagers, not a single pimple among them”. He spoke convincingly enough for me to give it a try. I eliminated all processed foods and stuck to veggies, meat and low-glycemic-load fruits. In two weeks my acne was completely gone. None of the toxic drugs I had been on all those years came close to the same result. I stayed with it for a couple months and the results remained good. Excited, I contacted the professor again to ask if dermatologists knew about this. He said, “they do, but it’s not in their interest to recommend it.”

This professor went on to be the founder of the Paleo Diet, which branched into all kinds of fad diets over the years. But I will always remember that moment when I felt lied to by the health authorities in my life. What else are they hiding from me, I wondered? It took me ten years to restore and rebalance my intestines from the toxic drugs. Of course I did that through a healthy diet, as well, declining the second cocktail of toxic drugs they prescribed to fix the side effects from the first bunch.

The point of me explaining this situation is not to discredit all doctors or people in authority. It is only to show how that first door of doubt about the nature of reality opened to me. That event led me to research every manner of conspiracy theory out there for about five years. My eyes were opened quite a bit to the smoke of reality, and sometimes to the fire.

I was enlightened. But I wasn’t happy. It was too much darkness for my heart, mind and spirit to carry. So, I pulled my head out of the rabbit holes, cold turkey. I refocused my energies elsewhere, mostly in studying the Scriptures, which helped center me on the Truth and to find peace in the mixed up world. That didn’t mean I started believing everything was exactly the way the media portrayed it again. It didn’t mean I wasn’t staying vigilant or watchful. It just meant I didn’t over-invest my time and energy in the pursuit of certain truths whose weight I could tell I wasn’t meant to hold.

It’s not easy to maintain the narrow middle path. The year 2020 took me off the rails and back in the holes. Of course, I was not alone. That year birthed a whole new generation of conspiracy theorists.

I don’t have a universal answer to the problem of conspiratorial extremism (or the opposite stream), but for me, I’m learning to read the smoke. In the manner that there are different kinds of clouds, there are different kinds of smoke. Sometimes the smoke in the distance is from the neighborhood barbeque. Sometimes it is from a house fire. Sometimes it is fog. Sometimes it is the Limerick Power Plant.

I’m learning the difference between a legitimate conspiracy theory, a conspiracy hypothesis and a conspiracy pile of dogpoop. More importantly, I’m finding my peace in the One who has this all sorted out. I’ll leave you with a passage from Isaiah 8. It’s about Heaven’s Conspiracy Fact. Hold on to this Truth... breathe His air....and you will not stumble into any undesirable rabbit holes or fear the diabolical plots of the Luciferian puppets.

This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way

“Do not call conspiracy

everything this people calls a conspiracy;

do not fear what they fear,

and do not dread it.

The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,

he is the one you are to fear,

he is the one you are to dread.

He will be a holy place;

for both Israel and Judah he will be

a stone that causes people to stumble

and a rock that makes them fall.

And for the people of Jerusalem he will be

a trap and a snare.

Many of them will stumble;

they will fall and be broken,

they will be snared and captured.”