On Conspiracy Theories

A post from Carl Trueman on conspiracy theories reminded me of several quotes I have collected through the years, all of which make similar statements.

Conspiracy theories have an aesthetic appeal: they make us feel more important in the grand scheme of things than we are. If someone is going to all this trouble to con us into believing in something, then we have to be worth conning; and the impotence we all feel in the face of massive impersonal bureaucracies and economies driven not by democratic institutions so much as multinational corporations is not really the result of our intrinsic smallness and insignificance so much of our potential power which needs to be smothered. Such views play to our vanity; and, to be brutally frank, the kind of virtual solitary vice which so much solipsistic internet activity represents.

Conspiracy theories don’t hold up, though. Nobody is that competent and powerful to pull them off. Even giant bureaucracies are made up of lots of small, incompetent units fighting petty turf wars, a fragmentation which undermine the possibility of the kind of co-ordinated efforts required to pull off, say, the fabrication of the Holocaust. History, humanly speaking, is a tale of incompetence and thoughtlessness, not of elaborate and sophisticated cabals. Evil, catastrophic evil, is not exceptional and brilliant; it is humdrum and banal; it does not involve thinking too much; it involves thinking too little.

-Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

“Many issues are misconstrued, not because they are too complex for most people to understand, but because a mundane explanation is far less emotionally satisfying than an explanation which produces villains to hate and heroes to exalt. Indeed, the emotionally satisfying explanation may often be more complex than a mundane explanation that is more consonant with verifiable facts. This is especially true of conspiracy theories.” 

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society 

"My boyfriend, Jim, has so many conspiracy theories. I think he gives people too much credit. I so rarely meet a single person who is very well organized, or with any direction. What are the chances a meeting a whole group?"

Esme Raji Codell, Educating Esme

"Liberal historians often assume that people are omnicompetent. Because they believe that humans can do anything, they routinely assume that outcomes are almost always the planned results of some human intentions. (An aside: this is why conspiracy theories abound. When you think that men control everything, you assume that every bad thing is the result of some intentional human plan.) Not true. Fallen humans are both capable and myopic, both powerful and unwise. The result is that human history is littered with unintended consequences. The Great War for Empire (a.k.a. the French and Indian War) shattered the colonists’ largely warm relationship with Great Britain in the 1760s, but this was accidental and unplanned. Historical events have causes, but they are often unexpected ones. Indeed, we should not be surprised when fallen humans misjudge situations and unleash dynamics that yield surprising results."

-Robert G. Spinney 

What Should We Do with our Frozen Embryos?

Russell Moore responds to this question from a conscience-stricken  father.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2013/04/17/what-should-we-do-with-our-frozen-embryos/#more-10558

Media Silence and Suppressing the Truth

The Kermit Gosnell murder trial has all the earmarks of a great story, but thus far the media has largely silent.  Here are some good sources dealing with why:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2013/04/11/8-reasons-for-the-media-blackout-on-kermit-gosnell/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/2013/04/a-wapo-reporter-explains-her-personal-gosnell-blackout/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+getreligion%2FDmXm+%28GetReligion%29

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/04/12/the-briefing-04-12-13/ (first seven minutes)

Abortion and the Right to Get What You Pay For

"Recently in Florida, Alisa LaPolt Snow, representing Florida Planned Parenthood organizations, testified against a bill that would require abortionists to provide medical care to babies who survive attempted abortions. Snow was asked: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” Snow replied: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.” She added, “That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider.” To this, a Florida legislator responded: “I think that at that point the patient would be the child struggling on a table. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Planned Parenthood, which receives more than $500 million in government subsidies, is branching out, expanding its mission beyond the provision of abortions to the defense of consumers’ rights: If you pay for an abortion, you are owed a dead baby."

 -George Will, "Johns Hopkins and Planned Parenthood's Troubling Extremism"

For more analysis of this story, see http://erlc.com/article/life-digest-infanticide-optional-p.p.-official-says

Temptation that Only Jesus Can Know

If Jesus never sinned, then can he really understand how strong our temptations are? 19th century bishop B.F. Westcott gives a thoughtful answer.

“Endurance involves more, not less, than ordinary human suffering: sympathy with the sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of the temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in its full intensity. He who falls yields before the last strain.”

-B.F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (1892 A.D.)

How to Live in the Age of Nuclear War

With Iran and North Korea making constant noise, Lewis's words here are as timely as ever.

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” 

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors— anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

--C. S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age," in Present Concerns 

Guns and the Killing Chain

David Brooks, full of principled pragmatism and good sense, as usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/opinion/brooks-the-killing-chain.html?ref=davidbrooks&_r=0

A Brief History of Church Discipline

Greg Wills is a professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this excerpt, he gives a brief summary overview of how church discipline has been practiced across church history, and what factors impacted its practice.

"From the apostolic era to the end of the fourth century, church discipline was a standard practice in the church, though not always practiced universally or consistently. From the fifth century the practice of church discipline diminished, and the practice of private confession and individual penance largely displaced it. During the Protestant Reformation there was a broad desire to recover the practice of apostolic church discipline, but those efforts were not always successful. Both the practice of infant baptism and the control of civil authorities over the affairs of the church made full recovery difficult. The Anabaptists were more successful because of their insistence on the separation of the civil and religious realms as well as their practice of regenerate church membership. Although Baptists maintained active church discipline from the seventeenth until the late nineteenth century, during the twentieth century it waned dramatically. Churches rarely opposed it in principle, but for a variety of reasons they lost their resolve to practice it."

-Greg Wills, Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline

Church Discipline and the Assurance of Love

The Assurance of Love

"In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul told the Corinthian congregation to wake up to the truth and to realize that they had someone in their number who was living as an enemy to the gospel he professed. A man was committing adultery with his father's wife (a serious crime even in pagan Corinth)! But the man is not the direct object of Paul's rebuke; that was reserved for the congregation. Why? Because the congregation was allowing the man to continue thinking of himself as a follower of Jesus when he was in open and unrepentant sin. His sin was as leaven in the loaf (as Paul goes on to say); it was infection in the body. The infection itself was serious but not nearly as serious as the congregation's toleration of it. To be welcoming and tolerant at this point was not simply an individual infection; it was a failure of the body's entire immune system. It showed that something essential to the body's life and health was missing, and it would quickly lead to the death of that local body if not immediately addressed. A body that could not resist such an intrusion would soon succumb to it.

Considered from the point of the individual disciplined, what Paul was calling them to implement was an act of love. Given that this man was obviously continuing to regard himself as, and was being regarded by others as, a Christian, he was clearly self-deceived. We know that professing Christians can be self-deceived. Paul later wrote to the Corinthians, "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves" (2 Cor 13: 5; cf. 1 Pet 1: 10– 11). We should realize that offering someone assurance of their salvation, based merely on their profession of faith in Christ, may not be the most loving thing we can do. And if that is true for us as individuals, it is doubly true of our congregations. Joining a church is joining an assurance-of-salvation cooperative. We are to observe evidences of God's grace in one another's lives and to encourage one another. We are to correct one another when occasion requires. Paul was urgent in 1 Corinthians 6 that the Corinthians not be deceived about who would inherit the kingdom of God. That warning sprang from love. Membership functions to assure us that we truly know God's love and that we truly love God in response."

-Mark Dever, in Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline http://www.amazon.com/Those-Who-Must-Give-Account/dp/1433671190/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365087341&sr=1-1&keywords=Those+Who+Must+Give+an+Account%3A

Jesus is on the Wrong Side of History

Trevin Wax at his best.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2013/04/02/jesus-is-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/

Intended Allegory in the Song of Solomon?

Good article by James Hamilton dealing with the issue of whether Solomon intended his Song to describe both human married love and divine married love.

http://jimhamilton.info/2013/04/01/intended-allegory-in-the-song-of-songs/