What is the deal with some Christians and conspiracy theories? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 7

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. So on today's episode, we're going to talk about conspiracy theories.

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And today on the show, I have Kevin with me. Hello. Good to see you guys. And Jeff.

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Hello. How's everybody doing? So conspiracy theories, for whatever reason, both in my personal life and at Got Questions, I'm hearing from a lot of people who are either buying into conspiracy theories, who are very curious about conspiracy theories.

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And it's interesting. It's fascinating just to hear some of the crazy stuff that people are interested in or even peddling.

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But at the same time, it can be frustrating. It's like, why are you spending so much of your time, so much of your mental energy focusing on something that in all likelihood is not true?

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With many conspiracy theories, there might be a little nugget of truth in there somewhere. But then everything that surrounds it is ranging from total lies to misrepresentations to just complete craziness.

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So not really saying that about any particular conspiracy theory. We might mention a few in the show today, but we just want to approach the topic of conspiracy theories in general.

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And as a focus, there's several scriptures I think we need to just look at that give us a good introduction to this.

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To me, conspiracy theories are a lot like gossip. When you're gossiping about a person, there may be a little nugget of truth in what you're saying.

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But ultimately, you're sharing stuff that you don't know whether it's true or not. And that's damaging.

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The Bible speaks against that. Proverbs 18 .8 in the New Living Translation reads, rumors are dainty morsels that sink deep into one's heart.

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And this is true of both gossip and conspiracy theories. They're interesting. They're fascinating.

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They make you want to know more, and they make you want to spread what you've heard.

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But often truth is absent. Ephesians 4 .15 tells us to speak the truth in love.

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Ephesians 4 .25, therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.

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So Christians, we are to be people of the truth.

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God is truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. So how can we participate in spreading something that, in all likelihood, is false?

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Every word that comes out of our mouth should be the truth spoken in love. John 8 .32

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says the truth will set you free. So the opposite of this is that falsehood, lies, they bind us.

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They enslave us. And the addictive nature of conspiracy theories, I've seen it in people.

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They just can't let it go. It becomes an obsession. So the truth is what sets us free.

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And then maybe a powerful reminder, John 8 .44 says that Satan is the father of lies.

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When we are participating in spreading falsehood, spreading lies, we are, in a sense, doing the devil's work.

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And I don't know about you, but that is the absolute last thing I want coming out of my mouth, anything that's going to support

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Satan and his efforts to deceive and mislead people. So it's a quick biblical reminder.

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We're to be people of the truth, and conspiracy theories don't fit into that. Yeah, I think one of the things we also have to keep in mind is understanding why conspiracy theories are something that's so easy for us as human beings to get into.

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Because people don't just wake up in the morning and say, I think I'm going to become obsessed with this particular theme or this idea.

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There's things about them that draw us in and are attractive.

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Probably the biggest one is that conspiracy theories are easy, and that's not meant to be dismissive of anybody or the way that they think about things.

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But a conspiracy theory, by definition, takes something that's sophisticated or complicated or has a lot of moving parts or a lot of knowledge that we just don't have access to, and it boils it all down to something that's extremely simple and very, very easy to state.

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Instead of needing to explain something in several minutes, you've got a five -second soundbite.

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And there's aspects of that that are more comfortable, but that doesn't mean they're good.

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Conspiracy theories are also reinforcing. In my experience, I see a lot of people who tend to gravitate towards conspiracy theories, which if that conspiracy theory were true, reinforces their social or political or personal preferences.

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So what winds up happening is that conspiracy theory becomes this backwards kind of evidence in their life that also supports these other things.

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There's also that sense of being an insider, that you have this special knowledge or special perspective, that you have had the wool pulled from off of your eyes, that you're seeing behind the curtain, that everybody else who doesn't get this just doesn't understand as well as you do.

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And the other problem with that is that it's evasive. Conspiracy theories give us an ability to avoid more difficult questions or more awkward conversations, because instead of focusing on things that maybe we should be talking about or that we need to discuss, or like Shay, you were saying, you take that nugget of truth that's in there.

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Instead of actually getting to that nugget of truth, we can focus on something that's much easier and less personal to get into.

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And I think all of those come down to the idea of control. We don't feel comfortable when we don't feel like we're in control.

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And the world can be a scary place. And sometimes we feel like if we understand something, that in some sense, we are in control of it.

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And conspiracy theories are a way for a person to say, I fully and completely understand this thing.

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Therefore, it is somehow less scary. It is less intimidating.

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It is easier for me to deal with it or cope with, as opposed to saying, you know what, maybe

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I just don't fully understand what's happening. Maybe I really just don't grasp where this is coming from.

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And as believers, it's important for us to be willing to accept the idea that sometimes we just don't know.

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And we can't know. Yeah. Jeff, I think that draw of being one of the informed crowd is a strong pull, as a strong temptation.

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Some of my favorites in the conspiracy theory world are, like back in 1966,

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Paul McCartney died, and he was replaced by the Beatles by a lookalike, and I guess also a sound alike.

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That's one of my favorite ones. But also, did you know, if you're really informed, then you would know that the

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Titanic never sank, that the wreckage at the bottom of the ocean is actually its sister ship, the

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Olympic, that was purposefully driven into an iceberg for an insurance scam.

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And then here's what I just found out about yesterday. I was just informed of this yesterday, that Michael Rockefeller, the son of Nelson Rockefeller, who presumably died back in 1961, is in reality still alive.

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In fact, he's been hiding in plain sight. We know him today as the actor

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Tom Hanks. So there you go. Now you're informed. This is how conspiracy theories work, though.

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They take something that can't be proved, can't be disproved, I guess, and they just run with it.

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People latch on to these things, and then they consider themselves to be truly informed.

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And the Scripture warns us against getting all caught up in these types of things.

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Number one, following a conspiracy theory is really a big waste of time and energy.

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1 Timothy chapter 1, verses 4 through 6. I'd like to apply to conspiracy theories, because Paul tells

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Timothy that as he is working with church leaders, he needs to warn certain people not to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations, rather than the stewardship from God, which is by faith.

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The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

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Certain persons by swerving from these have wandered away into vain discussion.

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What are conspiracy theories but myths that lead to speculation and vain discussions, empty discussions?

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Even if they're true, there's no way to prove that they're true, and so all we're left with is speculation, which the

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Bible warns against. What if all the time that we spent studying conspiracy theories were instead spent studying the

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Word of God and applying it to our lives? What kind of people would we be? But there's another biblical reason,

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I think, not to follow conspiracy theories, and that is they are oftentimes a source of fear in people's lives, and they cause unrest and anxiety.

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There are people trying to get us or whatever, paranoia, and God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind, 2

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Timothy 1 verse 7. We should avoid those things that promote or engender fear.

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That's not to be our focus in this world. Our focus is to be Christ. So excellent,

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Kevin. I mean, powerful reminder. The verse in Timothy that you shared is endless genealogies, godless myths.

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I mean, that's I can't think of a better description of a conspiracy theory than what that verse shares.

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It's going to tell a funny story that kind of illustrates how conspiracy theories work.

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So I don't know if you all are familiar with the reptilian conspiracy theory.

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Yes. And basically, the gist of it is that a race of reptilian aliens have invaded

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Earth and replaced a certain percentage of human beings with basically reptiles who are disguising themselves as human beings.

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Well, we were joking about this one morning in a prayer meeting, which, sorry, we actually did pray, but this was the pre -prayer meeting.

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And one person was like, you know, one out of every 10 people are actually a reptilian in disguise.

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Well, there were nine of us there. And five seconds after the person said this,

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Gwen walks into the room. And so we're like, oh, so clearly Gwen is the alien among us.

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Now, if you two know Gwen, Gwen is not an alien. She's one of the nicest people I've ever met.

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But that's what she says. That's part of the conspiracy. So Gwen is just amazing at hiding the fact and everything she does.

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And we've been teasing her for years about it in love, of course. But just seeing how we could take every little thing, every denial, every slip up is like, oh, there's this is evidence that what we're joking about is actually true.

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And there's absolutely no truth to it, of course. But it's things like that that something even start out as a joke.

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You can see how the choice morsels of gospel of the conspiracy theory can can lead you to every little bit of data that may contradict the conspiracy theory.

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It's easy to twist it and make it actually be evidence for the conspiracy theory.

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And that's what we talked about. Jeff mentioned earlier, these are disprovable. You can't buy their very nature.

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You can't prove that they're not true. Therefore, makes it so difficult to actually squelch them to squash these things and get people to stop talking about them because you can never fully prove that they're not true.

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I think a lot of times part of the problem is that people are taking legitimate observations. In other words, they're taking actual facts, actual things that they can see or that are true, and then they're misinterpreting them, either because they don't actually understand them or they're just looking for a way to to pack those in there.

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Gwen, for example, is an excessively nice person. And people would point to that and say, well, she's just too nice to be a human being.

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You could look at it that way, I suppose. Part of my experience that I have in conspiracy theories, for example, my background from an education standpoint is actually mechanical engineering.

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So one of the conspiracy theories that really drives me crazy is what's called chemtrails, which is the idea that commercial airliners are flying around spraying chemicals that are meant to control the population and everything else like this.

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People are making legitimate observations. Sometimes I see them. Sometimes I don't see the chemtrails.

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A lot of times they're in very regular patterns. Sometimes they stick around for a long time. Sometimes they don't stick around for a long time.

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Sometimes they're really broad. Sometimes they're really narrow. If airplanes left contrails, why wouldn't we just see them in this way or that way?

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And you don't want to pull the expertise card on people, but you want to tell them, look, there really are a lot of different factors involved in this humidity and temperature and the makeup of the level that the engine is running at.

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There's the fact that air traffic controllers will typically route planes in regular patterns, which is why you very often see regularly spaced straight lines.

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In other words, the problem is not necessarily that people are not seeing these things or that the evidences or the things that they point to are not actually the case.

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A lot of times it's just that they don't understand them. And that comes back to that idea of being in control.

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It's a scary thing to say that which I see, I may not fully understand.

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And a lot of times it's where it's where people get caught in these is they want to explain the things they see.

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They just don't know how. So instead of deferring to a better understanding or seeking something, they just go with their gut, which is not always, it's not always a good idea.

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Yeah. You know, there are some conspiracies, I guess we could call them, in the Bible that were uncovered.

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The prophet Nathan uncovered the conspiracy that David had put in place to cover up his adultery and then the murder of Bathsheba's husband.

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That was a true conspiracy. And Nathan uncovered that. We also see Paul's nephew, who was uncovering a plot to assassinate

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Paul. And he informed the authorities. They thwarted that assassination plot and everything was good.

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But in both cases, the whistleblower, as it were, did not obsess over the conspiracy in front of him.

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They didn't spend any time or effort really tracking it down and getting all the details.

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It was just that the truth came out. The truth came to them. In Nathan's case, the

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Lord told him what was going on in David's life and David's heart. And in the case of Paul's nephew, he happened to overhear something.

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And I think Scripture's plain teaching is that the truth will come out.

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Yes, wickedness likes to hide. Men do not come to the light lest their evil deeds should be reproved.

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So wickedness does like to hide, but Scripture also says that the truth will out someday.

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I think that's a good way to approach, because one of the questions that we're going to get into eventually is how do we move forward from this?

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How does a person actually examine where they are and decide, okay, am I engaging in conspiracy theories? And I think that's an excellent point to remember,

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Kevin, is that that doesn't mean saying there is no way any kind of conspiracy could ever possibly happen.

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They can, they really can. People can conspire to do things. You can have people who lie or put forward false information and disguise facts and confuse people about different things.

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But there's a serious difference between a true conspiracy or a conspiracy theory in the way that we're looking at these things.

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I think one of the things that's easier for us to start with to look at is the level or the extent of the conspiracy.

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It's one thing to suggest that a person or two or three people are hiding a secret, and those two or three people have done something, or that there is one particular business or even one industry that's withholding data or keeping things back.

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A lot of conspiracy theories though assume that you have hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who know that this is a conspiracy, but they're all perfectly coordinated in their lies about this.

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Chemtrails would be an example, or that the earth is actually flat, or that we didn't actually land on the moon.

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All of those conspiracies mean you need thousands, maybe millions of people to not only know that this is false, but to be perfectly coordinated without any disloyalty whatsoever to what's going on.

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Sometimes it's almost like the smell test, where people will say, well, this particular thing the government is doing, they're giving this to people, but when they tested it, it killed all the test subjects.

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Well, but if that's really true, then why aren't there people just dropping dead left and right as this is being handed out?

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We need to go through and understand what a conspiracy can and can't realistically involve.

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I think we need to worry about confirmation bias. Am I just looking for something that sort of agrees with me?

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It's very easy for conspiracy theorists to point out inconsistencies and observations that seem to go along with the conspiracy, and then either ignore or stay away from anything that goes against it.

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And that same thing is with selective sources. You can find somebody somewhere who will write an essay that will support what you want to say.

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And that person will probably have a PhD in something somewhere. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's a reasonable opinion.

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And I think the other thing that we need to look for is what I call starvation. On the internet, we talk about not feeding the trolls.

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That is usually the worst possible response to somebody who is obsessively attacking, criticizing, and baiting you, is not to try to win the conversation or to defeat the person.

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It's just to accept the fact that nothing is ever going to matter, and you just ignore it. You have to starve that off.

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So both in your own life or with friends and family, sometimes it's okay to say, look, I need to just step away from this for a minute and think about other things and focus on what

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God wants me to focus on. Or when it's friends, family members, to be willing to just politely tell somebody,

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I'm just not interested in talking about it. I understand that it's a sore point. I understand that it's important to you.

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I would just rather not discuss it. And sometimes as we drift away from giving it attention, we can help people to break free a little bit of the obsession to what

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Kevin was talking about with where people just get fixed on it and they can't get away from it.

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So we need to know how to move forward. We just have to be careful about how we do it. Great, great points,

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Jeff. Two of the more recent or current conspiracy theories would be the

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QAnon. No need to go into all the details of it, but essentially, and you find this a lot in conspiracy theories, is they demonize people you disagree with, whether that's the disagreement is personal or spiritual or political.

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Let's take the political party that we disagree with, that we didn't vote for, and come up with the worst possible story you could possibly invent of what they're like in secret or what they're doing in secret, of course.

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And then we have the COVID vaccine conspiracy theories. And I'm not going to go into those today, but I invite you to listen to our episode where we discuss should a

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Christian get the COVID vaccine. But some of the things you hear are just downright ridiculous.

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Some of the things that are supposedly in these vaccines are what they will do to you if you take them.

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So those are two of the ones that we continue to hear a lot from. And just to go to illustrate the points we're making is that they're not true.

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And spending so much time fixating on these theories is a tremendous waste of time when we could be spending them doing far more important things like encouraging one another, loving one another, praying for one another, spurring one another on towards loving good deeds.

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Exactly, Shea. And I think we just need to get back to basics in our

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Christian lives. Second Corinthians chapter 11, I'm afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

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We need to get back to a sincere and pure devotion to Christ, the simplicity that is in Christ.

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He's our focus. When the unsaved world looks at Christians, what do they think about Christians?

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Oh, those Christians, those are the ones that are always caught up in those conspiracy theories. Or those Christians, I know them, they're the ones who are always angry about something.

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Or wouldn't it be better when the world thinks about Christians to think, oh,

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Christians, yeah, they're the ones that are always talking about the gospel of Christ.

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Or, yeah, I know those Christians, they're the ones that love each other no matter what.

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That's our focus. We need to get back to the basics. Amen, Kevin.

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That's good. Kevin, I really appreciate the two verses that you brought up that I think really speak strongly to the issue.

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Can you remind me again what those two were? You had one from Timothy and the one that you just brought up, so people listening can double check on exactly which ones those were.

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Yeah, the one that I just mentioned about the simplicity in Christ is 2 Corinthians 11 and verse 3.

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And then the one about avoiding the myths and the endless speculations is 1

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Timothy 1, verses 4 through 6. All right, thank you.

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Listening to those, it's almost uncanny the way they really speak directly to the issue.

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So I appreciate you bringing those out. Mm -hmm, absolutely. So let's be people of the truth.

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Let's speak the truth in love. May every word that comes out of our mouths be something that can promote godliness, that can encourage others.

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Conspiracy theories aren't that at all. May we never be known for peddling theories that aren't based in truth.

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So I hope our conversation today has been encouraging and helpful to you. Again, let's be people of the truth.