How Christians can be easily fooled by all those conspiracy theories
introduction
The Coronavirus is not just making people sick, it’s also making people stupid
That was the opening line from the Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng, starting his episode about the Coronavirus pandemic and its effects on our everyday life.
And even if the sentence sounds harsh and judgemental, I have unfortunately to say, that he is right.
With the threat of the pandemics and the quarantine measures limiting our movements, most people live at home and a in a constant psychosis, sharing all possible conspiracy theories on the social media.
And unfortunately, Christians are not immune to conspiracy theories, actually gullibility is very much present in some denominations.
CHRISTIANITY AND GULLIBILITY
But did I say that we Christian are easily gullible? Off course no, but I need to say that most of them are, especially in these days.
This happens because most of them, especially Fundamentalists evangelicals, read the Bible in a sort of “extreme way”, without understanding and throwing away all the things they learned.
And this goes back to my last year blog where I wrote about the Abecedarians and the Chick Tracts and their common thread of blind faith.
One big example is the misuse of the Book Of Revelation in two different wrong ways:
1. coronavirus: Punishment from god ?
This is the first mistake. In some denominations ( or better to say, SECTS ), there’s this idea that the pandemic was sent by God as a punishment against abortion, homosexuality and so on, this also based about the stories on the old testament.
Well I am not a theology expert, but according also to the evangelist Tom Loud if the coronavirus was from God, He surely would be a vengeful bombardier without mercy, a completely different version of Him.
Then comes also three big questions:
- If the coronavirus was from God so what about Black Plague, Spanish Fever, SARS or Ebola?
- If it’s a punishment against abortion, homosexuality and so on, why didn’t He spare also conservative nations like f.e. Poland, Hungary, Brazil or the “Nation Under God” USA?
- What about all the closed churches for the quarantine ? Is it God’s will too?
So before saying that Corona is God’s punishment, try to answer these questions.
2.coronavirus: end times sign
This is also the second mistake, similar to the first but also more dangerous.
As I wrote two years ago in my post about the psycho cults there’s a sort of infuriating emphasis on the end times prophecies, and this emphasis sometimes lead to deviated and distorted reality thoughts , just like conspiracy theories ( like NWO, Mark of the Beast and so on.. ) or, in the worst of the cases, delusions of persecution like this.
The pandemic has highlighted a lot these “end times” stuff, and a lot of opportunists and deranged gurus have taken advantage of their feeble-minded followers. Same situation that happened in the ’80s and ’90s with the Satanic Panic, where con-artist like Bob Larson or Rebecca Brown were hailed as heroes.
USA: BETWEEN THREAT AND QUACKERY
But let’s go to USA, the “Nation Under God”, but especially under president Trump, who not only cut the funds to the WHO, but is going also to fire Anthony Fauci, the virologist who’s making a great job in the fight against the CoViD.
And this is just the peak of Trump’s series of mistakes against the virus, while USA is right now the country with the highest number of contagions and deaths by coronavirus.
And it’s really sad to see how still many evangelicals still say that he’s always right. But after all evangelical christianity in USA has become a circus, where there are “prophets and clowns”
Exactly, PROPHETS AND CLOWNS, like our EFAGD song says. And some clear examples are:
- Shawn Bolz, a self-proclaimed prophets who said in a gathering that “God showed him the end of the virus”, and it was the beginning of March, now we are on 16th of April and the situation is going from bad to worse.
- Kenneth Copeland, the prosperity preacher, who tried to stop the virus with a prayer that looked more like a charade.
- Rodney Howard-Browne, the head of River Church and well known conspiracy theorist, who got a warrant for violating the quarantine measures. It’s such funny how his followers blabber about “persecution” when he almost put a lot of people at risk hosting a gathering, if we think what happened in France last month.
- Jim Bakker, the controversial televangelist who claims silver solution as remedy against coronavirus
- QAnon, the conspiracy psycho-sect, who promoted MMS, the pseudo-medicine containing bleach
- Last but not least, this guy in sackcloth, wandering and preaching around the empty quarantined American metropolises
FINLAND: THE PETRI PAAVOLA CASE
Unfortunately also Finland is not immune neither from coronavirus ( right now there are 3200 cases and 72 deaths ), nor from conspiracy theorist.
And unfortunately, as I wrote before, Christians are not immune. The most obvious example is Petri Paavola, the anti-catholic liar upon whom I wrote almost two years ago.
At the end of March mister Paavola hold a service for few people because of the quarantine measures, and all the service was a complete concentration of persecution complexes and conspiracy craps.
He said, during his “service”, that coronavirus was created by Bill Gates to create new mass vaccination’s program, I really don’t know if laughing or vomiting in half of such idiocy, buy anyway here’s the parody.
Is Paavola completely deranged or is he just a liar ? Well it could be both of them, but what it’s worse is that he claims to have received a “revelation from God” about all that quackery. And obviously gullible followers believe him easily, like for example the author of this comment
For the non Finnish speakers the translation is:
thanks for the clear facts about what the elites do behind us. 5G and Coronavirus wortk together. Don’t take neither vaccine nor 5G
Yes, because in the middle of this conspiracy psychosis, the 5G is nowadays one of the most popular theme and someone, like the crackhead who commented, believes even that 5G causes coronavirus.
It could sound funny but unfortunately is not, as in England, just weeks ago, some cell towers were set on fire because of this psychosis.
A LIGHT INTO THE DARKNESS
Thank God that into this marasma of darkness there’s always the light.
One example is this great article from ChristianityToday, written by Ed Stetzer, and I absolutely like to quote the first part of this article.
A major crisis provides a fertile field for producing conspiracy theories, and the current global pandemic has created a bumper crop of them.
One of the sad things that I’ve learned over time is how Christians are disproportionately fooled by conspiracy theories. I’ve also said before that when Christians spread lies, they need to repent of those lies. Sharing fake news makes us look foolish and harms our witness.
We saw this in the last election when some of the troll factories focused on conservative, evangelical Christians. This is disappointing. Now we are seeing it again. So how do we respond?
First, we need to speak up and speak out to others— particularly those fooled yet again— and lovingly say, “You need to go to trusted sources.” Your social media news feed is not a trusted source.
But you can find them if you are willing to look. That’s why we created coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide credible information for churches. But, there are plenty of credible news sources— generally from outlets that do not have a track record of conspiracy peddling.
Second, God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue, and we ought not to act like that. Believing and sharing Covid-19 conspiracies does not honor the Lord.
Yet now, it appears we are dealing with a new flood of conspiracy theories. Take a look at the list on Wikipedia, or just search for yourself using a few keywords.
No one is born “hyper-intelligent” but someone needs to speak out.
