This is about the religious belief of an atheist friend. Well, former friend, I suppose. The termination of said friendship has prompted this missive.
If it seems like an oxymoron, please understand that religious belief does not necessarily require a god, but rather, only belief in something without good reason. It isn’t the belief itself that is a problem, but the refusal to relinquish belief when it cannot be supported by reason.
There are many examples I could use from the 40 years I’ve known this man, but I’ll pick one incident. It is from his efforts to get me to subscribe to the belief that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were false flag operations by the US Government.
Of course the entire 9/11 conspiracy movement is rubbish. It is entirely implausible at every level of examination, and belief in it requires acceptance of wild assertions and the willful avoidance and rejection of provable facts. But that doesn’t stop the true believers.
In the incident that follows I was reminded of something I couldn’t place, and it took me several years to identify the moment it was from. When the memory came it revealed to me the religious nature of conspiracy belief.
The former friend I refer to, let’s call him Alex, had described several things which, as far as he was concerned had proven 9/11 was a false flag operation. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it describes an attack on oneself or ally that is framed as if it came from a rival or enemy. The first of these that I ever encountered was in grammar school. I went to a K-8 school in Chicago, and during that last year a student running for class president defaced his own campaign posters to elicit sympathy and tarnish his opponent. It actually worked, and when discovered, caused a removal from office and expulsion from school.
In the case of 9/11, the theory proposes that the government attacked and murdered its own citizens and blamed it on Islamic terrorists. The goal was to encroach on the freedoms of American citizens, create a more powerful government, justify invasion of Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, or a combination of all three. None of these arguments are sound, but that would take a lot of space for debunking that has been thoroughly done elsewhere.
For this we focus on a single moment.
Alex insisted that I listen to some audio he had. He described it as amongst the most compelling support for this conspiracy that he knew of, and implied that it should at least open my mind to the truth as he believed it.
It was a recording of about ten minutes in length of a presentation made by a former FBI agent named Ted Gunderson. I had never heard of him before that moment (not a surprise, really) but was to understand that he was a strong proponent of the 9/11 truth conspiracy theory.
The first five minutes or so was Gunderson relating his background. Decades in the FBI as an agent, and then as supervisor of various district offices managing hundreds of agents. He made it clear that he was a proficient administrator of bureaucracy and an expert in criminal investigation with many years of experience.
The second half of this speech concerned two things. First he said that the World Trade Center twin towers collapse could not have been caused by the planes that hit them; and that he was in touch with current (unidentified) FBI personnel who fed him secret information that supported the conspiracy claim.
Alex was blind to what I saw as obvious. Gunderson had debunked himself. His own words made it clear that there was no good reason to take him seriously. It was clear to me that he was a zealot, incapable of critical examination of his belief. I’ll explain for those who miss the point.
His prelude was to establish himself as an authority. To someone untrained in critical thinking, such a background as his, decades of service in a prestigious and trusted institution, made whatever he said compelling. But what I heard was admission by omission of lack of any relevant expertise that could give authority to his statement about the collapse of the towers. He didn’t suggest any study in structural engineering or metallurgy. He didn’t add any evidence or statements from those with such expertise, nor offer any support at all, but instead relied entirely on assertion and insistence. His opinion had no more weight because he had been a criminal investigator, than had he been a commercial fisherman or had played three years of semi-pro baseball.
It would be like me suggesting that my twenty years of maritime experience gave authority to my pronouncements about how far a regulation football could be thrown. It has no bearing on the argument.
And Gunderson should have known that. As someone with as much experience as he had, and with having sought out experts for cases he investigated, he must have known he was out of his depth. And yet he was willing to make claims on a matter where he knew he had no expertise. At that moment he became unreliable as a source of information. He demonstrated that he was willing to pass off his unqualified opinion as expert analysis. It didn’t matter what he said after that. For any reasonable member of his audience he was done. Dismissed as a crank.
The second part of what he said, about secret information should also be dismissed accordingly. First, because of what I just covered, that whatever he claimed was unreliable at face value; and second because claims of secret knowledge are an unfalsifiable argument. There is no way to prove that he doesn’t have secret information. His assertion requires acceptance without evidence, thus making his argument an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. It is a claim without evidence spoken by a man without credibility.
(I did look up Ted Gunderson and was not surprised to find that he had become obsessed with belief in Satan worshipers sacrificing babies, as well as many other conspiracy claims. He had dived down various rabbit holes of conspiracy, and even a perfunctory search would render him as a true crank.)
But Alex looked at me after playing this audio. He was nodding his head, and widening his eyes as if to say, “Now do you believe?”
Of course I didn’t, but something seemed so familiar about his posture and his expectation of my response. It took me years to recognize where I had experienced it.
It was way back in 1977. I was a seventeen year old Seaman Apprentice stationed on a Tank Landing Ship based in Little Creek, Virginia. While on board that ship I had several different Christian sailors attempt to convert me to their churches. Assembly of God, Pentecostals, and Southern Baptists to name the three that I remember. Two shipmates belonging to the latter of these invited me to their church to hear a sermon.
I had been raised Roman Catholic, complete with gothic sculptures, statues of Mary and the saints, Jesus on the crucifix, and priests resplendent in finery befitting a chain of command that led to the Vicar of Christ himself. All elements of an organization crafted to instill trust and faith. So, the setting of the church my shipmates took me was unorthodox, literally.
The minister wore a powder-blue leisure suit and stood at a podium that bore a simple cross. This was clearly all about the minister and his presentation of revealed truth. I do not recall if I ever heard the minister’s name, nor do I remember his face, but if you imagine Jerry Falwell you’d have a pretty good picture. Heck, I don’t know that it wasn’t Jerry Falwell.
The minister spent a half-hour railing about men with long hair and women who wore pants, along with a lot of other blather about who was a true Christian and heaven and hell and whatnot.
After this was over my shipmates asked me if I had been saved. “From what?” I asked.
“From going to hell,” they answered. “Don’t you want to go to heaven?”
“Was that guy in the powder-blue leisure suit going?”
They nodded yes, he was.
“Then I’ll pass,” I said. “I’m not going to spend eternity hanging around that guy.”
These two young men were dyed in the wool Christian believers. They had heard all of this before, and believed it completely. And each time they heard this minister speak they became more certain of the belief they held. Each experience at such a meeting was a heart-filling reenforcement of the belief they came in with. With no skepticism behind them and without the application of any critical thinking, they were unable to understand how someone else wouldn’t be convinced by their preacher’s message. They couldn’t see that others might view this as the ravings and rantings of a bigot and a cult leader. Utterly unconvincing and void of any reasonable arguments of support.
Let’s go back to Alex and Ted Gunderson and how these are related.
I realized it was the same thing. Alex was a true believer and part of the choir that Ted Gunderson was preaching to. He might as well have been standing behind a pulpit and talking about how much Jesus loves us. Identical in all but the words and claims. Alex listened to Gunderson with the same lack of skepticism that those young men in Virginia had so many years ago absorbed the claims of their minister. Gunderson was a priest presenting truth revealed to him through secret communication. His anonymous sources were no different that God speaking to the minister. Ridiculous to anyone not in the cult, gospel to those who are.
I met Alex in 1980 when he joined the ship I was on. (A different ship, this one based in California.) He was at the time a new recruit, fresh from Navy “A” school in Orlando, Florida where he had been evangelized. At some point later he abandoned that belief. I’m not sure what did it for him, but in retrospect I can’t believe his journey away from deism was similar to mine. Mine was a growing appreciation for logic and reason, and the requirement that my beliefs be sufficiently justified through those tools. Over time I couldn’t rationalize the stories from the Bible and make them align with any kind of reality. And gradually the very concept of the supernatural became just so much fantasy forced into a hole where knowledge ended.
I wonder if Alex had simply heard some George Carlin sketch humorously shredding the traditional beliefs in God, and just abandoned the belief on the spot. Or if it was the accumulation of people scoffing at the silliness of so much of biblical belief.
But what became clear in time, in a very long time admittedly, was that Alex had never adopted reason as a means to work out truth, or skepticism as a tool to resist assertions from those we are trained to trust. What also became clear to me was his willingness to accept as true the claims that align with pre held belief.
There is no intellectual difference between true believers, regardless of the belief.
Alex held many other conspiracy beliefs, from the laughable and harmless belief that NASA faked the moon landings, or that jet planes are spraying chemicals over the cities; to darker ones that really caused me to question and ultimately end our friendship; such as the belief in a secret cabal of Jewish bankers who controlled the world behind the scenes, and that the holocaust didn’t happen as reported. And more recently, of allowing the current viral pandemic to cull the population of the unhealthy and unfit, in lieu of vaccination, which he considers to be one of the tools of world domination the aforementioned cabal use.
I suspect that Alex had, when he surrendered belief in God, retained his belief in the Devil. Not an actual devil or Satan or whatever, but perhaps a more nebulous evil that exists as an entity. Like some invisible miasma. A force that attracts bad actors and influences them to ill exploits. Perhaps he had adopted belief in “the force” and its dark side that were introduced in the Star Wars franchise. I know many who do subscribe to that.
It is much easier in a world full of science and reason to move the supernatural away from a single creator and a band of angels and to a vague and amorphous “force.” I read once that the decline in religious belief in America was matched by an increase in belief in extraterrestrial visitation. Our need to feel we are at the center of the universe. If there isn’t any Gods paying special attention to us, than perhaps it is the aliens.
As far as Alex went, I concluded that efforts to bring him around with reason were never going to work as he would never accept he was wrong about anything. I recognized that I had to face the antisemitism he supported, and the inhumane attitude towards other people. A clear-eyed look without the filters that four decades of friendship had applied. He would be quite comfortable disposing of unappealing members of the population. It was easy to imagine him as a Pilgrim to early America, smiling at the natives while carrying armloads of blankets. Smallpox would only destroy the weak.
And he wasn’t content to hold his beliefs separate from our interactions like others I know where we politely agree to disagree. In Alex I had seen already through countless encounters that he wouldn’t keep any of these ideas to himself. Truly, he was bent on convincing me of those beliefs.
And finally I realized, that whatever time I have left in my life, it wasn’t enough time for crazy.