Conspiracies

“Do not call conspiracy
    everything this people calls a conspiracy;
do not fear what they fear,
    and do not dread it."  Isaiah 8:12

Not thinking about anything in specific, except I woman I used to work with who started out in The Boston Church, which she now recognised was a cult and had left, but said she had "Learned a lot from them." She has gone on to various concerns about prophecy, and that the churches now don't teach about this and neglect it, but we are definitely in The Last Days (not in a theological but in an immediate sense) and has thought so since I met her in the early 90's. The Mark of the Beast, the various horns and the European Union, it's all there.  As paranoids often do eventually, she has settled on the modern Jews not being the real Jews, on account of being Khazars who converted, so they can still be Illuminati and controlling all the banks and whatever and destroying the church rather than being an object of any affection.  When she married the independent Baptist preacher from Georgia who had lost his pulpit in his last three churches after less than two years each (because they could not endure the Full Word of God, you see) and attends none now, I knew the Jews were going to be in the picture soon.

Tangent: BTW, this is common among abusive men as well. They use a lot of Christian language about family and discipline and often have this fascination with odd corners of Christianity, but somehow they never last with a community because there's something wrong with all the churches around them.  I have attributed this to bad teaching in the past, but now think it is a symptom of some deeper psychological need to tell other people what to do but not be told what to do oneself. End tangent.

Anyway, of course she didn't get any of the vaccines and has a collection of explanations why. This is at least her third Mark of the Beast and I grow weary. But most important is her new one that even though they have bought a filtering system for their water, they still boil everything before drinking it. Because "you don't know what's in those filters."  My thought is that you could likely look that up these days in the amount of time it takes you to boil a gallon of water, but maybe that's just my over-trusting nature. 

Also there is just the preponderance of conspiracy beliefs now. They seem to be everywhere. I wonder if we could go back to somewhere unremarkable like Wilmington, Delaware in the 1820s and just listen in to what people were saying on the street if we would find the same amount of conspiratorial belief or it would be different. The verse from Isaiah would suggest it's a pretty stable percentage. I do know that conspiracies are hard, very hard to maintain. People have to have considerable motivation to keep terrible things secret, and when we are talking about thousands of people who would have to be in on the deal it gets more and more unlikely. People try to form conspiracies all the time. Even open societies like America have lots of people trying to keep some secret and get away with stuff. Very rarely, if you are in the Mafia or some other place where the stakes for exposure would be death for you and your family, a conspiracy will hold. Yet even then the Secret Knowledge is an open secret, it's just no one will go on record.