Filling the Theological Void

I grew up in the church. Every Sunday was an all-day affair. The early morning Sunday School starts; learning about ethics and the art of being a good human being. Then was the church service at about mid-morning, until whenever the pastor decided to stop preaching.

Walking through those double doors was like accidentally walking onstage to a Broadway musical. A roaring band and trained concert pianist playing in harmony with a choir that was never out of tune. People dancing and singing along. It was quite a therapeutic couple of hours.

I could walk into church with any pressing questions I had about life. Somehow as if he were telepathic—or an astrologist—the pastor would answer my questions in his sermon.

Church always had a solution to life’s tough problems. But as I grew, my questions became more complex. My congregation’s stance on prominent issues of the time made me examine its validity as an authority figure. The church space morphed from a place of knowledge into a space of wellbeing.

Logic could not live here. It lived in the secular outside world. My mind did the work to compartmentalize; a mental separation of church and state.

Upon entering adulthood, I grew tired of filtering through it all. My hunger for knowledge led me down a more open-ended path.

Religion and spiritual concepts are present in all world cultures. Believing in the beyond is one thing that unifies all races. The fact that these traditions pre-date recorded history shows just how much spirituality lives within our biological makeup.

Even our distant chimpanzee cousins have funeral rites.

Yet studies have shown a consistent decline in worship across the West. This downward trend is reminiscent of the Age of Enlightenment.

When the barriers to information fall (a.k.a. the democratization of the Internet), secularism rises. The questions that religion originally answered are now solved through scientific methods; or left for philosophers to ponder indefinitely.

The problem is, that intense need to rationalize, that desire for it all to make sense, still lives within our brain. And that’s when our friend Conspiracy Theory joins the party.

More knowledge does not always equate to more understanding. Sometimes an overabundance of information can aid in altering the truth.

When sifting through the web, you can easily find factual articles that support your worldview. You can easily ignore factual articles that don’t support your opinions. Cherry-picking truths vs. telling the whole story is now the equivalent of quoting Scripture out of context. Instead of finding a Bible verse to suit our narrative, we follow the journalist who most identifies with us. Our buddy, Conspiracy Theory thrives in environments like this.

Whenever the truth isn’t fully told, leave it to them to find an answer. Theory will hop, skip, and jump through unrelated facts and figures to dream up the answer you've always wanted.

The conspiracy theory doesn’t care about what’s correct or incorrect. Its only goal is to answer a burning question. An answer we’re inclined to believe with the same fervor we had while listening to sermons on Sunday.

It preys on that missing spiritual link. The grand age-old tale of good triumphing over evil. God over demon. Liberal over conservative. Black over white. Right over left. Neo over Smith.

The concept of duality is hard-wired into our brains.

It’s ever-present in our religions, movies, and music. It’s much easier to tell a story when there’s a clear distinction between right and wrong. And this is the type of storytelling conspiracy theory thrives on. It’s also why theories continue to grow in popularity as the world becomes more secular.

It’s hard, so hard, to do the work. Duality is the magic bullet; helping us categorize complex grey-area subjects into simple matters of black and white.

Unfortunately, this shortcut hurts us in more ways than it helps. It grants us the freedom to ignore the circular nature of all complex matters. It makes us view every issue as a straight line on the spectrum of good and evil.

It’s easier to cancel than to converse, to make meaning out of meaningless coincidences. Beware the all-seeing eye of conspiracy theory. When you think you have the answer to all of life’s questions; think again.