[Taltarzac725]

Originally Posted by OldDave

I have two thoughts I'd like to mention.

First someone talked about Penn State and the Catholic church sex scandals. To me these really aren't conspiracies as such. Certainly there was conspiracy later to cover up, but they didn't start that way. They started small with powerful people doing evil things. In many cases they weren't discovered right away, and when they were the people in charge tried to make them go away. In the case of the church, transferring priests instead of getting rid of them. The case with the BBC children's star is probably the worst I've ever seen. While these aren't really the tradition conspiracy as I said, I think they are almost more frightening. They are people in a position of trust that abuse it, and do so in an ongoing manner.

As to black helicopters, big foot, UFOs, etc. I truly don't understand why such a significant part of the population believes in this stuff. I was flipping by one of the big foot shows the other day, and two guys saw something hairy and large, so they just knew it had to be big foot. Certainly if you are faced with thing that might be a bear or and animal that doesn't exist, it is logical to go with the mythical animal, eh?

I have always admired Occam's Razor. This is a philosophy that has been around for a couple of thousand years, and has been stated many ways. This one is from the 1st century AD:

"We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible".

All of the different statements basically say if you see something that is a puzzle, the simpliest answer is the most likely. Conspiracy fans seem to go out of their way to believe the opposite.

My very favorite is the UFO. These are always mysterious lights in the night sky. Wouldn't an alien race that was trying to keep their existence a secret be smart enough to turn off their running lights while spying on us? And if they didn't want to hide, why wouldn't they send an email or just land at Sears and say hi.

My final thought is conspiracy theorists fall in with discussions of politics and religion. People believe what they believe and do not want to be bothered with facts or any arguments that don't support what they believe.

This might be of interest. Check Conspiracy Theory Myth #3. Gatecreepers - Entries - > EXCLUSIVE: Debunking Myths on Conspiracy Theories [Infowarrior Resource Part 1]