JoeMama wrote: ↑Sat Jun 10, 2023 4:31 pm
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Replying to boatsnguitars in post #2624]
I'm reminded of the lonely, 15-year-old, home-schooled boy from Scotland who for years jousted with a dozen atheist adults in Farrell Till's Errancy Forum about twenty years ago. He professed inerrancy beliefs that were easily refuted, but he never conceded. He seemingly loved the ego-feeding attention the grown-ups were lavishing on him, while the skeptics just could not resist the temptation to show the boy how wrong were his beliefs.
We're all potentially that kid. I accept that, but there do seem to be others who are definitely that kid. I think of all the extreme MAGA Trump supporters who simply can't let go of the idea that he's the only good man left in the world; or, at least, that he might be a horrible human being but he's the horrible human being God Himself picked for the battle against the forces of evil.
If you just look at him. Just look at Trump, the things he's done and said, you'll see he's nothing but a man-boy con-artist with a ego the size of Jupiter and a vicious streak a mile wide. He's just a scum bag. All you have to do is look.
But, people have convinced themselves that there is numerology, or signs from God, or deep, occult and arcane secrets revealed in everything he does.
(Classic example, but applied to someone else. A writer said about Desantis' response to the Indictment, "If it were you or I, we'd be indicted in a New York minute." The writer said implied that this was a clever dig at Trump because Trump is from New York. But I think that's giving Desantis too much credit. It's the old story of Beatles lyrics seeming deep, but the Beatles themselves saying that they were just stoned and didn't mean anything by the words. They just rhymed.)
That is, Trump does something and people find meaning in it. Likewise, a conspiracy theorist sees something and reads into it. Likewise, a SoT fanatic sees everything as a clue that it's real.
For example: It looks like a Medieval painting. The SoT fanatic will say, "That's why we know it's real - who in their right mind would make a fake look so fake!"
It's sad, and I don't know how to snap people out of the lure of thinking they know something that no one else in the world knows. It must be a heady feeling.
edit:
When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive ... ic-author/
https://priory-of-sion.com/biblios/link ... andum.html
