One of my first posts on to a Usenet newsgroup (aus.religion, alt.conspiracy), 12/1/1995. (BTW there are now 34,000 Christian denominations. Feb. 2004).

~~~

My job is to ask questions about the church (churches actually pay me – a little – to do this!).

One category of questions has to do with conspiracy theories. Briefly, the *theory* of it all runs like this:

# There’s a cosmic battle going on. The Devil has a strategy to destroy the work of God in every Christian denomination, local church, and individual Christian. (Yes, I have a CSLewisian view of Satan).

# God gives gifts to his people to figure out these conspiracies: they have to do with prophecy, words of knowledge, and discernment of spirits.

# Each Christian church/individual are potentially destroyed at the point of their greatest strength. (You think of examples).

# Many destructive tendencies emanate from separating what God was put together, or making means into ends, or wholes from parts. (Can you think of examples?)

In practice, there are 22,000 Christian denominations in the world. The devil is active in all of them, the Holy Spirit in most of them. To believe your abomination (oops, denomination) is the only *right/true* one is to be guilty of ignorance or idolatry or both. The truth doesn’t lie everywhere in the total church, but it is very widespread. (Ie. the Holy Spirit is active in most churches).

Wanna talk about any of this?

P.S. Does anyone have a conspiracy theory about why conspiracy theorists come to be that way? I have!

Keep stirring!

Rowland Croucher

~~~

To which a netfriend responded:

I think that the best response to this is from the book, “Good Omens” by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (a wonderful book — every Christian fundamentalist should read it):

`If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying “THIS IS IT!”? … I mean, why do that if you really don’t want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be very complicated Solitare.’

It’s worth a thought, anyway.