Most of the issues I confront involve people believing things with no evidence. This person instead denies the evidence that is, most concretely, there.
I will spend more time here than the original article does, dialoguing with the theory itself. The article itself is less about the theory, than (rather lamely) about why people believe in conspiracy theories, and how conspiracy theories spread.
According to this theory, ancient Rome is a fiction concocted by the Church in the 16th century. They, at that time, created the artifacts; they created the texts. But why? “It’s a fictional homogenizaton of European indigenous culture by the Church,” whatever that means.
There are the ruins of the vast ancient buildings, such as the Coliseum, in Rome today. I have seen photos of the aqueducts the Romans built; we have their roads. Did the Church have anywhere near the resources to fabricate these things — for the sake of a fraud?
Where did the Latin language, the language of the Church, come from?
Where did the Church itself come from? The theory is problematic for Christianity, since Rome played a prominent role in the stories of the New Testament, notably the Crucifixion; and those texts are generally accepted to have appeared in the First Century.
I can recall from my childhood in the 1960s, how some folk at that time were prone to exalt the glories of ancient Rome, to almost superhuman levels. Such would be unfashionable today, since political correctness prohibits speaking well of any thing any Caucasian has ever done.
I also recall from the education we got in that era, the impression that Mediterranean civilization began with the Athens of the Fifth Century (B.C.E.), the age of Socrates. In recent years, I have had glimpses of other civilizations we weren’t taught about, earlier high civilizations, Mycenaean Greece and the Minoans of Crete, who preceded Athens by 1,000 years. If I had time, I would wish to learn more about them.
A Minoan frescoe
It just won’t go away.
The reason the “There was no Rome” theory keeps coming up year after year, is simple: its author, the young woman Donna Dickens, keeps bringing it up year after year.
To that extent, she reminds me of Renee M. Moses, who every year predicts a new, certain date for the Rapture — and takes down from YouTube all the videos she produced the previous year, predicting a previous date for the Rapture, that came and went. Her enemies do not take down their videos documenting her repeated failures.
She first got significant attention in 2014, when she predicted that an asteroid would collide with the Earth on September 15, 2015. She got that insight from a remark a French official had made on May 13, 2014, “We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.” What on earth human beings might have done, in that 500 days, to avert an asteroid collision, is beyond me.
She identifies Barack Obama specifically with the Antichrist. Now, the Tribulation is supposed to last seven years, and the Rapture is supposed to occur halfway through. Obama having come into power in 2008, that hasn’t exactly happened yet. She nonetheless identified his March 22, 2013 visit to the Church of the Nativity, as the “abomination of desolation” mentioned in Daniel 11:31 and Mark 13:14.
As of mid-April 2023, she is predicting that a series of Raptures will begin in May of this year.
04/22/23 screenshot from her web page.
Her YouTube channel currently has 51 videos.
Related:
Reasons to believe
The Daily Beast article linked to at the outset includes remarks from psychologists as to why people believe conspiracy theories. In short, it’s chalked up to unmet psychological needs, and several are mentioned. It seems to me they can all be boiled down to one: the quest for certainty, or fear of the unknown.
Given the randomness of events, people can become uncomfortable and seek out some proposition as to which they can feel absolutely certain, whether or not the proposition has any basis in fact. But one’s certainty about this one proposition makes all the other uncertainty they face in life — tolerable.
In that it’s a coping mechanism, I chose today to review my blog post of that name, and got quite a jolt. On the one hand, it covers the whole thing in some detail, so that I am better to link to it, than to restate it here. On the other hand, this post, written now nineteen months ago, includes admonitions for me that I could have written yesterday. And I would do well to take them to heart.
Related: “Coping mechanisms”
What will William Tell do about all this?
The final admonition of Free Speech Handbook is to face uncertainty head-on, and accept the fact of all one doesn’t know:
… or “I don’t understand.” Be willing also to hear others say it; give them permission.
Why: On the one hand, much of the mischief we have been discussing, comes from a desire to look competent even if one’s not; to look smart rather than stupid. Accordingly, on the one hand, folk are prone to pretend they know things they don’t.
There’s no correct shame in not-knowing. If you were to start listing all the things I don’t know, neither you nor your grandchild nor your great-great-great-grandchild would ever finish. All not-knowing means, is an opportunity to learn.
On the other hand, to deny someone permission to say, “I don’t know;” to insist that the person take a stand, one way or the other; poses a high risk of violating (raping) that per-son’s conscience. No one can rightly be called on to endorse a position she or he does not understand, or has not had time to think through — or, quite possibly, doesn’t even care about.
An attitude of “You’re either for us or against us,” of “It’s us or them,” runs the risk that both “us” and “them” have misconceived the issue, are possibly even asking the wrong questions, so that neither side’s stand is correct. Both sides then might correctly turn to the one who says, “I don’t know,” humble themselves and seek from that person a better understanding.
The author of Psalm 8 said in part (“You” here is God.):
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals, that you care for them? Yet you have made them little lower than angels, and crowned them with glory and honor.
Awe in the face of the unknown may be the healthiest of all human postures.
Comments