Religion

Your Paranoia Is Your God

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Many a Conspiracy Theorist claims to be religious, but I think they’re not honest about who their real God is.

As my regular readers know I have a fascination with Conspiracy Theories. This is both because I’m interested in how people work, and because as we’ve seen they’re incredibly goddamn dangerous. Honestly the way we treat Conspiracy Theorists as a point of humor misses how some of them turn very deadly individually or in groups.

As I watch these potentially dangerous people, I’ve seen how their ideas can become all-consuming. I’ve noted elsewhere that Conspiracy Theory is a kind of creative skill, an unhealthy form of writing and imagination. I suppose it has to be that way so it can encompass everything you need to an eternal yes-anding to reality.

After all, your Theory has to explain everything. Plus you can’t let someone one-up on you, especially if you want to get internet clicks and sell supplements. A Conspiracy Theory is a comittment.

These Conspiracy Theories almost inevitably include religion because you have to. You have to cover it all, so deities, Satan, angels, etc. all have to become part of it. Most Conspiracy theorists remind me of the ever one-upping that dooms movies and TV shows to raise the stakes ridiculously to keep going before their inevitable collapse. The theory must be fed.

Watching this constant adaption, this sacrifice to the Theory, reminds me of what I said early about Monotheism being so unstable it has to evangelize and spread to avoid questions. Thus I can safely say that Conspiracy Theories are just a form of monotheism.

Think about it. Conspiracists are beholden to the Great Conspiracy. The Conspiracy defines them. The Conspiracy must be supported. For many The Conspiracy is a form of profit or career, the very essence of what they do. The Conspiracy Theory is the most important thing in their life – in short, their god.

And it has to be monotheism. The Conspiracy Theorist by definition worships an all-encompassing idea. Any different idea is incorporated or is declared falsehood and the enemy. To not do so is to risk breaking your god – you may dress it up in cosplay as some other god, but it’s yours and it’s just as broken as you are.

Even if the Conspiracy Theorist is a pure grifter, they still have to keep putting time in on the Theory as it’s always under challenge. It’s still their god even if they don’t believe it. Plus there’s always the risk they start believing or have to start believing.

Whatever deity they say they worship, The Conspiracy Theorist’s real god is The Theory.

This “monotheism model” is a tool I find useful to understand Conspiracy Theorists. They’re on a religious crusade no matter what. They have to be. They have to maintain this god, the god is all they have. No wonder they seem so anxious to kill people for their god.

It doesn’t make me feel any safer. If anything I feel kind of worse. But I feel I have a better grasp of what to worry about.

-Xenofact

Good for the Spirit, Good for the Mind

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As I write this there’s a huge, understandable panic that AI is being used by students so much they don’t know how to read and analyze it. If you are reading this in a future years removed from this essay, I hope you live in a world where AI isn’t such a concern, and you’reNOTin some post-apocalyptic disaster.

Anyway, whatever your chronological state, here in 2025 it’s been quite a concern. If you let AI write for you, analyze for you, etc. you are essentially outsourcing your thinking and your humanity. You will not develop skills you need to read books and understand things, and the skills you do have will decay.

This in turn made me think about spiritual and philosophical writing and how it trains you to read, analyze and understand. For the sake of brevity to encompass such things for self-development I shall call them spiritual works here.

When we sit down with a spiritual work we are attempting to contemplate, grow, and understand some very serious issues. We bring to it a desire to understand and grow, to engage with the work. The attitude of becoming involved in the work is there at the start.

In turn, the engagement is needed.

Spiritual works are about deep issues, and you will find yourself pausing to contemplate and analyze. We’ve all experienced moments where a paragraph or a page can hold our attention for a half hour. In spiritual works, you may find yourself going over something word by word just thinking what it means.

Spiritual works often use symbolism and metaphor as that may be easy to communicate complex truths, represent the otherwise indescribable, or lead you around a bit to help you learn. Symbolism also helps you think, how the symbols work together, what they really mean, and so on. Again, you are engaged with the work, connected to it.

Finally, many spiritual works are often grounded in a place, a person, an experience, a lineage, etc. To engage with spiritual work is to engage with much more than a book or a menial or a series of poems – it’s to learn about who produced it and the situation that led to it. One small book can lead you to a world of context – and a greater point of view.

Reading a good spiritual work teaches you to read, analyze, understand. A person with an interest about such issues can, in time, give themselves ersatz literary training. I once read a book called DIY MFA about how a person can read and write and analyze to gain similar experiences to getting an MFA – and that feels very familiar in spiritual writing.

So in a world of AI writing and AI reading, remember our spiritual pursuits. Sitting down with a book on philosophy or meditation or metaphysics isn’t just enriching morally or spiritually – it’s enriching literately. Your wrestling with ethics or breath meditation or divinities also helps you learn to read, analyze, and understand.

Just another reason to do it, I suppose.

-Xenofact

Feed The Unstable God

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I’ve been thinking about religious evangelism lately due to, well, large chunks of human history and too many chunks of current history. Most of my thoughts are about evangelizing by believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism, those who worship a god they insist is infinite and all knowing yet has the same traits and biases as humans. It seems a lot of people want us to follow their Big Daddy – or else.

The funny thing is for so many people proclaiming their undying faith – and being willing to spread it by the sword and the bullet – evangelical Anthropomorphic Monotheists seem peculiarly insecure about their deity. Considering a core part of their believe has a conflict between “infinite in all ways” and “just as petty as I am” it’s not surprising. You can feel that instability.

How do you resolve belief in a being of infinite power and potential with the idea they’re worried about, say, what bathroom they use or what day they worship at? How do you reconcile all the conflicts with experience, holy texts, other believers, and so on? A believer in an all-to-human infinite “god” has to spend a lot of time making excuses or a lot of time ignoring the conflicts – the world will mock them by existing.

This conflict is familiar to me – believing in a god both petty and transcendent is a challenge that is faced by enthusiasts for media, like fanfic writers. Every new show, every season, every episode the staff may dump a new load of continuity or retcontinuity on you. You have to constantly revise your ideas due to new input and instability – but whereas fanfic writers admit they have “a take,” believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism have to act like everything is real.

And this I think is one reason for the rampant evangelism. The world is constantly leading you to question your beliefs as your beliefs are fundamentally unstable and unsustainable without effort. So what do you do? You convert the world, you make the world believe and act the way you think it should so you don’t face conflicts.

Anthropomorphic Monotheism is inherently unstable to a level that is painful in the mind of believers. To resolve that pain they have to change the world so they don’t have conflict, so everything lines up, so everything is it should be. At some levels this evangelism is a kind of Gray Goo, Von Neuman’s Catastro-deity. It just chews up the world to replicate itself.

And, yes, the reasons for religions evangelism are more than just resolving conflicts by eating the world, but I think the inherent instability and need to convert are worth examining. Maybe it explains people’s need for an Apocalypse – they need a fundamental point where unresolvable conflicts are resolved, and are fine to watch the world die to have it.

So next time you see believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism enragedly trying to convert people, ask how much of that is them trying to resolve the inherit instability of their religion. And ask yourself how much of the world they’d burn to fuel it.

-Xenofact