I'm Tired of Zeitgeist and Loose Change.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

Recently in my foreign policy class one of the random people who is in the class with me brought up Zeitgeist and even linked it to all of us. He was obviously pro-movie all thought my professor wouldn't watch it because, "I'm not into conspiracy stuff."

I know a topic had been made about Zeigeist before, but that college liberal art film reject is just a mess. Same going with Loose Change 2nd Editon.

Oh yeah, here's a hint conspiracy theorist, if they have to make a 2nd edition to, "update sources and edit film", then the movie is most likely bullshit.

Anyway, one major failing in Zeigeist was debunking Christianity. Now, everyone is titled to their own opinions about the religion itself. However, it uses similes with other religious figures siting that it was similar to Jesus. Part 1 is a mess for the most part because it starts off with dramatic music, a quote from George Carlin who is obviously an expert in Christianity, and right into wrongness.

It starts off with Horus making bold claims about similarities and failing to note that JESUS WAS NOT BORN ON THE 25th of DECEMBER. When it gets a minor detail like that wrong you know the movie is downhill. Did the makers even pick up a Bible? In no way does it state that Jesus was born on the 25th.

My further Zeitgeist frustrations include being told by some pompous conspiracy theories to "open my eyes." As if all of this is some huge liberation movement. It gets even more annoying when I'm obviously "brainwashed" and they "know" the truth. Like some sort of bad Matrix free your mind crap.

In one of my man heated arguments I quoted Edith Hamiltons Mythology. Edith Hamilton spent her entire life studying the story of Zues, Aries, Hades, Hercules and every single last story under the Greek sun. I quoted that, "No, Dyniseus was not born of a virgin and in fact Zues and his mother boinked." They cried, "source" as I see they give me none, but just quote the movie. So I quoted Mythology.

Response, "Oh well, that book is typical reading material for High School students and shouldn't be taken into account." So just because people read it in high school its obviously not suitable for adult level source. Unfuckingbelievable.

I had more coherent rant going on here, but I just can't stand it anymore. It's like you want to convince these people of fact when they want to say the opposite. This kind of conspiracy theory stuff is destructive especially when a large portion of Americans are actually believing parts of it. It's going to lead to false panic and anger when its not even there.

Ugh.

[Nights_into_dreams]

The Illuminati is alive and well, controlling the world behind the scenes even now.

I know this because I saw it in my alphabet soup.

N00bs. :innocent:

[stsparky]

Everyone knows that the actual date of Jesus' birth would have been September 23rd if he actually existed. I know he was not real. You?

Earl Doherty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Doherty), currently living in Canada, is the author of The Jesus Puzzle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_Puzzle), a work published in 1999 by Canadian Humanist Publications arguing that Jesus never lived. Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing Christian documents did not believe in Jesus as a person that lived on Earth in an historical setting. Rather, they believed in Jesus as a mythical hero who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven in the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.

According to Doherty, the Jesus myth was given a historical setting only by the second generation of Christians, somewhere between the first and second century. Doherty claims that even the author of the Gospel of Mark, which he dates, later than most New Testament scholars, after 90 AD, probably did not consider his gospel to be a literal work of history, but an allegorical Midrashic composition based on the Old Testament prophecies. In the widely supported two-source hypothesis, the story of Mark was later fused with a separate tradition of anonymous sayings embodied in the Q document into the other gospels; according to Doherty these became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus. Doherty denies any historical value of the Acts of the Apostles, dismissing it as a late work based on legend.

Doherty has a degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages, and he was introduced to the idea of a mythical origin of Jesus by the work of G. A. Wells, who has authored a number of books arguing a more moderate form of the "Christ myth" theory. Doherty claims to have used his language skills to have studied the original-language versions of the New Testament, and to have come to his views through a critical analysis of these texts.

• The Origins of Christianity: Was there no Founder Jesus? (http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/jesus.html)
And it isn't a conspiracy minus the Bush Crime Clan. He's likely the head of the Bavarian Illuminati here in the states.
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/fiction/images/simpsons_handshake.jpg

[Shuft]

The best way to deal with conspiracy theorists is with extreme sarcasm. The "Colbert method" is my favorite. Agree wholeheartedly with everything they say, then take it to its logical conclusion. Of course 9-11 was faked. Of course it was a controlled demolition. Of course the entire building maintenance and security departments were in on it. They are all living it up in some exotic locale now. None of them would find the whole plot objectionable. Then you just keep going until they realize you think they're idiots.

Bonus points if you bring up the moon landing and JFK.

[Sublime]

The best way to deal with conspiracy theorists is with extreme sarcasm. The "Colbert method" is my favorite. Agree wholeheartedly with everything they say, then take it to its logical conclusion. Of course 9-11 was faked. Of course it was a controlled demolition. Of course the entire building maintenance and security departments were in on it. They are all living it up in some exotic locale now. None of them would find the whole plot objectionable. Then you just keep going until they realize you think they're idiots.

Bonus points if you bring up the moon landing and JFK.

Yeah lol. I've done that a couple of times to laugh at their expression of pure despair.

PROTIP: A real Christian wouldn't care about any scientific proof about religion.

It's absolutely counter-productive to try to explain religion with the methods of science - they're two extreme opposite mentalities. The only Christians that care about proof or facts are those who only play-believe and put up an act and use that scientific proof to convince others into believing. Though the opposite is also true and people who have never been religious will never be convinced via presenting evidence. So the whole comparing religion to science on Viasat History and anywhere else is a huge waste of good budget money if you ask me.

[stsparky]

PROTIP: A real Christian wouldn't care about any scientific proof about religion.
Those are the ones you can call Satanists and then walk away from as if they have the plague. And if you can't mindfuck them with their own Gospels you're not trying hard enough. I use "The Book of Reveltions" when they target me as a 'Jew'; And, start harping on how Jesus is the messiah after how I explain that their 'whisper campaign' made flesh wouldn't even qualify as a 'false' messiah. My biggest joy is showing religious reactionary fucktards the errors in their own copy of the Old Testament. Hehehe.

Google: "From Jesus to Christ" ~"the storytellers"
There's plenty of ammo there.

The rule about modern day conspiracies is that they must include George Herbert Walker Bush (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati). Extra points if they also include Prescott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Sheldon_Bush#Nazi_collaboration_controver sy).

[Urameshi YuSooKey]

Leave Christianity Alone!
Leave It Alone!!! :duh:

[Karthak]

Leave Christianity Alone!
Leave It Alone!!! :duh:
Why? There are so many plotholes in the bible that it would be almost criminal not to point them out.

[Sublime]

Why? There are so many plotholes in the bible that it would be almost criminal not to point them out.

The Bible ain't a criminal novel. It's a transcription of events probably written a hundred years after those events happened (or didn't happen). It's not like you're expecting much of a story line or any of those unexpected plot twists. Bad cop ends up good cop and the corrupted government official gets it in the end.

Anyway - bring it on. I'd like to hear what you consider plot holes in a 2000 years old text. *brings pop-corn for everybody*

[Swede]

I always thought the fact that some guy built a boat that could hold every animal in the world, while also having presumably all the food they would need, somehow stopping them from eating/killing each other, getting animals from different continents to swim their asses over to where he was. Right.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

I know things about everyone.

I love how people assume they know everything about one group and know everything about a person. Cause I'm one of those people who think science is great and am a Christian.

No matter because I'm obviously playing at my faith.

Anyway, in Zeitgeist the guy doesn't even bother going after any kind of scientific way to explain why he thinks Jesus is real. Fine and dandy if he could actually prove such a thing, but its a mess.

Also, this topic is more about the film and less about Christianity/Religion in general. So try your best not to derail the topic.

[Karthak]

The Bible ain't a criminal novel. It's a transcription of events probably written a hundred years after those events happened (or didn't happen). It's not like you're expecting much of a story line or any of those unexpected plot twists. Bad cop ends up good cop and the corrupted government official gets it in the end.

Anyway - bring it on. I'd like to hear what you consider plot holes in a 2000 years old text. *brings pop-corn for everybody*
I was joking slightly. You need to take things easier. :)

[SlickWilly440]

I think the Zeitgeist and Loose change "documentaries" are a great form of entertainment because they give a more conspiracy rationale to specific events, which makes the events as a whole more interesting. Even if all the information is untrue, their critical approach to telling a story seems more believable then what is conventionally known.

For example, Zeitgeist said that FDR provoked the Japanese to attack America by trying to stop the importation of oil from China to Japan (which some of us learned in history class), along with other interventions. So that means that America was already involve in WWII before the Japanese attacked, but yet we are still told that America entered WWII after the Japanese attacked, not before.

So basically we have been told to believe that another country was the cause for America's involvement in the War, instead of saying America minor involvement in the war escalated into major involvement.

The bottom line to everything is how to make money/profit and how to make even more of it.

These two films teaches us to think outside of the box and not just take in what we are fed. It makes those of use who don't, think critically about worldly events by analyzing there cause and effects.

[Shuft]

Everyone knows the US was pretty much in the war before the pearl harbor attack. When you sell lots of arms to one side on credit and none to the other side you are doing a little more than playing favorites.

[stsparky]

I love how people assume they know everything about one group and know everything about a person. Cause I'm one of those people who think science is great and am a Christian. ...
Yet you thought it kosher to diss George Carlin who is a serious Roman Catholic. It's very easy to shoot down any religion, but the ones with evangelists are asking for it. So what kind of 'Christian' are you?

You get points for being pro-science, so stop whining about us picking on Christianity because I'm only doing it this time as it links into crappy conspiracy nonsense.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

Yet you thought it kosher to diss George Carlin who is a serious Roman Catholic. It's very easy to shoot down any religion, but the ones with evangelists are asking for it. So what kind of 'Christian' are you?

You get points for being pro-science, so stop whining about us picking on Christianity because I'm only doing it this time as it links into crappy conspiracy nonsense.

Well, I don't want this entire topic to be about religion because it also touched the subect of 9/11, globalization, and some odd stuff about banks.

That's all.

[stsparky]

Well, I've no desire to watch either film - why were they idiotic on the other topics?

[SlickWilly440]

The Zeitgeist movie points out religion because they say that the the Roman government created the Christian religion, as well as other countries who created there own religions, to control the citizens of the state. Saying that all religions where a copy of the Egyptian religion. Government control being the main theme here, they linked the old governments to the current governments, which is still trying to control or suppress the citizens of the state by keeping everyone occupied on everything else besides the government and also planning dramatic events, to the sway the masses emotions. The government does this because they fear/know that the people might overthrow them and destroy the entire system of government if the people are not preoccupied.

[Swede]

Aaaaand this is just the Marxist view of religion. It's reductionist and, let's face it, reductionism is retarded.

[SlickWilly440]

How is reductionism retarded? It's easier to break a complex problem down into more simpler problems to solve, instead of trying to solve it all at once. This applies to pretty much everything we do especially in academia and the real world.

[Swede]

Because reductionism is trying to explain something in it's entirety through one of its parts. It's like trying to explain everything about a human through looking at one of it's organs.

Religion is a complex cultural phenomena that people go into for all sorts of different reasons. Hell, the reason someone continues to practice a religion may be completely different from the reasons the initially decided to follow it. It's not universal.

[Black fist]

I still don't see why somebody always gotta throw a bitch fit over religion, I mean who knows who the fuck is right. Hell there might be an afterlife design specifically for each religion or some shit who knows, You like Science then let it be fucking science. Don't try to prove some religion wrong cause you did some science, even though science and disapproving shit is a main staple of my religion.

I'm a member of The Nations of Gods and Earth

[Sublime]

I love how people assume they know everything about one group and know everything about a person. Cause I'm one of those people who think science is great and am a Christian.

No matter because I'm obviously playing at my faith.

Anyway, in Zeitgeist the guy doesn't even bother going after any kind of scientific way to explain why he thinks Jesus is real. Fine and dandy if he could actually prove such a thing, but its a mess.

Also, this topic is more about the film and less about Christianity/Religion in general. So try your best not to derail the topic.

No - I know everything about everyone - have seen it ALL as far as bloggers and forum communities go. Teh Interwebz don't impress me and neither do you.

"Cause I'm one of those people who think science is great and am a Christian."

All I said was a smart guy wouldn't be mixing the two in terms of trying to explain one with the other. I wasn't even referring to you.

PROTIP: You don't need to hate science to be religious*. Just goes to show how you completely missed the point of what I was saying. (PP: everybody thinks science is great - it's one of those 'what the government wants you to think ;)' moments. Truth is - science is just a tool. Ask the people who aren't wasting their time trying to make a brighter IPod screen. They know everything about it.)

Next time at least try to be funnier.

*much less a Christian - hell that could be anybody. Does George W Bush count for a Christian?

I always thought the fact that some guy built a boat that could hold every animal in the world, while also having presumably all the food they would need, somehow stopping them from eating/killing each other, getting animals from different continents to swim their asses over to where he was. Right.

You're confusing the spiritual with the religious. Religion hasn't always been about power-junkies such as the Roman Catholic church. It might be because I'm Orthodox but religion for me was more of a Set-Of-Helpful-Suggestions thing rather than Law-Of-God. You seem to be put off by the Church trying to present a set of fictional stories as truth to the point where the whole thing is offensive on an "I'm not a 12 year old kid anymore." level. I tend to think of it as a good set of fictional stories because it tells us a lot about the way people reasoned at the time. It's good history - no assumptions or easy explanations - no TV narrator giving you a brief because you're too lazy to look it up yourself - you go there and find your own meanings - the meanings that fit your world. Another reason why those History Channel flicks are lame - they're just the spicy mass-media filler no-one really cares about. Was Mary Magdalene a hooker? I say who gives a fuck. I certainly don't.

[Swede]

You hit it right on the "I'm not a 12 year old kid anymore" part. But the thing is, while I recognize that there are good messages within Christianity or any other religion, that isn't enough to make me think some guy was the son of God (whatever that is). I'm more for practicality than pretending to believe some story. Which, for me, is what that would be, I just don't believe in it.
I'm sure there's plenty of people who do legitimately believe in it for whatever reasons, all the more power to them. I just haven't seen anything in my existence that would make me believe it's anything more than a book, and if you can't rely on that, what have you got?

[Sublime]

If there's no God for measure then what's the meaning of everything we call humanity - how do we define good or bad and right or wrong. If there's no God then the definition for a good man will be one who's afraid of punishment because there would not be another reason to be good.

What will this world be worth without a moral standard or a goal. Now if there weren't any God then every possible world would be acceptable. Every possible reality - equally suffer-able. And each of them the same shade of pale gray - endless worlds where goodness is instilled because it is practical for the sake of the common good. Not a goal mind you but a state of tolerable well-being. And what would that be without a God?

If there was any reason to defile the forces of nature to create things like guilt pity mercy it would be a God because without a God our whole existence would be endless self-indulgence. We just need to have someone to say to "Look I did that for you." when we change the world in our own appearance.

Lastly a God is just as necessary to the human psyche as a Mother and Father - there are still people who live without one or either but they're never complete personalities - they're always searching for someone to please or to rebel against and those people probably make good lovers and artists. A person without a God in him is perhaps the most desperate being on Earth.

[Swede]

For the first part, "how do we judge right and wrong", etc., etc., what makes you think that a god is the only possible explanation for different systems of ethics? If you need a god in order to justify doing something good outside of avoiding punishment, well, good for you. Glad it's working out for you. I can do good things for people, for myself, for whatever and feel good about it just because. Just because I don't believe in God doesn't mean my only reason for not killing someone is to avoid punishment. Maybe I view other people as individuals like myself, and give them the same respect I would want.

There is no one moral standard throughout the world. Again, you don't need God to have a sense of morality. You're correct in the sense that right and wrong is defined essentially by our society. That doesn't mean you have to be a sheep and listen to everything you are told, devoid of any independent thought.

I'm not even sure what kind of point you are trying to make to be honest... You think that a God is necessary for everything, like human advancement (I think?). "Look I did that for you"? What? People change the world in order to make life more comfortable/ convenient/ to gain a better understanding of it. All the cities of the world weren't built as monuments to God.


As for people not believing in God being desperate, it seems like you feel like the way you think is the way everybody thinks. A god is not necessary to have a sense of self worth. Not every action I take is to please someone or rebel against something else.


With nearly everything you've said, you can just as easily replace God with some aspect of society, conscience, etc.



I have no problem with religion as long as people aren't trying to force it onto other people as the only possible explanation. If it helps you, great, just understand that it isn't something everyone feels a need for and there is no possible way of proving it is either right or wrong.










Also, define God :innocent:





*wow did this ever get off topic*

[stsparky]

There is only one thing GOD can be. Everything. Next question.

[Swede]

Or is everything God :watson: Or is everything... everything? Is there a difference?







Even though I wouldn't say I really believe in anything, the Pantheistic view is probably my personal favorite. No real reason, I just think it sounds nice. :)

[stsparky]

Yes the reverse is true. Which means organized religions as a rule are just trying to sell you something else than the product they say they are. Now, let's move forward onto the other conspiracy nonsense I was getting at. The best nutjobs tie the Bushes into this as well.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Buddy_Christ.jpg
The Jesus Bloodline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_bloodline) (AKA the Merovingian Kings):
The main elements of the thesis are that:
Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, with whom he was married. The descendants of this child became the Merovingian kings of France.
The Church has suppressed the truth about Mary Magdalene and the Jesus bloodline for 2000 years.
A secret order protects these royal claimants because they may be the literal descendants of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, or, at the very least, of King David (the Davidic line) and High Priest Aaron.
This secret society known as Priory of Sion has a long and illustrious history dating back to the First Crusade starting with the creation of the Knights Templar as its military and financial front. The Priory is led by a Grand Master or Nautonnier. The bloodline theory is not contained in any of the Priory of Sion documents, it must be stressed and in 1982 on a French radio interview Pierre Plantard distanced himself from the central theory in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
It is devoted to returning the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Frankish kingdom from the fifth century to 751, to the thrones of Europe.
The Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene.
A variation on the theory is that instead of dying on the cross, Jesus (in this story known as Yuz Asaf) fled to Kashmir where he died in old age, returning to Srinagar where he had originally been influenced by Hindu and Buddhist teachings. This theory is lent credence by close comparisons of Jesus' sayings in the Gnostic Gospel of St Thomas, which are seen by some as closely paralleling classical Buddhist Sutras.
The Jesus Bloodline "theory" also has parallels with other "disciple flight to distant lands" stories, such as the one that Joseph of Arimathea travelled to England after the death of Jesus taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these stories as medieval inventions.

Criticism of the theory:
The theory has been discredited by mainstream historians and in recent years by journalists and investigators such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has an extensive archive on this subject matter. Plantard confessed in 1993 that the Priory of Sion was a hoax and that he had developed a long pseudohistory about the organization and had never taken it seriously.
In 2005, UK TV presenter and amateur archaeologist Tony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, "The Real Da Vinci Code", shown on Channel 4. The program featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Prieuré de Sion - to quote Arnaud de Sède in the program, "frankly, it was piffle". The programme also cast severe doubt on the Rosslyn Chapel association with the Grail and on other related stories like the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France.
Quoting Pierre Plantard: "I admit that 'The Sacred Enigma' (French title for 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail') is a good book, but one must say that there is a part that owes more to fiction than to fact, especially in the part that deals with the lineage of Jesus. How can you prove a lineage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians? I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ" (Jacques Pradel radio interview on 'France-Inter', 18 February 1982).
Some commentators see the thesis of Jesus having had children, and the "Sion hoax" as a deliberate piece of anti-Catholic propaganda; they compare it with Reformation period allegations such as the sexual misbehaviour of Popes, or see it as part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic feeling with deep roots in the Protestant imagination.
In addition, the notion that a person living today has a small number of ancestors from millennia ago is statistically incorrect. For example, Steve Olson, author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, published an article in Nature demonstrating that, as a matter of statistical probability, "..If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet."

[Urameshi YuSooKey]

Also, this topic is more about the film and less about Christianity/Religion in general. So try your best not to derail the topic.
Well, I don't want this entire topic to be about religion because it also touched the subect of 9/11, globalization, and some odd stuff about banks.

This thread has completely deviated from the OPs original intent. It was purposely done too IMO. This is GD, so try to keep things on topic and not just whatever you feel like typing atm.

I haven't seen the movie so I don't have anything to comment on about it. I'm not into propaganda films so I'm sure i won't be seeing it anytime soon.

[SlickWilly440]

Oh yeah, here's a hint conspiracy theorist, if they have to make a 2nd edition to, "update sources and edit film", then the movie is most likely bullshit.

Well I'm watching the 2nd edition of Loose Change right now and the facts are pretty much the same so far. No dramatic change in the storyline or anything, so it's pretty consistent with the 1st edition, so far.

Edit: They have more footage of people saying that there were multiple explosion inside the buildings after the planes hit. They even showed a reporter that said she heard multiple explosions inside the building, followed by black smoke, before the towers collapsed.

They point out some very good questions, and it's said that the black boxes on the 2 planes that hit the Tower were found, but not released for the public to hear.

Loose Change 2nd Edition: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7866929448192753501

[stsparky]

I lost a cousin in the WTC. She was 45. Another 68 year old cousin made it down the stairs and out via the subways thanks to the physical rehab therapy he was doing to recover from a heart attack. We know the numbers of victims was lower due to two factors. It was an election day and the first day of school.

What have you got?

[Fermented Yeast Paste]

Any incarnation of Loose Change is an absolute joke that relies solely on rhetoric and the makers hoping that any who watch it don't have any common sense.

[SlickWilly440]

What have you got?
I've got nothing.

Any incarnation of Loose Change is an absolute joke that relies solely on rhetoric and the makers hoping that any who watch it don't have any common sense.

I totally agree about the rhetoric part and not everyone who watched the film is going to want to do their own research to double check what they were saying. So it's hard to believe if what they are stating is fact or total BS.

Even if those films are total BS, they give the audience a different perspective/angle to think about certain events that happened in history. Instead of just totally believing what the media saids or what we have learned in school since day one, and not critically thinking for ourselves.

[The_Penguin]

How is reductionism retarded? It's easier to break a complex problem down into more simpler problems to solve, instead of trying to solve it all at once. This applies to pretty much everything we do especially in academia and the real world.
Umm... this isn't engineering. If engineers could come up with solutions like that and have those solutions work, we'd become robots at one point or another (or have to be robots in the first place.)

[The_Penguin]

I've got nothing.



I totally agree about the rhetoric part and not everyone who watched the film is going to want to do their own research to double check what they were saying. So it's hard to believe if what they are stating is fact or total BS.

Even if those films are total BS, they give the audience a different perspective/angle to think about certain events that happened in history. Instead of just totally believing what the media saids or what we have learned in school since day one, and not critically thinking for ourselves.
Loose Change wouldn't be anywhere near as laughable if the makers just said: "Look, it's slick, it's believable, but it's one big lie. It's a story and it's untrue. Whaddaya think of our ability come up with shit like this? Anyone wanna hire us?"

[The_Penguin]

I enjoyed this article.
Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact, warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book

George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.

Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.

This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.

We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.

That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.

Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.

Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades.

I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts" about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right," they said. "It did seem strange…"

Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge.

The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology.

The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right.

Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible."

Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed "without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services". Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre".

In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics."

We do not normally think of creationism and maverick physics as conspiracy theories; but what they have in common with Loose Change is a methodology that marks them as counterknowledge. People who share a muddled, careless or deceitful attitude towards gathering evidence often find themselves drawn to each other's fantasies. If you believe one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another. Although this has been true for centuries, the invention of the internet has had a galvanising effect. A rumour about the Antichrist can leap from Goths in Sweden to Australian fascists in seconds. Minority groups are becoming more tolerant of each other's eccentric doctrines. Contacts between white and black racists are now flourishing; in particular, the growing anti-Semitism of black American Muslims has been a great ice-breaker on the neo-Nazi circuit.

In June 2007, the home page of The Truth Seeker, a conspiracy website, included claims that Aids is a "man-made Pentagon genocide", that Pope Paul VI "was impersonated by an actor from 1975 to 1978", that new evidence about the Loch Ness monster had emerged – plus a link to Loose Change.

Yet, as we saw earlier, more than 100 million people have seen that film. In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream, cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils.

But Left-wing multiculturalists are not the only guilty ones: entrepreneurs are turning counterknowledge into an industry. Publishing houses pay self-taught archaeologists and pseudo-historians large amounts to turn fragments of fact into saleable stories. Titles are placed in the history sections of bookshops whose claims have been thoroughly demolished – yet the publishers carry on bringing out new editions.

The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing information about Jesus.

Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin supplements and "superfoods" that are unsupported by scientific literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial interest in selling the supplements in question.

Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect, and therefore of risk.

The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.

But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.

These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.

Islamic countries, in particular, have embraced counterknowledge to a remarkable degree. In 2006, the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arabs carried out the September 11 attacks. The majority of respondents in each country said no. Indeed, most British Muslims – 56 per cent – also thought that Arabs were innocent. A quarter of British Muslims believe that "the British Government was involved in some way" with the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005.

The battle between knowledge and counterknowledge is not just a struggle to protect the public domain from bogus facts. It has profound implications for the safety of the West. And, make no mistake about it: this is a battle we are losing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=WM41FVD32GW0NQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQ YIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/12/nrfact112.xml&page=3

As a godless atheist who believes in evolution and thinks that there are no conspiracy theories (come on, the only ones ever plotted unraveled eventually, no dumbass shit that lasts thousands of years and dating back to the Egyptians), I recommend that you send this link to any dumbass who believes in nonsense.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

Loose Change 2nd Edition: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7866929448192753501

http://www.lolloosechange.co.nr/

Different perspectives are all nice and junk, but is that really necessary for tragic events like this?

I mean people said that the United States Detonated a nuke which caused the major tsunami a few years back. Not only that but a majority of people in South Korea were all aboard for that load of crap. Despite the fact that there is not and probably never be a powerful enough Nuclear bomb capable of matching a 9.1 Earthquake. If there was then imagine how fucked we'd all be.

Still, I'm just saying that even if people have different perspectives it doesn't mean they are always right and only opens people's eyes to fear and rhetoric.

[Matt W]

I don't believe any where near all of what is said in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, but the fact of the matter is they raise some serious questions to which there are no good answers to. I don't know what happened that day, but I sure as hell don't believe the official story, there is just too much coincidence and too many holes. I've watched a lot of 911 stuff, from both sides, and I've never seen a good answer as to why NORAD did nothing, why the Pentagon refuses to release the some 70 tapes they have of the attack on the Pentagon, etc...

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

I can answer the NORAD thing.

NORAD was designed to defend US airspace from fightplane attacks. NOT commericial jets.

Why do you think they were out of their element?

[SlickWilly440]

http://www.lolloosechange.co.nr/

Different perspectives are all nice and junk, but is that really necessary for tragic events like this?

Thanks for the video link that debunks loose change, it's a really good watch although it's like 3 hours long, which I'm watching right now.

If only there was a video like this for the Zeitgeist film.

[Sock Full of Boiled Dimes]

Not many people are taking that film seriously anymore I think.

[Sublime]

Not many people are taking that film seriously anymore I think.

Nah... say.. Got Christ? :D:D:D

[SlickWilly440]

Oh my gosh I feel so betrayed by Loose Change after watching the debunking version of it.

[Beowulf]

Any 911 conspiracy unravels when you realize the sheer amount of people that would be required to pull something like this. With dozens of people involved it would have only been a matter of time before someone, somewhere talked to a loved one, family member, friend, coworker, press, something. That's just human nature.

[RandomPasserby]

Are you guys serious when you say that you watched loose change and needed to watch a 3 hour film to debunk it? I mean it is mainly just a video based on the basic 9/11 conspiracy claims that get debunked in 1 second by googling or use of common sense (people hearing "explosions" isn't a proof of explosions etc.).

Why waste 5-6 hours in watching videos when you can just see few pictures of air plane rubble in Pentagon or of a flaming wtc 7 missing a corner?

Also The Penguin's linked article is sadly leaving out most of the right wing, christian and white racist conspiracy nuts.

[SlickWilly440]

Are you guys serious when you say that you watched loose change and needed to watch a 3 hour film to debunk it?

Why waste 5-6 hours in watching videos when you can just see few pictures of air plane rubble in Pentagon or of a flaming wtc 7 missing a corner?

Yes I'm serious, I watched Loose Change a few years ago, then watched the 2nd edition yesterday, then watched the Debunking edition today.

Have you watched Loose Change before? It's easier/quicker to watch the Debunking because there's too many lies in the original to google it all in a timely manner.