A Hint of Skepticism: Part 2

“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created–and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground–for I regret that I have made them.”

Genesis 6:1-7

In my previous post, that you can read here, I talked a little bit about my first run-in with the Bible (after becoming a Christian at 28), how I had accepted the Bible as true before even reading it and actually taking the time to examine its claims, and how I was confronted with many things that I considered to be disgusting and immoral. I talked about how I tried to justify many things, such as slavery and genocide. I talked about using apologetics websites, like gotquestions.org, for simple answers to these deeply troubling questions. And I talked about how those simple answers, over time, weren’t sufficiently satisfying, and drove me to look to other sources. Which led to me the Book of Enoch…and eventually led me down a rabbit hole of wild YouTube conspiracy theories and various forms of pseudoscience that I will be discussing in this blog today.

Much like when I initially started buying into Christianity, I didn’t actually read (much) of the source material of the various conspiracy theories and pseudosciences. I only really listened to what other people were saying about these various concepts. To this day I don’t think I’ve read more than a few passages in The Book of Enoch. Honestly, I’ll probably end up reading more writing and researching things for this blog than I did when I bought into it.

Without doing some real work and digging into this, I honestly don’t know if the “sons of God” described in the Genesis 6 were purported to be human or something else. Some sources say the “sons of God” were angelic beings, some other sources theorize they were what Sumerian texts refer to as the Anunnaki (aliens). According to Wikipedia, 1 Enoch talks about the “sons of God” and refer to them as “the watchers” or “the holy ones”. In Enoch, these watchers were the angels that got sent to earth to watch over humanity, and began to “lust for human women”. The book of Daniel also mentions “watchers” in chapter 4:13, chapter 4:17, and chapter 4:23. Many translations also translate watchers to be “holy one, a messenger”, “angelic watcher, a holy one”, and “a messenger, a holy one”. There certainly seems to be precedent for this notion of the sons of God being (fallen) angels in the Bible as well as in other ancient extra-biblical texts.

My introduction to these concepts came by the way of YouTube videos—as so many of my pseudo-intellectual pursuits did back in those days. There are many different people that talk about these concepts, such as fallen angels, ancient aliens, and ancient lost “advanced” civilizations. Hell, you can watch mainstream network tv, such as the History Channel (that rarely shows actual history), and hear about these things. There are several big names such as, Brien Foerster, David Hatcher Childress, and Graham Hancock, that all dabble in these sorts of ideas. But the guy that really introduced me to them was a YouTube creator by the name of Trey Smith.

Trey has a lot of videos on these sorts of topics. From videos on evolution to the occult, to the Book of Enoch to Trump prophecy (imagine a guy that believes aliens are demonic is a Trump supporter). He makes several claims about things such as the elongated skulls (pictured above) as being the Nephilim (giants) of the Bible and usually has some “expert”, like Brien Foerster, on to talk about these things. He does make some compelling arguments if you don’t know anything about the arguments against them. Which most people don’t.

Anyway, Trey was my gateway drug into the world of conspiracy theories. (I am planning on making a separate blog post addressing the elongated skulls and ancient civilizations at a later time, that addresses the specific claims these guys make.)

You may be wondering, why? Why might a person buy into this nonsense? Well, for reasons we discussed in the first part of this blog series, I believed the Bible was true, but I had major issues with much of what was seemingly being condoned, and even commanded by the God I claimed to believe in. These concepts made those issues less difficult to deal with. If the accounts of mass genocide really happened, and they were a result of God’s commands, and God was good, then there must have been a good reason that these things happened—there had to be if the Bible was true. A Luciferian agenda to hijack history and distort the truth must have been true. Science, history, the world leaders, and everything that we have been told to be true about our world, in order to fit the biblical narrative, by necessity, must have been fabricated.

A mass conspiracy.

So the first time I really had an inkling of a conspiracy was right after 9/11. My hunch, even before all the conspiracy theorists came out with their assertions about what happened, I thought it was a false flag event. “An inside job”. So honestly, I was already primed and ready to accept these other conspiracy theories without much coercion at all. The pieces of the puzzle just seemed to all be fitting nicely.

Before I knew it, I was consuming, not only YouTube conspiracy videos, but I was reading every article and listening to every podcast I could find. The creators of a YouTube channel, called FaceLikeTheSun, put out a “documentary” back in 2011 called ‘AGE OF DECEIT’, which was all about fallen angels and their relationship to the New World Order. In the movie they talk about the biblical flood, the pre-flood world as being Atlantis (allegedly an ancient lost, highly advanced civilization), fallen angels seeding society with Luciferian blood lines, UFOs, extraterrestrials and abductions, demonic possession, channeling, and much more craziness. They also made a part 2 and 3. Part 2 was all about the mark of the beast and achieving immorality through technology, called transhumanism, which is a whole other topic. I didn’t watch part 3 as it came out last year, long after I had deconverted, and moved far away from these types of ideas—but I may have to watch it at some point and write about it, for fun.

The makers of the FaceLikeTheSun channel also had a podcast called CanaryCryRadio. In which they covered just about every conspiracy you could think of. Most of which they were completely sold on. New World Order, the Illuminati, 9/11 conspiracy theories, fake moon landings, CERN conspiracies, you name it. One thing that really got me rethinking some of these things was when they brought on a man by the name of Mark Sargent. Those of you that don’t know who this man is, he is a major contributor to what we all know to be the Flat Earth movement. Check out ‘Behind the Curve’ on Netflix if you haven’t already! You can thank me later.

I don’t know why it took something as crazy as the Flat Earth conspirators to make me really start to question these sorts of things, but it did. I just had a hard time believing in such a ridiculous idea (yeah because half human-half demon hybrids aren’t ridiculous!? I know…). NASA would have to be completely fake, the government and everyone that was ever involved with any sort of high, or even moderate level intelligence in, not only the U.S. government, but every government in the world, would have to be in on the conspiracy.

“A Hint of Skepticism” right there!

But my trip down the rabbit hole didn’t end there. Nope. I wish it had. Because soon, I fell down an even deeper rabbit hole. The quantum rabbit hole!

I was first introduced to quantum physics by, yep, you guessed it, YouTube. I thought that I had found something that, while it may not necessarily answer my questions about the Bible, maybe it might just prove the existence of god, or at least a universal consciousness. Maybe, like what I talked about as a high schooler, God was the universe.

The video that sucked me in was Dr. Quantum’s (a cartoon character) explanation of the Double Slit Experiment. Ironically enough, this short clip originated from a movie entitled, ‘What the Bleep! Down the Rabbit Hole’. Later I found out that the entire movie was based on pseudoscience and deception, but at the time, I felt like I had found the holy grail of information!

If you have never heard about the Double Slit Experiment, please don’t learn about it from Dr. (Woo) Quantum. Google it and find a reputable source that’s not going to feed you full of a bunch of crap.

Essentially what Dr. Quantum, and this shady ass movie, were attempting to do was show us how reality is not what we were taught in school. Basically, we create reality by observing it. And this sent me down an entire different rabbit hole. Still very much in the realm of conspiracy theories, but now I was moving further away from Christianity and more toward what we call New Age philosophy.

“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

Werner Heisenberg

What the creators of ‘What the Bleep!’ were saying was when we create reality by observing it, not only do we create reality, but that we have the ability to change reality. Now, I’m no physicist, nor would pretend (at least not anymore) to fully grasp the implications of the various theories within the quantum world, but I don’t think physicists would go as far as to say we create reality. And they damn sure wouldn’t say that we can change reality. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that you begin to believe when you listen, and buy into, to this pseudoscientific nonsense.

Deepak Chopra is a big name in the realm of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. He has a book entitled, ‘Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine’ in which he claims to be able to cure cancer, heart disease, and “even aging itself”. This is not only bullshit, but it’s dangerous bullshit because people believe it!

This is the kind of thing that I believe is important to fight against. I’m generally not that concerned with what people believe, as long as it’s not negatively affecting anyone else. Unfortunately, it’s very rare that a person can hold a deeply held belief and it not affect anyone else. People vote, people have children, people are teachers and politicians, and they spread these ideas to other people, and they spread them to other people in their life, and on and on and on it goes. In most cases, what people believe does matter.

It wasn’t long before I found myself having doubts about these claims. Thankfully, I never really got into quantum healing, it was mostly just me running my mouth and thinking I had acquired some secret “knowledge”, and believing that science had proven God.

2014 was a big year for me. That was the year that Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted the new version of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which really got me interested in actual science. In the same year, Ken Ham (the creationist that I talked about in my last blog) and Bill Nye “The Science Guy” had a debate about evolution—a debate Bill Nye won, IMO, using little more than elementary level logic and arguments. My trip down the rabbit hole wasn’t over yet, but it was slowing down in a big, BIG way.

Stat tuned!