Chaos, Conspiracy & Control

While on the hunt for some links to use in my previous blog post I found something awesome*.  Turns out Jack Chick now also posts his comic books online for all to read for free!  I read through most of them and may I just say, holy flying assweasels!!  If you thought his tracts were out there, wait till you read the comic books!  Usually you have to go to a website with bright colours and EVERYHING WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS (with lots of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!) to find someone piling on the crazy this thick!

Now fair enough, all the conspiracy theories I've ever heard seemed pretty crazy but the Satanic conspiracy theories have a far darker edge than your usual "UFO's are real!!/Bigfoot lives!!/There was no moon landing!1!" conspiracy.  At their core, conspiracy theories are fantasies about how the world really works.  You know, behind the scenes.  In a way that only the really smart and tuned in people can see, unlike the rest of us sheeple.  Now I'm sure any conspiracy theorist would take umbrage at me calling it "fantasies" but that's exactly what it is: it's something you believe despite having no proof to back it (and usually plenty to debunk it) because it makes you feel good/smart/enlightened/special to do so.  What sets the Satanic Panic fantasies apart from all the rest is that they are really gutwrenchingly horrific fantasies!  Call me crazy but when I fantasize I usually imagine a world better than the one I am currently in.  People who buy into the wild tales of these  (alleged) former Satanic superstars like John Todd and Mike Warnke do the opposite - they fantasize about a world much, much worse than the one we live in!   Ritual rape, black magic, incest, human sacrifice, torture, demons, infanticide - the fantasies these people come up with would make Jeffrey Dahmer queasy!  What then would drive a good, mild mannered Christian to want to passionately believe in such a B horror movie version of the world?

I could be wrong but I think this XKCD comic about the "Pen Fifteen Club" may hold the answer:

The world is a damn scary place.  Bad things happen to good people all the time.  Everything can seem so chaotic and random and that makes it terrifying because if bad things happen at random then you are not safe!  But what if it was not random?  What if there were evil people who worshiped Evil personified who were actually causing all the bad things you see and hear about?  What if there was actually a plan behind all the chaos?  That would make it a lot less scary wouldn't it?  Even if the plan was horrifying and evil it would still be preferable to no plan at all right?  If there is a scapegoat, if there is a single malevolent cause to all the evil in the world then that means there is also a way for you to protect yourself!  Pray, practice spiritual warfare, read your Bible, avoid the ever growing list of things that invite satanic influences into your home, etc and you have your control back.  In a demon haunted world, the chaos of the unknown is kept at bay and order is restored to your existence.  Not only that but you can now live a heroic life, constantly locked in battle with the forces of darkness.  Maybe you can't do anything about the evil ones running everything in the world behind the scenes but you sure can keep them out of your house!   By making the world more scary you can somehow make it less scary.  In this way a world filled with dark magic and human sacrifice can somehow become a better world than the boring/uncertain one we really live in.  As make believe worlds go it's pretty awful but I see now that there is some twisted logic to it.


*Opinions may vary.