"and did you see the lizards clear?"

(oddly enough i think maybe reading mainstream papers a lot makes it EASIER to fall into this kind of basically well-armoured self-protective thinking)

(And why would you read the newspaper if you believed, as he must to defend certain positions, that the newspaper was either lying to you or was completely in the dark about the actual workings of the world?)

I read the times just to pass the time and to laugh at the positions that they have on certain issues. That's all.

Anyway, didn't you know that the sport news section is the only news actually worth reading!

Right, right: no one wants to admit that he actually trembles before the paper and can't truly know anything about what's happening apart from what that paper passes along -- thus he must pretend that the paper is only raw information behind which only he can divine the hidden truth using his all-powerful Conspiracy Filter. (And this really does seem to be the way roommate reads the paper: in this weird adversarial way where he wants to scoff at it and say "well obviously the actual truth is...") (Really, though, why won't anyone ever just take a paper at face value?)

("Face-value" in this instance meaning yes there are decisions made about what leads and what gets stuffed and whether X piece of information goes inside at paragraph 30 or runs in the reefer and what stories run period, yes, obviously, but it's not as if any actual effort is being made to lie to or misinform you: everyone involved, from the paper itself to the government officials and spokesmen and lawyers and everyone else quoted within, is doing a simple workaday job.)

conspiracy theories etc give a lot of comfort to some people, making think 'yes, there is order out there, things do make some sort of sense'. if the need for 'truth' cannot be sated, the need for there to be a truth stands in, the fact that this 'truth' is 'hidden' is actually better, because you can make it up...

in conversation with a conspiracy theorist once, i nearly said "of course, the goverment encourages conspiracy theories to deflect attention from its amateruism and general incompetence, it needs people to believe them to maintain the myth of control", but i was not in the mood for verbal trolling

i guess the question part of the thread is: what are the wonkier Explanations of the World you have encountered being defended by a non-mentalist

Calvinism.

Is Calvinism really any more wonky then any other Christian denomination (or any other religion for that matter)?