A Sin to Entertain Conspiracy Theories

[exnihilo]

But they are logical questions that have to be answered before charges by the theorists can be taken seriously.

I asked questions you never answered. Where do we get the official explanation? How is the official explanation determined? If the official explanation is accepted on the mere authority of the giver of that explanation then anyone who accepts it is acting in faith. So the faithfulness of the authority would be very important. So who is the authority for historical truth?

Now I’ve heard everything.

If you had never before heard this fact, and let’s be clear this is a fact, then I don’t think you have investigated this event sufficiently to dismiss or accept anyone’s theory on grounds other than faith in an authority.

This fact is what they call motive. Plenty of police investigations begin based solely on motive. From motive they assemble other convincing evidence to make a theory. This theory is then presented. Another party attempts to poke holes in this theory. The claims are judged by a jury. A verdict is then reached. This seems like a reasonable way to judge truth claims. But even so this method is not perfect. How did we arrive at the official story?

By the way plenty of people sit in jail based solely on circumstantial evidence that hinges on a strong motive. If this is good enough to jail people it would seem like a good enough reason to at least question the official story.

First of all, facts don’t speak for themselves; they have to be interpreted. I spent a career interpreting facts. Second, "The questions remain because the President who should be able to answer them, WILL NOT” is the whole basis for conspiracy theories, no matter what they are. Just replace “the president” with “the authorities”. Where is the evidence that the president should be able to answer any question that can be cooked up? It is obvious that Gold is afflicted with what Feser calls “contempt for authority.”

You are setting up straw men by which you judge competing theories. Not every theory is founded on ‘because someone will not answer questions…’ In fact no good theory is. They have other facts which make the lack of answers compelling. By the way the government treats any one of us who will not answer questions as suspicious. So when the government uses this rule it is good, but when the people use it it is bad?

I think conspiracy theories need more proof than just speculative questions. “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead” said Ben Franklin. In all the people required to carry out a conspiracy the level of 9/11, there had to be at least one with a hatred for George Bush. Where is he?

Why wouldn’t this standard apply to the government’s conspiracy theory. Again, what I think is the official story is that a terrorist organization conspired to send nineteen men to the US to train to fly planes to crash them into buildings because they hate freedom. The motive sounds silly and far less compelling than making money like the leaseholder of the WTC. But if the terrorists could keep a secret why do you think members of our government can not? The truth of the Gulf of Tonkin incident took forty years to get out. Based on government lies we made war on Vietnam and 50,000 US soldiers died. They were able to keep that secret and there are plenty more terrible documented lies.

 

[sedonaman]

You can go on and on with your philosophical position, but you did not address the two points I brought up.
…

I asked questions you never answered. … etc.

The reason I am highly skeptical of conspiracy theories is they all use the same tactic: cower the opposition into proving the theory is wrong. Well, I’m not falling for it. It’s not up to me to prove your theory wrong; you have to prove your theory right. :sad_yes:

 

[exnihilo]

The reason I am highly skeptical of conspiracy theories is they all use the same tactic: cower the opposition into proving the theory is wrong. Well, I’m not falling for it. It’s not up to me to prove your theory wrong; you have to prove your theory right. :sad_yes:

How can you claim all conspiracy theories use the same tactic which is to cower the opposition? There is no way you can know that as you can not be familiar with all conspiracy theories. So you are making a clearly unprovable claim yourself.

I’ve asked several times how one can know the official story. I’ve not asked to advocate any particular theory. I’ve asked because we can’t even know what is a conspiracy theory unless we can know what is the official story by which we judge a theory as being either the official story or a different one, which men will label as a conspiracy theory. If you can’t tell me how we know the official story then you are setting up a moving target. You condemn conspiracy theories but can’t tell us how we even know what a conspiracy theory is.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The reason I am highly skeptical of conspiracy theories is they all use the same tactic: cower the opposition into proving the theory is wrong. Well, I’m not falling for it. It’s not up to me to prove your theory wrong; you have to prove your theory right. :sad_yes:

I didn’t present a theory, I pointed to 2 scientific reasons for showing that the official version of building collapse cannot be true. You did not provide a sniff of a reason for showing why my concerns are off the mark. You don’t need to provide a reason for proving me wrong, but an explanation of why the official story can be accepted given that it breaks the laws of motion and gravity. In other words why is the official story right and reasonable to believe?

You say: "The reason I am highly skeptical of conspiracy theories is they all use the same tactic: cower the opposition into proving the theory is wrong. " However as exnihilo pointed out, the government story also involves a conspiracy of at least 19 men and it suffers from the same problem the conspiracy theories you scoff at do; by not answering critical questions, it “cowers the opposition into proving the theory wrong.” To be consistent you should be dismissing the official conspiracy story for the same reason you are dismissing all other conspiracy theories.