Culture: A cornucopia of crackpot conspiracies

My thanks to Talleyrand, who observed that “Life Is Too Short to Read Dumb Books”, for much of the information here.

David Ray Griffin has kindly summarized his goofy conspiracy theory (blaming 9/11 on President Bush) on a free website. This is a good thing because it deprives the author of royalties and the publisher, the dear old clueless PCUSA, of profits that might be gained by people actually buying the book.

The most hopeful part of Griffin’s article was the first clause of the first sentence: “In the spring of 2003, near the end of my 31-year teaching career at the Claremont School of Theology….” That’s a relief, at least he’s out of the classroom. So what was he teaching? Although he seems to have made his silly conspiracy his new life’s work, he was probably teaching them something called process theology – a materialistic postmodern philosophy that proposes a god who is part of the universe and constrained by it, an obvious contradiction of God’s self-revelation in the Bible.

The website that hosts Griffin’s fantasy offers a truly amazing collection of equally hare-brained conspiracies. For example, “using human beings [especially children] as guinea pigs to test the toxic strength of commercial poisons has become a central regulatory strategy under the Bush administration.” Or soon, maybe tomorrow we will all begin, “a slow, somnambulant walk as in a gray dream right out of the Talmud into the Neo-Con extermination camps now currently under construction by the fine folks at, you guessed it! – – Halliburton.”

Did you know that the U.S. deliberately kept all warnings of the 2004 tsunami a secret? How about DuPont’s plot to eliminate the growing of hemp and deprive Dead-heads and other American stoners of their favorite recreational drug? And you probably didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch is at the center of a conspiracy to turn the Internet into “a mass surveillance database and marketing tool.”.

This is the sort of company the esteemed David Ray Griffin keeps. I expect the PCUSA’s Westminster/John Knox publishing house to announce new author signings from among this crowd any day now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Culture, PCUSA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.