I can sometimes see the appeal of conspiracy theories.
Think about it. He’s called Captain Hook, but there’s no way he was born with the name Hook. He was born with hands. And what character 21 years earlier and was about 21 years younger? Long John Silver’s coxswain: Mr Israel Hands.
There’s something compelling about connecting the dots and seeing the pattern, even if it is deeply stupid.
This seems to be more an example of head canon or even fan fiction rather than conspiracy theory.
I think conspiracy theory requires you start from a real event and then attempt to shoehorn stupid, unsupported explanations for it.
“Conspiracy is the expectation of reason from an unreasonable world.”
—Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell
Vicar, Dorothy was wrong; conspiracy is a secret plan by some group to do something nefarious.
(Shared breath!)
Been a while, so here’s an entrance to the rabbit-hole: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConspiracyTheorist
@John Morales:
No, she’s right. People come up with conspiracy theories because they cannot handle the fact that the world is essentially beyond the control of any individual human will — rather than admit that, say, the structure of IP law and corporate capitalism (particularly when the Friedman doctrine is given legal weight, as it has been by US courts) guarantees that medical research will be full of rent-seeking opportunists in ways which are impossible to foresee completely and raise prices while blunting — sometimes even outright negating — results, conspiracy theories require that medical research be under the control of some person or small group who are deliberately trying to keep people from good health, and then you get things like antivaxxers and Kevin Trudeau’s “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About”.
(And it’s worth pointing out: all religions are conspiracy theories — there’s a shadowy cabal of intelligent beings who control the whole universe, and they want us to behave in some particular way, but they’ll do any batshit-insane Rube Goldberg machine setup to manipulate us rather than just manifesting and telling us what to do. Everything that happens is the will of one or another of these unseeable secret super-intelligences, carried out by their likewise-invisible servants. And, as with all other conspiracy theories, religion is largely perpetuated by grifters seeking to capitalize on people too blinded by ignorance and paranoia to see through the scam.)
“No, she’s right.”
You’re free to believe counterfactuals, of course.
Be aware that your attempted justification is rather vacuous; for one thing, the claim is about conspiracy as a thing, not about why people are motivated to create theories about them or even about conspiracy theories; for another, your generalisation about religions being conspiracies shows you don’t understand religion itself; for another, belief in your fanciful “shadowy cabal” that runs things would basically be the opposite of an expectation of reason in an unreasonable world.
(I could go on, but shan’t)
They’re SO lazy. They just throw together the same tired crap over and over, hoping something will hook another sucker who admits crap is present yet is convinced they can discern the legit parts.
The other day, I exposed myself to a couple minutes of a tv show where the host name dropped Stonehenge, the Pentagon (cuz it’s round!), and Freemasons. I might have caught the end of a segment on Easter Island, too.
CA7746, in what you quoted, the second clause is independent of the first; both are wrong, but the first is just utterly wrong while the second is merely mostly wrong. So, no.
The landscape of religious experience is vast, and organised religion is only part of it, as is formalised religion, as is personal religion.
—
When Europeans first conquered Australia, they came up with their version of what they thought the Aboriginal religion was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming
Not a grift.
(I suppose to you it’s tired old crap, being a few tens of thousands of years old)
In the Broadway play, Hook refers to himself as “Mrs. Book’s little baby boy.”
[Captain Hook]
Who’s the crawling-est, cruelest, crummiest, crookedest crook?
[Pirates]
Crookedest crook
What a prize
What a joy
[Captain Hook]
Mrs. Hook’s little baby boy
Look, look, look
[Pirates]
The scourge of the sea
[Captain Hook, spoken]
Yes, yes, yes
Just little ol’ me
[All]
Captain Hook!
Yo ho!
Hook, not Book. –$@ ==# autocorrect…
Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they’re a part of something bigger. They want to blame all the world’s problems on some single enemy they can fight, instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone’s control. Steven Universe.
Literary confluences can be a lot of fun.
I particularly enjoyed one assembled by Philip José Farmer in one of his Tarzan take-offs, where he invented/revealed that Tarzan and Doc Savage were half-brothers and sons of Jack the Ripper. He worked out a complicated genealogy for dozens of famous characters: my favorite was positing that James Bond was the (great?)grandson of Sherlock Holmes.
Pierce, yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wold_Newton_family
Rather pulpy, but quite enjoyable if one can cope with the schlock.
Wherein one learns Tarzan is more than passingly familiar with coprophilia and knows there is more nutrition in carnivore feces than herbivores’, for example; or that the male members tended to have huge, um, male members and the consequences of that.
[correction: coprophagia, not coprophilia. Survival, not pleasure]
Pierce R. Butler@13,
W.S. Baring-Gould in his fan-fiction “biography” of Sherlock Holmes, claims that Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout’s fictional detective) was Holmes’ son by Irene Adler (the woman who outsmarted Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia.
He wasn’t born with a hook, but he could have been born with the last name Hook, had his hand bitten off, and decided to replace it with something on theme. Kinda makes me wonder what would happen if his last name was Bell, or Fisher, or Stamp, or Orr.