Obviously there’s never a bad time to arrest those guilty of pedophilia-related crimes regardless of the perps’ political affiliations, but a handful of GOP big shots getting busted in the first couple months of Biden’s presidency would be amazing.
On the other hand it would also be further obvious proof that the Democratic Party is a satanic cult of child rapists.
Terrorism ideology.
I think this really misses the actual brain rotting source. It’s religion, not right wing news.
About the only ideology all Qers share is Christianity. Their ability to believe nonsense and adapt their idiotic worldview instantly, even in light of direct counter evidence, is straight out of religion.
Q is the result of 2500 years of religious indoctrination, not 30 years of right wing media.
That’s very incorrect.
I think this is an odd way of looking at it. I think it’s more that QAnon is filling a religion-shaped hole in these people’s lives. That suggests to me that their susceptibility to it is in part driven by the loss of credibility organised religion has undergone in the West, broadly speaking, over the last several decades. Aren’t QAnon types mostly non-churchgoing?
It’s very weird to state that people trolling on 4chan has anything to do with religion. 4chan is maybe the least religious place on the internet.
I think Clovis is making a good point. Religion has you believe things which there has been zero evidence for since er forever. And a lot of it is simply bat shit insane if you look at it logically. Someone on that train is already primed to jump on the Qanon express too.
From what I’ve read, Q believers vary a lot in what they believe in terms of the Q orthodoxy but the one thing they share is they are nearly all Christians.
My point is being religious requires adoption of a worldview based on faith over reason and acceptance of silly ideas about how the world works (e.g., resurrection, transubstantiation, heaven). This epistemology is the exact same one that leads to Q and baby-eating Dems, all powerful Trump etc. There is no difference. This might offend religious people but there really is no difference between believing in resurrection and believing that dems are lizard people. It’s the same in both degree and kind.
Q and religion also allow for an unfalsifiable worldview where nothing can puncture it because any new data, no matter how counter to core beliefs, is simply subsumed into the larger ideology.
Your point about a religious vacuum can also be true. It’s a good point. I don’t see how church going has much to do with it though. Can you elaborate?
I think that for the past millenia religion created a world where faith needs to be respected at least as much as evidence-based science. Where you have people like Dustin Hoffman come out to defend batshit crazy cults like Scientology and compare measures against them to the Nazi persecution of Jews.
I started out as an atheist that thought everybody should be free to believe whatever they want. I did not realize how harmful the religious mindset truly is.
You get elected officials using the existence of snowballs as evidence that global warming is a hoax or they cite bible verses that God won’t destroy mankind again therefore we have nothing to worry about.
That’s why I am now an anti-theist instead of an atheist.
The top part is just definitely not true. Q was basically just people trolling others on Chan sites pre pandemic then exploded onto FB groups when people were home and normal people were making bread and playing animal crossing
I don’t claim to be a world expert on Q but my understanding is you are correct. It started as joke online among trolls. At that point it had zero to do with religion. However, it’s a huge mistake to think that is what it is now. It’s a strongly held worldview among millions.
Religion is what allowed it to jump from trolling joke to a logical explanation for how the world works for so many people.
Being religious doesn’t require any of that, even if in some instances it entails that. Maybe you can say that fundamentalism, literalism etc share some family resemblances with QAnon (which shouldn’t surprise us if we regard QAnon as a religion or religion-like phenomenon). I still think that it’s far more accurate to say that QAnon is supplementing an urge that’s no longer being satisfied by religion alone. Or to think of it as an extension of certain blends of Christianity, which makes it trivially true that (those forms of) Christianity are a precursor to it.
Yeah, I don’t know why this is being tied to religion other than Clovis misremembering that he thinks he read some poll on the issue which surely doesn’t exist. What actually correlates well here is a lack of education.
Yeah, the concept of faith is just priming you for these types of beliefs.
It took both for Q to become so mainstream. It’s not even just religion, but specific insane right wing religion in this country. Because there are tons of leftists christians in this country and I HIGHLY doubt they would fall for some left wing version of Q.
It’s the specific right wing Christianity that is super anti science, based on hate etc, mixed with ring wing media melting their brains.
Q wouldn’t exist without both. If there was no Rush, Fox News etc Q wouldn’t exist in the way it does today.
Right wing christianity hard wired their brains to be anti science, to hate, to be illogical, and right wing media taught them conspiracy theories and the left is the source of all evil.
A lot of religious talk in American society (I confidently assert from Europe) is just cultural signaling. Rural/urban and racial tribal delineation as opposed to the expression of a full-throated worldview per se. I imagine most of the people who talk about their religion in that way are probably not big churchgoers, that’s all.
I don’t know that we disagree on much of substance here. I just see QAnon as another form of the same thing, something that fits in the same slot as religion rather than having the way paved for it by religion. I’ve made the point elsewhere that it’s actually quite an old-fashioned, Manichean-Gnostic sort of thing. A powerful evil that preys on children isn’t something we invented on 4chan.
Pretty much all the mainstream Q people are also insane religious nutters. Not just the ones in congress, but the ones on twitter and the internet and they cite Christianity, god, and jesus regularly, When screen caps are posted on random Q forums its the same.
It didn’t start that way, but it’s how it spread.
I think it was On The Media that had a great episode on gnosticism and Q/trumpism and how they’re so similar. I’ll try to find it.
Found the episode. Everyone should give this a listen. It’s a brilliant episode
I don’t want to get into a theological debate. We will simply have to disagree that religion doesn’t require both the concept of faith and a supernatural worldview. I was using it just as an example when I mentioned resurrection. My point still holds if we talk about magical talking clams, souls living in volcanoes, mormon gifts of the spirit, turning people into salt, a resurrecting Buddha, or a belief that Jinn really exist among muslims.
Your idea that Q is filling some inherent gap in the human condition assumes such a gap for the supernatural exists. I think this is highly debatable.
I agree we are not differing that much here. Your point is a good one and worthy of discussion for sure. I’m also not that confident on my assertion in terms of which is proximate and which is the ultimate cause in terms of right wing media and religion.
The conspiracy theory that led to Q anon was birtherism
This episode seeded my thought on this topic for sure.