We cannot promote conspiracies and still be prepared to speak of the one who is Truth.

 

Grief keeps following me—it seems that the past keeps unraveling—but God surely knows—His ways are not in darkness.

I have written before about a time, when working in apologetics and new religions ministry I watched various apologetics groups around me fall into troubling ways of doing ministry. One group, in Berkeley, started using conspiracy theories even anti-Semitic theories. Jesus chased the money lenders out of the temple and they went out and became the international bankers they wrote. Another apologetic group tried to solve heresy problems by attempting to cast demons out of Christians a heresy itself. The Holy Spirit does not dwell where demons dwell and one is not a Christian without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Now I am grieving over another ministry group as I watch them go down the broken road of conspiracies and radical ideas. This is a ministry I have loved and respected. I had taught workshops alongside them and used the materials they sent about worldviews,  but now …. The head of their ministry, Rich Poll, wrote in an e-mail sent August 12, “My wife Pam and I began the ministry of Apologia in 1995. Since then, our work has had a growing focus of tracking the worldview/ideology/human rights connection. It began with worldview alone, but lately the rest has become ever more urgent.” But what is the rest?

There are three items in the e-mail and two are very troubling. Poll quoted an e-mail his wife had sent out, “I've been researching election fraud since last Nov and what I've discovered is that, according to physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and cyber security experts, the voting machines used in the USA are totally unsecured and easily hacked. Several of these experts have proven the machines are controlled by algorithms and hackers.” She goes on to write about an event which will supposedly prove the truth of election fraud. She writes:

There's a big event happening this week called a Cyber Symposium which will be streaming all day and night this Tues Wed and Thursday on www.frankspeech.com. A group of white hat hackers recorded the Packet Captures for the entire Nov 2020 election which means they can prove what exactly happened in the voting machines — if they were hacked and if votes were changed. [If you click on any of the links in the e-mail you will reach “Frank” a new platform promoted by Mike Lindell. You have to join to hear anything. I have not joined.]

This is about Mike Lindell’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen by China. If you are interested in the truth about Packet Captures and Lindell’s films there is an excellent article on The Dispatch site, Fact Checking ‘Absolutely 9-0,’ the Latest Documentary From Mike Lindell. However you also need to subscribe to The Dispatch to read the information. There is a great deal of detail in the article but I will try to cover a few points here.

The article simply details the impossibility of Lindell being able to see what he claims to see. Khava Himmelman, author of the article writes:

 Kevin Skoglund, president and chief technologist of Citizens for Better Elections, a nonpartisan nonprofit described as being “dedicated to promoting election security and efficiency in Pennsylvania,” explained in an interview with The Dispatch Fact Check that PCAP, or packet capture, is a standard networking way that you can view traffic over the internet. “Traffic over the internet is sent as packets of information,” he said. “They aren’t encrypted, necessarily, but they are encoded, because they don’t need to be human-readable while they’re in transit.”

Further into the article Himmelman quotes “Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science” writing:

Jones also noted why it would be so difficult to access this information. Jones mentioned that Lindell is claiming that his PCAPs show exactly how many votes were stolen through these internet transactions, but his evidence doesn’t hold up. “The only way to capture packets addressed to and from all those different election offices around the country would be to have the resources of the NSA [the National Security Agency],” he said. “That is, if his data is real and not entirely fictional, the only source would be someone inside the NSA providing it. This would be a felony violation of U.S. law—actually a compound felony.”

Himmelman continues:

Jones also pointed out a number of flaws with Lindell’s supposed PCAP evidence. “He claims to not only know who sent and who received the packets, but also what those packets meant,” said Jones. “That means that his source has decrypted the traffic. Modern cryptography is really strong. The NSA and the FBI have a very hard time breaking codes used routinely for such things as encrypted email and web service.”

Additionally, as Jones points out, Lindell says that in certain cases, PCAPs show evidence of specific numbers of votes stolen. “That requires understanding the mechanism of vote theft,” he said. “It's very hard for me to imagine a message, in a single packet, saying ‘steal 10 votes from Trump.’

There is reference to another film, The Deep Rig produced by Patrick Byrne, also insisting the election was fraudulent.

The other item in the e-mail that troubled me was connected to the pandemic we are all experiencing. Once again Pam Poll is quoted:

I believe this authoritarian control is the ultimate goal of the perpetrators of the Covid virus. Vaccine passports are now required to function in Israel. Even though the vaccines have failed to protect people from the latest mutation (driven by the vaccines), they are still forcing people to get injected regardless of millions of adverse reactions worldwide including death. Hard to understand such evil would take place an (sic) a country that was founded by Nazi survivors. Pray we can resist Vaccine Passports here.

Clearly there are several problems here including the assumption that there were perpetrators who sought authoritarian control, we don’t yet know how COVID-19 occurred, we may never know. The other problems—the idea that the vaccines have failed to protect from the latest mutations—that the latest mutation was driven by the vaccines—that there are “millions” of adverse reactions caused by the vaccines—that vaccine passports are evil.  There can of course be differences of opinion on the vaccine passports but when the opinion is based on conspiracies that is another matter. And this leads to my overall concerns.

The biblical picture of God and His rule is kindness, compassion, justice and truth. And those attributes go together. In fact, Jesus Christ, very God of very God, is Truth, is Life, is the Way. When I was still in the PCUSA our presbytery leader, upset at some words I had written on my blog, asked me to read I Corinthians 13 as part of our worship service and read it twice. I was fairly certain that he asked me to do the reading because he felt I needed to know more about love but before the day came he called and suggested I should probably only read it once. I told him no I would read it twice. Here is the reason why. The chapter explaining what love is and does states in verse six “Does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.”

We were concerned at the time with voting to retain the biblical view of marriage which is biblically between one man and one woman. We failed and many of us are no longer PCUSA. But now, for me, and hopefully for other Christians the issue is the Lordship of Jesus. We cannot promote conspiracies and still be prepared to speak of the one who is Truth. We cannot major in our own particular ideology over the truth of the triune God of the Bible. Our urgency, if we are faithful, whether apologist or simply follower of Jesus, must be to clear away the rubbish of false doctrine which includes conspiracies. It is to make the path clear so that others can freely rejoice in Truth as they submit to the Lordship of Christ.