Question

why conspiracy theories are so widely believed? Consider conspiracy theories like: condoms are a Western plot to wipe out African countries, climate change is really the result of government cloud seeding practices and not carbon emissions, the government is lying to us when they say that vaccines don't cause autism, and HIV was manufactured by the government to control black people.

Answer 1

mans love gossip. We love it so much that whenever we find it, our initial reaction is to

immediately tell someone, and if we don’t find

a salacious story we make it up and tell someone anyway.Let me lead-in with a quote from my grandfather, Forrest Goodrich. He taught me that I should never believe anything I hear and only half of what I see. When it comes to conspiracy theories we all should takehis words of wisdom to heart.Many people simply

can’t resist getting the details on the latest conspiracy theories, no matter how

far-fetched they may seem. At the same time, many people quickly denounce any conspiracy theory asuntrue and sometimes as unpatriotic or just plain ridiculous. I have friends who believe in conspiracytheories, the more ridiculous the better. I used to spend hours trying to convince them how stupid they were.

However, the reaction was always, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Now I just

listen politely then hurry on my way, knowing that we will just have to agree to disagree.Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminalor political conspiracy. However, it has become almost exclusively in reference to any fringe theory whichexplains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by political, religious, criminal, scientific,or international conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. To

conspire means “to join in a

secret agreement to engage in an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful

end.” The term “conspiracy theory” is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret

military, religious, corporate, scientific, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom,

from “the people.”

To many, conspiracy theories are just human nature. Not all people in this world arehonest, hardworking and forthcoming about their intentions. Certainly, we can all agree on this. So how

did the term “conspiracy theory” get grouped in with

urban legend, fiction, fantasy and folklore?Skeptics are important in achieving an objective view of reality. Healthy skepticism is importantand based on empirical evidence. However, the skepticism of the conspiracy theorists is based on emotions,manufactured evidence, rumors, conjecture, and supposition.

On December 19, 1998, a month after President Clinton declared AIDS a crisis in black America -- a hard-won concession by the Congressional Black Caucus and a handful of determined African-American advocates -- Reverend Al Sharpton and a dirty dozen of community activists assembled for an AIDS assault of a different kind in Harlem.

They were responding to the same crazy reality: African Americans, who constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population, then made up 32 percent of PWAs, a ratio that crept to 33 percent in 1999. But unlike Mario Cooper, whose Leading for Life campaign twisted the arms of African-American leaders to take on AIDS, or Maxine Waters, the empathetic Caucus chair who led the charge on Capitol Hill, Sharpton’s six-hour-long meeting took aim at the reeling statistics with a whirlwind of theories. These theories, about why exactly AIDS shows such a strange affinity for blacks, have been blowing across America for more than 10 years now, stoking fires that no one’s figured out how to put out.

One burning voice belongs to Boyd Ed Graves. Sitting at a well-polished dining room table at his home in Cleveland’s black, solidly middle-class Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Graves offers an explanation for those numbers: genocide, plain and simple. In fact, he’s suing the U.S. government for using tax dollars to secretly develop HIV in a lab and then deploy it as a biological weapon to kill blacks. It’s ethnic cleansing, he says, and in the end not a single black soul will remain.

For the record, Graves, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 (and now has an undetectable viral load on HAART), concedes it’s possible that he contracted the virus through unprotected sex. But more likely, he believes, he was the victim of a stealth dart gun, a “micro-bio-inoculator” that can tag unsuspecting victims from 100 feet away without so much as a prick, a product of the U.S. government’s biological warfare program. Or, he imagines, he may have been one of thousands of unlucky African Americans infected through a bite by a virus-distributing mosquito bred by government contractors at an island facility off the shores of Manhattan. Or: “The HIV virus is the result of a century-long hunt for a contagious cancer that selectively kills.” “If they didn’t want me to discover the true origins of AIDS,” Graves says, cutting a glare in my direction, “they shouldn’t have given it to me.”

Cloud Trutherism (my own term for it) is one of many conspiracy theories surrounding climate change. It is not your standard climate denial, but rather a persistent belief that airplanes are the real and ignored cause of climate change. It’s worth mentioning here that the carbon impact of air travel is to blame for a significant portion of emissions, but that’s not the Cloud Truther cause.

Adherents’ beliefs range from the somewhat benign (cloud-seeding projects are having runaway and largely ignored effects on the climate) to the extreme (the government is secretly using aircraft for geoengineering and spraying its citizens with disease-causing chemicals), but it all boils down to: It can’t just be carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. The scientists are wrong, and, depending on what part of the internet you land upon, part of a nefarious global plot to control the climate.Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that is caused by differences in how the brain functions. People with ASD may communicate, interact, behave, and learn in different ways.

There is no link between vaccines and autism.

Some people have had concerns that ASD might be linked to the vaccines children receive, but studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD. In 2011, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) tExternal on eight vaccines given to children and adults found that with rare exceptions, these vaccines are very safe.