Comment by intothemild | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intothemild | Hacker News Reader

I got to the part where his parents were jehovas witnesses, and realised that perhaps people who are gullible enough to believe dumb shit like flat earth, are probably wired to believe dumb shit.

I’ll explain, my grandmother is a jehovas witness.

She believes any dumb shit she reads and hears, no matter how easily one could refute it. She will argue black and blue, and if you try and tell her she’s wrong, it only reinforces that she’s right and onto something “big” since we have to refute it.

Thing is about Jehovas witnesses is they believe that there’s a limited number of places in heaven, and only the truly devout will get a spot. There’s two real good ways to earn yourself a spot.

1. Donate a lot of money to the church over a lifetime. 2. Convert as many people as you can.

It is in essence a pyramid scheme.

No mattter how many times I’ve told her that she won’t earn one of the ~200,000 spaces in heaven (it’s really what they believe) because there’s easily a few million members of the “church” globally, and they would all be as devout as her... so if they all die before her surely they would get one of the 200,000 spots. Then what happens? Does their god say to person number 200,001 “oh shit man sorry we just sold out of spots in heaven. clicks teeth”

She will retort with “those other people have probably sinned and won’t get a spot.” Alluding that she’s better than people she doesn’t know. Which I’ll turn around on her and tell her that kind of thinking is probably a sin.

She will get up and walk away and we will begin this again next year.

Flat Earthers to me are similar to this kind of mindset. To hear that his flat earther parents were also Jehovas Witnesses... just wow.

> Thing is about Jehovas witnesses is they believe that there’s a limited number of places in heaven, and only the truly devout will get a spot

> No mattter how many times I’ve told her that she won’t earn one of the ~200,000 spaces in heaven (it’s really what they believe)

It's not. They do believe that a limited group of people - 144,000 to be exact - will live in heaven to be kings and rulers, but the rest of faithful JWs will live on a paradise earth, without any disease and death - forever. So they don't "compete" for the spots in heaven, if fact they believe those are people already chosen by God and feel that they have heavenly calling somehow. It is true that they feel they have to sort of "earn" their spot on the paradise earth by having deep faith and doing good deeds, among of which are contributing to the church financially, preaching the "good news" and converting people.

Source: I was a JW for 14 years and quit few years ago.

My dad has been a lifelong atheist and a generally rational person but recently, thanks to YouTube, he's discovered conspiracies and gone all in on just about all of them. 9/11, moon landings, crop circles are all definitely conspiracies. I'm not sure what he thinks about flat earth yet but he'll probably get there.

So it's not just pre-trained religious people who are susceptible. They're probably much more susceptible, though.

I make a daily effort to point out to elderly people in my family to be extremely aware of the electronic "fishing" for LandMoonDeniers, using "fishing hook/bait" headlines mixed in the middle of "serious/real" headlines, or adds placed by the website or the social media tool, and even spammed chat tool messages bought by the thousands from you know who.

When someone clicks one of this, they know you are easy to braiwash or scam. This is already very old technique , already used before Internet was so widespread, when a pretty girl will make cold calls all day long from some IP telephone call-center installed in Panama or Costa Rica or , in a small operation, in the Cayman Islands, and as she was trained, she could detect a LandMoonDenier in a minute by the phone, and she would set up the Larceny lace around his neck to scam her/his money.

Examples of this baits can be found, for instance, on The Sputinik News, what is very Scary and is a shame, and does't help at all the denial of Russian Interference by russian gov, but actually they don't really want to deny it(because it is not them who is doing this, If it was, they would never let the minimal vestige of evidence that it was them who do it), they know who is working in the shadows to elect , for example, a brainless in brazil, and they know this weird things are not coming from anyone from the U.S. or from the US intel, so they are just having fun playing and letting play, as long as the game is good for them.

:off course, the world's oldest profession is probably not that of the sex trade, or the sex trade was born at the same time that the criminal religious larceny firstly made by the first human who got a curious colored stone and told his tribe that this stone was God and that the village should give him/her good sex and good food,to keep the Priest of the Stone, bearer of the Words and Laws of God, happy, and to keep God happy by extension.

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