You’ve heard that aliens built the pyramids and the government is hiding flying saucers in Area 51.
You’ve heard that the moon landing never happened and it was all a giant hoax.
Maybe you should change who you’re hearing, then.
The Bible has been copied and recopied for thousands of years by thousands of people. These thousands of copies we have from these thousands of years look pretty similar to each other. Some spelling differences, a few changes in word order—think about what happened when you copied your buddy’s paper in school—but overall, there are too many copies made by too many people in too many scattered places for any nefarious group to have ever hidden or controlled anything.
Think about it: how good are you at getting your children to clean their rooms? Or getting your teenagers to behave? You think anyone could get everyone to obey the hidden nefarious ones that these theories suppose had to have existed? Fiction is fun, but come on: only preschool children think it’s describing real life.
And hidden or lost books of the Bible? Some have marketed the ancient pseudopigrapha and gnostic works with that title—I’ve got one on my shelves here—but those supposedly lost and hidden texts and are easily available from any good library or bookstore. Seminary students have been forced to read and study them for thousands of years. They’re about as entertaining and enlightening as watching paint dry. And make about as much sense.
If aliens have landed, then why do you still have so much trouble getting your computer to boot up? Wouldn’t the alien influence have made them work better? And why’s NASA spending so much money struggling just to get into orbit if we’ve reverse engineered flying saucers that can move like the Star Ship Enterprise? And if they knew there was life out there, don’t you think NASA would tell everyone? How much easier would it be then for them to get some cash out of the federal budget? You do know that they get less than one percent of the federal budget now, don’t you? The feds spend more than twice as much just on the food stamp program than they do on getting astronauts into space. Heck, we Americans spend more on credit card late fees each year than we spend on space exploration.
If the moon landing was a hoax, how’d we convince the Russians to go along? Let alone the French? And have you looked at the cheesy special effects they had in the 60’s? Like that would fool anyone!
We all like conspiracies and secrets, but remember, real life isn’t like in the movies. It just doesn’t work that way. No one’s really in control. The good guys don’t always win. Neither do the bad guys. And sometimes things just go wrong, and sometimes things just go right. After one of his generals was accused of treason for losing a battle, Napoleon is quoted as saying: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
And humans are pretty smart all by themselves. We don’t need stinking aliens to build piles of rocks like the pyramids. We can pile up rocks pretty well all by ourselves—if we have good enough motivation. It’s not that we can’t build the pyramids now, it’s just that we can’t think of a good enough reason to waste the time and money doing it.
And really: aliens have nothing better to do with themselves than mutilate cattle and make intricate designs in cornfields? Is that what you’d do as a member of a technologically advanced civilization after traveling a thousand light years? Why?
Me, I’d just be looking for a good cheeseburger.