I've thinking of how many of the communities and belief systems on the internet are very similar to religions. I've started calling conspiracy theories the "re

I've thinking of how many of the communities and belief systems on the internet are very similar to religions. I've started calling conspiracy theories the "religions of the internet" to make a point to my dad whose understandable distrust of the mainstream narrative has lead him to give more trust to the anti-establishment churches like https://themindunleashed.com https://themindunleashed.com that publish conspiracy theories, badly informed opinions on real science news, and pseudo-science mixed in with some real science news. His reaction to mistrusting the mainstream was to shift his trust somewhere easily identifiable as untrustworthy (to someone educated in the sciences) atleast partly because it acknowledges his mistrust of the mainstream and presents the only-mostly-wrong ideas in a fleshed out manner and authoritative tone. Some observations and layman speculation: I've just started reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari which suggests that there is a strong biological tendency toward adopting unsubstantiated beliefs to enable human cooperation at scale he called them collective myths. I've also once met a sincere flat earther, but I suspect his ideas arose from doing too much LSD before encountering the idea of tracing his beliefs to their root axioms.