(4) Protestants doing an unholy amalgamation of Catholic spirituality and Rational Scientific Inquiry to reach absurdist conclusions at their intersection.
Nar man. It isn't all about idiocy. Not everyone has your level of education; and even aside from that, people tend to grab bits and pieces of ideas that support what they already believe.
So if someone believes in god and the power of pray etc. but they feel that life still isn't going there way - they might see some value in this 'reason'. And even if this evil satellite thing is still implausible, a person might take bits of the idea to make their own version about something / someone else blocking prays. It could be 4G radiation, or vaccine microchips, or some other boogieman crap. It all feeds into a persons broader 'understanding' of how things could be even if they don't take in the whole idea.
You and I are basically immune to this particular post. It just looks like total garbage immediately. But it is incorrect and dangerous to think that only 'idiots' can be conned or tricked. All it takes is for someone to post ideas on the boundaries of what you understand, with a taste of what you want to hear. That's what hooks people in. For smart and educated people, that boundary of understanding can be pretty far in - but it still exists, and that's where the manipulation can still get them.
Yeah, I hear you, but this is a person that is unconscious, I mean if they're using the internet to post stuff, have they even thought or tried to understand one iota of what the hell is going on?
I've met some smart people that make these reasoning errors because they want to believe that phenomena just cannot be complex. Not even I'm excluded from these errors, I'm also just human.
I can sympathize with uneducated people and them grasping for fictitious enemies because they lack control of and in their own lives.
What makes things even worse is that this is supposed a pastor, and he's using his authority to spread this bullcrap.
I'm not immune to this type of misinformed and irrational thinking, but I think my confusion results from more sophisticated material in many cases, that being said I still hold irrational ideas around conspiracies, but I don't hold them as gospel, merely as possibiliry.
Unfortunately even us educated people might not be spared when generative AI begins to rewrite our history in each of our 5 senses and leaves us no way to look back in time to find the ground truth.
If there's something the internet has confirmed since its' inception, is that humanity is both incredibly clever and incredibly stupid, in equal measure, beyond what I ever imagined was possible, beyond what I could conceive.