Legend of the Illuminati

I typically use the term “Illuminati” with a note of sarcasm.
The question is not whether there exists a group of exceptionally intelligent psychopaths conspiring to rule the world, and coordinating their efforts on some level. So much is obviously fact. The question is whether they are as competent as is popularly assumed by such a very wide range of theorists. These theorists also encourage you to take all sorts of action to hinder them, action which is almost certainly a waste of resources.
I contend the distinctly Christian position is these people cannot possibly be as competent and coordinated as the fear mongers assume. By no means do I deny Satan can always find willing humans to promote his evil schemes. But it surrenders ground to the Devil to assume he will pull it off on the scale and level suggested by the activists. They are jousting with a Straw Man.
The Ancient Hebrew outlook does not consider the Apocalypse a literal future event. It’s a type, a symbol of human trend. Only after embracing Hellenism did the concept become concretely defined. It is not native to Scripture. The Book of Revelation aims at explaining the nature of our existence after the Fall here on this plane of existence. This is how things work, how they have always worked, and John was trying to explain to his parishioners how to build a mystical understanding so they could make sense of all the nasty things they faced. There have been multiple apocalypses, and many more to come. The persecution of Christians under Rome was just one, and unless you see John’s pastoral work as meaningful to those living then, you have no clue what John was like. It predicts future events in the sense nothing changes much from age to age, until it all Ends. That the final endpoint is associated with apocalypse as a concept is taken for granted.
So, yes, we face another apocalypse, but it’s hardly the last one. We’ll see the Four Horsemen for the hundredth time in human history because they represent the undying urge of humanity to dominate and control things they cannot and should not.
On top of this there is a huge false mythology about Satan and his function and powers. In case you didn’t grasp a fundamental element in the Book of Job, God does not allow Satan carte blanche. We can’t even guess what it would mean if He did give Satan free rein, but we can be sure His character means He does not. Satan is obliged to execute God’s wrath on sin, effectively serving God in ways Satan would rather not. We can’t comprehend all the details of this situation, but so much has been declared in Scripture be means of characterization. The Devil is bound by the moral laws of the universe, largely because he’s bound to this sphere of existence as part of his punishment. He’s not limited in the sense you and I are, but he’s not permitted to do everything our Western mythology assumes.
Despite the peculiar variations in religion and philosophy among the activists communities, Western Christian mythology flavors the underlying assumptions of what they post endlessly on their sites and their conversations with each other. The generally unspoken assumption behind most of it is these conspiring psychopaths have concrete plans, and if we don’t rise up and stop them, everything we see going bad must be viewed as part of those plans. These activists keep trying to describe their discoveries as exposing the plans of some variously defined Illuminati-type elite tribe.
Part of the reason all those alleged plans seem coherent and consistent is because dreams of dominating the human race always seem to take on a limited array of possibilities. It’s hard to imagine such overwhelming universal control without seizing various elements of political control and whatever it is humans regard as wealth. Such things are necessarily pretty narrowly defined, and there’s only so many ways you can grab them. (Part of the answer is valuing things they can’t grab, which leaves an awful lot.) All this frantic noise about protesting or preparing to kill people is just another form of political leverage, and requires using a certain expenditure of wealth.
Christian doctrine pretty bluntly says you can’t change anything significant in politics because God is in control and seldom consults us on it. The wild imagination of people who have embraced Western assumptions that they can and should be directly involved are deceived about the possibilities, as can be seen on even a purely intellectual level from that very same set of assumptions. Not because the Illuminati are so all powerful and all knowing, but because God is. On the other hand, the evil scheming of the psychopaths are a factor, as it can help us understand the specifics of what’s coming. We are taught to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, which are Hebrew symbols. In that context, those symbols point us to grasping the devilish nature of things (wise as serpents, aka demons), but without having much effect on things any more than doves might change a city’s politics. We are peaceful and disengaged from the ruckus. I expect non-Christian activists to miss the point, I am often amazed at how Christian believers can read the New Testament and still insist God wants them involved in political campaigns between two very evil political parties.
Thus, the majority of those conspiracy theories do indicate some factual awareness of some human ambitions for dominance, but most of them are unlikely to pan out even if we do nothing at all. At the same time, we will experience a lot of ugliness, but not so neatly coordinated on the human level as activists assume. Whatever the Illuminati might be, they are still utterly human with all the same biases, tastes and wishes, and all the same failures and weaknesses. They are hardly so neatly united in aspirations and objective intelligence, with secret plots so neatly capable of manipulating things with any lasting effect. They would like that, and surely hope we believe they can do it, but it won’t happen with any consistency. It’s better to recognize on a broad scale things are going bad because it’s the death throes of another civilization doomed to the same death all previous civilizations have suffered. While the activists warnings aren’t utterly pointless, the seriousness of the threat in terms of depth are overblown.
So do take some precautions and be wary of everyone and everything, but you should never imagine you can predict with any useful accuracy what’s coming. The Illuminati are not all that.