Am I really making a choice or is everything I do influenced by outside events that set me on the path of choices that I thought I was making? Because with every decision I make you can trace it back to an event that influenced that decision even when we try to act at random you can find a pattern to our randomness and trace it to something that had influenced that. It's the butterfly effect/chaos theory, if it were possible to change one small thing of our past it might have a great effect on the out come of the future, so with that could you really believe that freewill actually exists or are we just slaves to a cosmic push that set us into motion?

Edit: I you believe in the multiverse theory where there is a universe for every decision ever made then in this universe there is a path of decisions that we have to follow. You could easily say that the concept of freewill was created by the ego of human beings to trick ourselves into believing we have more control than we actually do.

Free will is definitely an illusion. So is the distinction between living and non-living.

And in the end it really doesn't matter which button I click, because the path laid out for me has already decided that I think Donald Trump could win this election.

It probably all already happened.

Dude is so off the rails now that all of his heroism on 9/11 is long forgotten.

I hate how the phrase "conspiracy theory" has become such a dirty word in politics.

Remember the conspiracy theory of our government infecting young black males with STDs? It turned out to be true. The Tuskegee experiments are much more off the wall than any conspiracy theory laid out about the Clintons and they turned out to be true.

the podcast inquiring minds examined the phenomenon of true events being discarded as false because they seemed preposterous and conspiratorial

The psychologist argued people disinclined to believe in conspiracy theories were just as likely to be hoodwinked as people who take a liking to them

Meaning most people will disregard the truth on the grounds that believing it will associate them with others who believe in it. It's not based on evidence or facts either way, but rather appearances

What if I carefully pick and choose which conspiracy theory to believe based upon the facts that are laid before me?

If you're truly objective you have very rare critical thinking skills

Only to an extent.