I’m watching Apocalypse in the Tropics documentary on Netflix about evangelicals and politics in Brazil and it’s mind boggling. Why do the religious people just blindly do whatever the pastors tell them?
There is also a selection bias at play here. I suspect that people who are more susceptible to manipulation are more likely to be religious.
Religion also includes a pretty horrific indoctrination program in children, ensuring that most of them remain uneducated and pliable enough to be manipulated for the rest of their lives by the church.
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Organized religion is a means to control people. Always has been. How can anybody be surprised to learn after thousands of years they have actually perfected the craft of controlling people?
I think maybe you have it backwards people who are easily swayed/trusting of authority/gullible are going to be naturally drawn toward religion. Skeptics/those who don’t take things at face value are going to be naturally skeptical of it.
Religion doesn’t make you stupid but it’s very attractive to the sort
The flip side of that is manipulators are going to gravitate toward religion as a easy way to get what they want from the suckers.
Their entire worldview depends on blindly believing things that don’t make sense and are unverifiable
They are trained from a very young age to accept anything an authority tells them.
This is how I look at it mostly. I also think, and statistics show as well, that religious folks are less intelligent on average… partly because they are taught a bunch of nonsense.
Pretty simple. They are groomed from birth and often until death, to blindly trust the “leaders” of their community. At some point they develop critical thinking skills, but they are so deeply manipulated to trust the cult that they face an internal conflict: Break away from your core values, family, friends, community, comfort of purpose and greater value, etc. Or don’t apply critical thinking to certain topics in your life.
Faced with what is essentially a social and moral death they ofteb choose the simpler option, just don’t let logic into that part of their life.
Honestly, hard to balme them, I myself have faced similar issues in my life and sadly didn’t always have to courage and strength to go with logic and instead kept with social norms that I know are wrong. To be fair, I think that 90% of people are blind to their own illogical (and often harmful) beliefs, but they easily identify it in others.
I think you have it backwards, it’s no wonder people who are easy to manipulate get drawn into religion.
2 Corinthians 5:7
For we live by faith, not by sight.
The whole concept of faith implies believing something without proof. Not a long stretch to see how people might believe in other, non religious, things without evidence.
And not just without proof, but to ignore proof if you see it!
Proverbs 3:5-6 5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
And
Proverbs 28:26 26 Those who trust in themselves are fools, but those who walk in wisdom are kept safe.
I think what proverbs is saying is less about evidence and moreso about following your heart and being arrogant.
John 20:25-28 ESV
So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
It’s the modern Scheister equivalent of “Trust me bro!”
Religion has a build in self defense mechanism as that it will prime people to expect people to call them fools for believing foolish things, so it actually serves to strengthen their faith. “See, pastor told me they’d come for my relationship with God!”
All of this relies heavily on getting into people when they are young and their brains are still developing.
People do not understand how deeply religion gets ingrained and how damaging it is.
You’ll have adults that have left the faith, because they’ve seen the bullshit that it is that are still afraid of hell because they’ve been bombarded with this shit since they could talk.
I think it’s because religions, cults, sports teams or whatever have community. Community comes with shared identities and beliefs. Nobody wants to be outcasted or shunned. So you follow along. Your friends are there, your family is there … they all believe the same thing.
The bubble. I have a friend who ended up in a ‘bubble’ church. They get all their news from the church. TV channels: church. Cinema: church.
They have a STEM degree. They’re not stupid, and yet they are.
Because they have been taught, from childhood, to just believe whatever the guy up front tells them to.
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For the abrahamitic religions, I’d say that the problem is the age of their texts. Their metaphors and the societies they were created in are so outdated that in order to live by the texts, which have to be followed since they are the only cornerstone everything is built upon, you need specialists that are authority figures like priests who you have to trust as a laiman in order to learn what the texts meaning is. Because not everyone can devote themselves to theology.
Many of them grew up in the church, attending 2-3 times per week and spend every single Sunday surrounded by people of one mind. As children we tend to default to believing people and when everyone you know says the same thing constantly it becomes real fucking easy to just accept as truth without questioning (especially when your religion contains a fancy “faith” clause that exists to hand wave away any inconsistency and when doubt itself is enough for an eternal trip to the fire pit).
The real kicker is that, having been trained since birth to accept as truth anything the powerful man in the front says you are primed to fall for politicians making wild and provably false claims without presenting any evidence.
It’s why religions make such a BIG DEAL about “faith”.
Faith is simply a commitment to believe things that otherwise contradict obvious reality (but which invariably work to some “leader’s” advantage).
In a word: gullible. Full stop.
