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by HasntBeen on October 30th, 2009
I think "brainwashed" is too strong a term, it implies people being locked in a room and subjected to a constant barrage of messages designed to override competing thoughts... i.e. to condition the mind through repetition or stress, etc.
What religion typically does, in my opinion, is to "slip in a mickey", or rather a whole raft of mickeys. So the way that works is that religion takes some truth, and some practices which work, and mixes them with some half-truths, non-truths, and meaningless fluff, and then asks the congregant to accept the whole package as a unit -- suspending the detailed critical analysis of each component.
The techniques used to elicit this wholesale swallowing are pretty effective: peer pressure and belonging, fear (of hellfire, being branded a "sinner" or outsider, etc.), reward (heaven, being considered a saint), appeals to authority, appeals to tradition, and a whole raft of persuasive but dubious arguments and prose.
To understand religion, I think one must understand this bit about it being a mix of truth and falsehood... so intricately intertwined that the latter gets easily mistaken for the former while the delivery mechanism disables the believer's incentive to question the details. It's a mistake to say "religion is all bunk", and it's a mistake to say "my religion is the whole truth and nothing but". In between those two, clarity can be found with persistence.
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