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?
People with a highly metaphysical worldview are easier to deceive and manipulate because their normal logic barriers have already been broken down - ie, if you already believe that the earth and everything on it was created by an omnipotent superbeing in six days, it’s not much of a further leap to believe that demons are making you horny.
Stupid, sexy demons!
aka: you gotta be dumb to be religious in the first place
Religion isn’t the only arena that has charlatans, manipulators and con artists.
No, but it’s certainly a big draw. People looking to the collection plate to buy absolution, buy better health, a better life, whatever…that already believe in magic are far more easily manipulated. Religion has always been attractive to charlatans, grifters, and even warmongers and hatreds. You an far more easily get people to hand you power and money with religion.
In a word: gullible. Full stop.
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 Their metaphors and the societies they were created in are so outdated that in order to live by the texts, which have to be followed since they are the only cornerstone everything is built upon, you need specialists that are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.
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.
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.
Literally, because they’re trained, usually from the age of children, to believe things without evidence. Their beliefs are based ENTIRELY on the conviction of other brainwashed
idiotsreligious people, which can be very convincing as a small child who’s otherwise completely and utterly dependant on the understanding of the adults around them.This is from someone who grew up in a religion and thankfully realized other peoples’ conviction is absolutely NOT a valid basis for understanding truth.
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?
Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
A lot of churches are cults. The Jehovah’s Witnesses put their religion before their own kids and shun them. They’ll pass on a blood transfusion for their religion. So yeah, mind control is a real thing.
Imo, because they expect God/Source/whatever to be a cosmic vending machine, without doing any internal work on themselves, or external work to make manifest the world they envision, with a large Side-Order of blame, shame, and guilt, scattered, smothered, and covered with greed, vengeance, and distraction (addictions included).
People are stupid. They can be made to believe any lie because either they want to believe it’s true or because they are afraid it’s true.
-Terry Goodkind, “Wizard’s First Rule”
Hate to break it to you, it’s not just religious people.
This the book with the extended author self-gratifying torture sex scene in the middle that has almost nothing to do with the story?
The author who went on about people being stupid when the entire plot hinges on the fact that the main character was forced to memorize a book for like, no reason, at the beginning?
The world with a tribe of “uneducated savages” who are saved by white man ingenuity, because, despite living in an area with heavy rainfall, they never thought of making roofs that don’t leak?
The obvious self-insert main character who escapes being forced to breed with said savages by convincing them his jizz is poison?
I misread the original quote as being from Terry Pratchett and as I was reading your comment I was like “No way in hell, what is this guy talking about?”.
Good heavens, no. Terry Pratchett is more than capable of nuance, subtext, and a love for his characters that goes beyond propping up his own fantasy.
Oh, so that means people are smart and never believe lies??
Go away
You sound like someone who thinks Terry Goodkind is poignant.
If you believe in a magic man in the sky and a talking snake, it’s probably pretty easy to convince them of other things too.
Religion has already filtered out a population segment more likely to defer to authority figures when faced with facts that contradict reality.
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.
Think about how scary and tough life is on your own. Think about everything bad that’s happening, and realizing that no one is in control. This we are all aware of, but we choose to confront that. Christians at least (because it’s who I grew up with so I just have the most experience) find comfort in their church. It gives them the feeling that there is someone in charge, that it’s not all just chaos but there is a plan, and rules, and a defined right and wrong. (Again, ignoring all the things wrong with the church, just from my examples).
Believing allows them to not have to worry about the world. There’s a plan. It’s not chaos. It’s safe. To me it’s very natural why people choose it, it’s honestly scary facing the chaotic real world we have, and I honestly don’t think most people can handle it.
Survival of the fittest has failed humanity many cenuries ago.
Survival of the Fittest isn’t failing, it just doesn’t follow what you’d like to be “fittest”. If a person is more reproductively successful because they’re religious, guess what, that makes them “fittest”. It really doesn’t matter if it’s stupid and illogical, just that it succeeds.
No, because that’s not fit to the environment as in actual living space environment. Humans have largely removed themselves from the natural environment, so we are no longer nearly as subject to survival of the fittest in the way it’s meant to apply to a changing species ala darwinism.
Besides, Idiocracy like behavior only further proves my point, it doesn’t prove the environment is magically different.
No I’m sorrry, “the environment” is just everything around you. Your house is the environment, new york city is nature. These distinctions are made up in our heads but deep down there is no essential difference between your house and a tree, or the city you live in and a forest. We haven’t seperated ourselves from anything, we’ve just changed it. Changing evolutionary pressures doesn’t mean we’ve somehow unmoored ourselves from it, traits are still being selected for and against it really doesn’t matter how anyone, or thing cares about it. It MAY end up getting us all killed, but the process will continue anyways and the “fit” will continue to reproduce more successfully than the “unfit”. It’s not that I don’t agree with you that the things that get selected for aren’t what I’d consider good, or that will make us happiest as a species. It’s merely that natural selection as a process will not “care” about what we care about because it is a process, nothing more.
That is an insanely dumb way to look at what environment is as far as darwinism is concerned. It’s like pretending being on a ship in the middle of the ocean is the same as swimming out there.
Only one of these conditions is meant to apply to the process of evolution and darwinism.
“meant” what do you mean by “meant”? who meant? why did they mean for that? You’re not making sense, you’re ascribing special properties to manmade enviorns and acting like they’re polluted, bad, or different in some essential way. That manmade enviorns are polluted, harmful, or otherwise damaging is just incidental, they don’t HAVE to be that way, you cannot just assume that they’re innately worse than “natural” enviornments, they’re just different. I just want to understand how you think “manmade” is any different from the effort ALL fauna and flora makes to change their enviornment to suit their needs. Is it “natural” the bees build hives? Is it “natural” for beavers to damn creeks? Were trees “meant” to alter the soil chemistry around them to fight off competitors? Did bryophytes defy nature’s will by evolving a waxy cuticle to survive in locations untouched by plants before they evolved? Humans, nor any other animal whatsoever was “intended” to live somewhere or some way. This a fundamental error so many people make when talking about the ecology of our planet, there is psuedo-religious way of looking at things and ascribing of anthropocentric values. None of this has a purpose, none of it has a goal, none of it has an intent, or a desire, or any sort of human-like trait.
No, not toxic traits. Literal, absolute, augmentations to survivability.
I agree that THE WORD “environment” applies to them.
You need to understand that they ARE NOT “the environment” as applied to darwinism/survival of the fittest. They are augmented and artificial, and that removes humans from natural evolution, which is the entire point being made. Humans changing their environment so much as to have wholly separate spaces with wholly separate conditions than nature removes humans from the natural order of events of the planet’s biome. Yes species still change under artificial conditions. The point is humans are more subject to artificial conditions than natural. At least until natural conditions get bad enough.
Survival of the fittest is who is best at sexing not who is best at thinking
Fittiest just means most adaptable to their environment.
No, it means most fit for the environment. If the environment changes, a species can become less fit to the point of dying off. Adaptability just means the species is more likely to stay “fit”.
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.
