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People stay religious because they're impressionable. We all are. Over the course of history, people's beliefs, values, and goals (religious and non-religious) have dramatically shifted. For example, our ambitions to grow wealth. Only with an empowered middle class is that even possible. Now, we all drive the same cars, eat the same shit, and like the same things as everyone else does. From culture to culture, we get imbued with the lifestyles of those around us, and adopt them not only as our own, but as truth. I don't believe in God, but I recognize my own following hypocrisy. It's almost impossible to avoid. It's to our evolutionary advantage to figure out the standard and adapt to it, to gather information from our environments to best thrive in it. Unfortunately, this cognitive ability leaves us with the weakness of impressionability in the face of misinformation. When you're raised from a young age to believe certain things, you form a world picture in which your consciousness resides every day, constantly reinforced. Religion provides an unfalsifiable and systematic explanation for how things are, building on a lot of human hopes and worries; wanting "purpose", an afterlife, an explanation. All to say, religion gets into people through the very same ways that all of our other sometimes silly beliefs come in, only those people are willing to trust without proof more, which I know I'm not capable of. The human brain is more malleable than we think; we have less free will than we think. Cults provide an extreme example (where the conditions of influence as so exaggerated as to speed up the brainwash process, for example at some initial "retreats" where potential recruits are subject to insufficient nourishment, no time alone, not enough sleep, etc.)
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simon -at- iacash dot com
icq: 231-421-229
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