Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[emjay]

I'm really sorry the indoctrination is still causing you such distress

I think it might be worth seeking some professional help regarding this. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some techniques for battling this kind of thing. Even CBT could probably help; and maybe there are more specialized approaches.

It's a fucking evil thing. More so because it deals with the intangible, so is harder to wrestle with. If there's anything I can do to help, let me know It's designed to provoke emotional responses, and the antidote is calm, rational, logical thought. But when the emotion is powerful enough, it can swat the logic aside. Religion relies on this.

Thanks Rob for your concern But it's not that bad. I was just thinking about something you said the other day about some ex-Christians not being able to shift the idea of hell, and that's the case with me... I give it more consideration than I should, just by virtue of these context dynamics. Some of the time at least. And I was just thinking about how unfair it was to be even giving it the time of day, whereas something like purgatory I can write off just as fast as you can because it's not part of the Christianity I grew up with. Basically I can never be the way you are with regards to Christianity but I can be regarding every other religion.

I was just thinking 'there's gotta be a way to deprogram this shit' so I looked that up on amazon, and it came up all cults and what have you... and it is a cult in a sense... but then I realised I already know what it is and how to approach it (if not solve it... yet at least)... a coherent context. That's all it is... that's the only thing that gives it power... that it exists in such detail. So I think that was a valuable realisation to have; that the fact that subjectively I see Christianity as much more plausible than any other religion has nothing to do with its evidence... nothing to do with its quality... only its quantity. In other words its plausibility (to me) is only an illusion... it was never 'proved' to me in any other way that many interconnecting details being learned, and that in itself being enough to sustain its activation as a coherent context.

And how to beat it... how to deprogram it? I don't know for sure but at least I've got a framework to look at it from; I know how neural contexts work... what sustains them and what shuts them down. A context gets its power/resilience from 'bi-directional feedback'. At a basic level they are sustained through stereotypes... their common features allow them to form a solid core of activation that can persist even in the absence of continued input because they form a self-supporting feedback loop. And the other thing about them is that they are quick to activate... a process called bootstrapping, again reliant on the dynamics of bidirectional feedback. So anyway what I'm saying is it's difficult to let a context die out once it's established because it is very easily 'topped up'... one minor input can send activation cascading through the network, and top the whole thing up because of the feedback support. So in order to let it die out one approach is to mindfully divert attention whenever any detail... no matter how big or small... comes to mind... so that it cannot top it up. An interesting example of this (imo)
is say you're learning to drive (as I was) and you have to stop for health reasons but you plan to go back to it. As long as you're still planning to go back to it, you retain all that knowledge... you could get back into a car months down the line and remember most of it... but as soon as you decide that you're not going to go back, you forget it all. In my opinion that's an example of this; that the will to return to it is the small input required to bootstrap the context and keep it active but choosing to put it behind you is what allows it to shut down and you to forget it. But back to the Christianity context I think Min's on the right track... call it out as bullshit at every opportunity (an alternative to mindfully diverting attention ) no matter how small the detail, because even small details have the ability to bootstrap it and bring it back up to full strength.