(January 10, 2017 at 9:40 am)robvalue Wrote: Religious people are deluded, yes. But it's a set of very organized delusions that have been nurtured for a very long time. The power of indoctrination is astonishing, and it takes a strong mind to break out of it. Most people won't even see that there's anything to break out of. Their brain has been altered.
So they do indeed sound like crazy people. But they're not, on the whole, crazy. They are victims of psychological programming, mostly. That's not their fault.
I find indoctrination repulsive and I try to encourage theists not to do it with their own children, and to instead allow them to decide what to believe for themselves. It does seem that people are tending towards a more liberal approach in this regard.
As a very young kid, I began to suspect that there was something quite phoney about religion. I'd say that it was a Sunday school lesson about 'Noah's Ark' that planted the Atheism seed.
I do not consider myself to be exceptionally brilliant, but even as a little kid I knew that there was something bogus about religion. Now if a kid can figure this out, how can it be that so many grown adults, with presumably fully developed minds, can't???
