(April 27, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: why do Christians believe in Jesus? For the same reasons anybody believes anything: Because the proposition integrates well within their broader web of beliefs and reduces it's entropy. In other words, because it makes sense to them.

Like a flat earth, makes sense to flat earthers.

(May 15, 2025 at 1:43 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: It wasn't so hard to isolate people when most of them never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born, which was all of history minus a recent comparatively paper-thin slice in recent times. Most people more than a couple of hundred years ago could live their whole lives without having a 20 minute converstion with someone of a different religion or no religion. Knowledge of other religions was often limited to caricatures and stereotypes their own religion taught them. And now that that is no longer the case, we see more peole switching denominations, religions, or turning away from religion altogether than ever before. But about half of teens still follow the same religion their parents did or one that's very similar, in the USA.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...and-teens/

When I grew up in the 1960s, we lived in a medium-sized city in Indiana in which there were something like 40 Protestant churches and only one Catholic church (if I remember correctly). There were no Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or even Jehovah's Witnesses. Almost everyone I knew was a believer, and they were very nice people. It could barely occur to me back then that they were all mistaken or misled, even though I never quite understood what I was supposed to understand. So I thought it was my own fault somehow until several years later, when I was asked to repeat the Christian oath to join a new church after we moved. I couldn't bring myself to do it since I still didn't understand that Son-of-God business.

(May 15, 2025 at 2:32 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 15, 2025 at 2:26 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Ah, I missed it. Pretty generic, but definitely an answer. Thank you.

The initial comment was generic, but I then spent the next 100 pages defending it at a deeper level, even in our current debate over propaganda and persuasion. .

You're not debating.  That's the trouble with a tq.  It begins with the tacit acknowledgement of the countervailing opinion, and proceeds to claim only that everything else is just as filthy.

(May 15, 2025 at 2:21 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: I think that the problem that John's having is that he can't seem to distinguish between propaganda and indoctrination, which are matters of persuasion and influence, and the much more absolute cases of "mind control" and "brain-washing".

No, that's the thing. I'm treating propaganda as nothing more than an advertisement for some ideology—and all ads are attempts at persuasion. But I have a technical definition of persuasion, and I understand how it works and how it doesn't. And the way I'm seeing it used here leans heavily towards something like mind-control, where the person exposed to the propaganda is involuntarily influenced by it.

Daily reminder.  Johnny fears the scrolls.

Life must be so damned easy when you make up your own definitions for words, instead of the ones upon which the rest of us have agreed.

Boru

(May 15, 2025 at 6:47 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: And the way I'm seeing it used here leans heavily towards something like mind-control, where the person exposed to the propaganda is involuntarily influenced by it.

I guess that if my own opinions seem absolutely self-evident and undeniable to me, proven beyond the point that any reasonable person could disagree, then I need some kind of extreme method to explain that disagreement.

So instead of saying, "those people reached a different conclusion," we have to say "they have been brainwashed against their will." Because only nefarious hypnosis-like methods could make people believe differently than I do.

The other explanation, which we see all the time, is that anyone who disagrees with me is simply dishonest. 

Not long ago I was insisting that the Democrats share some of the blame for the outcome of the last election, and for this I was accused of wanting to legitimize political lies. And of course you have been called a liar on this thread, due to your stubborn refusal to agree to certain details about how children learn. You are sinning against Truth!

(May 15, 2025 at 6:47 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 15, 2025 at 2:21 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: I think that the problem that John's having is that he can't seem to distinguish between propaganda and indoctrination, which are matters of persuasion and influence, and the much more absolute cases of "mind control" and "brain-washing".

No, that's the thing. I'm treating propaganda as nothing more than an advertisement for some ideology—and all ads are attempts at persuasion. But I have a technical definition of persuasion, and I understand how it works and how it doesn't. And the way I'm seeing it used here leans heavily towards something like mind-control, where the person exposed to the propaganda is involuntarily influenced by it.

You may be using it that way but nobody else is. Propaganda and indoctrination all work by persuasion and neither is absolute. They both work by percentages, as several others have stated. It isn't as if anybody thinks that some rando walks up and says, "Hi, do you have a moment to discuss our Lord and Saviour? Let me give you the five-minute easy-bake instaChristian brain rinse." That isn't a real thing and I don't think that anybody's suggesting that it is. Persuasion and coercion are both very real, and if anybody had talked about "atheist propaganda," there wouldn't have been a doubt in your mind. Raising a child in an environment saturated with, "Believe! Do not question! Do not doubt! Doubting will get you Eternal Damnation!" complete with a cute mascot named "Doubting Thomas" should have clear and obvious consequences that would involve Child Services if it weren't traditional.

We're all involuntarily influenced by most everything that we encounter. Nobody is master of all that goes on in their cranium. That's the entire reason that advertisers target our subconscious. For somebody who "understands how it works" you seem to have an amazingly poor grasp of it. But nobody's suggesting any sort of mind control, merely a fixed mindset developed from a long life lived in full cultural immersion that would be very difficult to change as you'd know if you'd ever discussed it with anybody of another religion.

Now, if you're quite done defining strawmen into existence, the more interesting question that you ought to be addressing is why Christian propaganda is failing. Having been successful for over a millennium, it's now in danger of being rendered useless in a matter of a few generations. I'm fairly certain that, regardless of which side of the debate you're on, the answers to that question will be far more interesting than tilting at these windmills that you've defined.

(May 15, 2025 at 9:35 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I guess that if my own opinions seem absolutely self-evident and undeniable to me, proven beyond the point that any reasonable person could disagree, then I need some kind of extreme method to explain that disagreement.

You believe as you do and a Hindu will believe as they do. Neither of you has been brainwashed. You're simply the product of different cultural upbringings and that's the simple reason for why we find more Christians in Missouri and more Hindus in Cambodia than the other way around.

We've at least agreed that christian propaganda and indoctrination is a major reason that people become or are christians.  That, insomuch as christian propaganda is successful, people will assume those behaviors and beliefs which..as it's been variously put it, then make sense to them and/or make them feel good.  

Progress.