You're right, people are so indoctrinated they don't want to know the truth and are even afraid to think for themselves. They have been trained to except only what priests and bishops tell them and to believe, to believe anyone else is to believe the devil. It also doesn't help that church claim good deeds that happen in the world like abolition of slavery as God's (meaning churches) deed. It goes so far that when people go to the doctor and get well by medication think that God healed them and not doctors - and it all comes from church installing in them such low image of themselves as beings with impure thoughts that certainly never were in the heads of Virgin Mary and Jesus. So they think "Oh thank god for having mercy on my such a repugnant being." It never occurs to them that in, for instance, 14th century when people only had prayers for medicine 400 million people died in Europe out of Black Plague, compared to today where it's almost eradicated.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
