Still struggling.

[KevinM1]

To expand on what Rob was saying about sin and satan being a means of control, you need to remember/realize that religion and politics were very much the same thing. And what do political ideas and movements need in order to gain traction? Numbers. And in a world where the average life expectancy was somewhere in one's 30s, in order to keep and grow numbers, you gotta start at birth. So, the whole thing is engineered to create people who think the same thing in mostly the same way in order to be a political force. And that's why anyone who believes differently is considered an enemy, which is part of why leaving it is so difficult.

There's also a reason why Christianity celebrates meekness and poverty and suffering under oppression in this world as a means of not only being rewarded in the next, but in assuring that those above them that cause their lot in life get punished for it down the line. That's the lens in which they saw the world because a lot/most of them were the peasant class.

So, when you look at it with common sense, you can see the mechanisms in the book - which is really just ancient propaganda ("My messiah can do all these magical things! But he's kind, and hangs out with the downtrodden, like me! I can really relate") - at work.