Yes, religion is a drug, but what type of drug?

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Very true.

And the longer someone has held such an extreme position, the harder it must be to ever admit that they have been wrong all that time. So the harder the brain fights to twist the world in order to fit it inside the biblical narrative.

One more bit of mental gymnastics is easier than stopping to consider that your whole position might be wrong. The cognitive dissidence must be maddening.

Being brainwashed is, upon thinking upon this further, a better analogy than having a drug addiction.  Most brainwashed individuals do not even know that they have been brainwashed, whereas, most drug abusers know that they are addicted, even if they cannot escape the addiction.  I suppose, for some, that is also true for religion; they know that it is false, but they are "addicted" to it (wife will leave them if they abandon it, lose their faith loser their job, etc.)

When you are raised Xtian, you are brainwashed from the day that you are first able to understand spoken language. You learn all about Mom's god, sin, where people go when they die, and Jesus before you you have developed any reasoning skills, which does not even begin to happen until the age of 6. Therefore, everything which you are taught before then, right or wrong, has been filed as correct for lack of any means of deciding otherwise. This, of course, is how religious ideas, so described by Dawkins as virulent memes, survive the evolving generations through thousands of years. It is fundamentally dishonest brainwashing!