(May 14, 2025 at 10:03 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 14, 2025 at 9:49 am)Alan V Wrote: That works great on kids, less great on teens.
Yes, that's because it doesn't matter how much conditioning you think you've done as a parent towards your three-year-old, eventually they'll reach adolescence and begin treading their own path. I'm sure quite a few people here either left or adopted religious views around 12-14.
p.s. I think it's good you don't use words like indoctrination. But keep in mind that conditioning comes from the defunct school of behaviorism. It is still a real aspect of learning, but all the implications and inferences that it used to have are wrong.
Look at it this way: conspiracy theories are based on false data and one can show someone who was duped that he has wrong facts, but he will mostly not let his belief in that conspiracy. That is because he has also made a whole world in his head based on the false data that excites him. So if you show him that only a weather balloon crashed in Roswell, he won't believe you because he already has a whole fantasy world of aliens secretly visiting Earth and giving people messages and whatnot, which has turned into a hobby and a passion project.
Pretty much the same is with religion - people have been fed false data and now they have a whole imagination land in their heads that is part of their lives.
So the question is how does one deals with imagination?
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"
