(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.
