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Re: A psychological question: "choose to believe" [message #442725 is a reply to message #442714] Sat, 15 January 2011 15:27 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Starbuzzz
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Registered: June 2008
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Spoony, since you pretty much grew as atheist and you had the sheer luxury of having superb parents, maybe that's why you are asking this. So I will say what a former-indoctrinated person would know:

I remember back in 2000 when me and my sister went up in the church and "confess" and were known as "saved." We were baptized a week later and we were told, "now you are in God's magnifying glass."

For younger people at the time like myself, it's really a matter of just believing. Since religion preys fully on the emotions of vulnerable people, it is much easier to believe something with the flick of a switch.

1 important thing to note here: the act of a young Christian believing is NOT a sovereign action of one's mind. It is always based on the yearly cumulative surrounding religious influences on the mind of the individual. Sunday school, church attendence, creationist documentaries, even the very act of praying before a meal...the influencing factors are too numerous to name. It is like being given a multiple choice question but with only 1 choice. So the individual at some point in entering youth-age, simply has no choice or obligation but just does what he was moulded to do: circle the 1 choice on the question.

Now, that is for younger folks. For adults, it is an entirely different process:

In all my life, I had heard only 1 Christian (Kirk Cameron) openly and honestly saying how the whole tactic is used on adults, i.e, "try to make people make a decision emotionally rather than allowing them to use their intellect to question what they are actually doing...by using "conviction" rather than reason, people can be saved."

If this does not make you feel terrible, then I don't know what does. He said this in a YouTube video long time ago; perhaps in 2007; I was a Christian at the time but still felt sick by it.

No wonder such a tactic hopelessly fails with smart people who reason. It's the exact opposite for a religious person; he is steered away from the intellectual questioning process altogether and rather allows his emotions to climax to the orgasmic point of suddenly allowing himself to be convinced and believing that "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Personal Saviour" upon which he is told he is "saved." I have experienced it.

The ugly part is that with all emotions, the experience wears off within weeks/months and the warm-fuzzy feelings of the soft emotional sex in which the person accepted a comforting lie falls apart. The person is then back to square 1 surrounded by the same feelings of despair in not having the answers and the solutions. Actually, I say he never left square 1, the religion just creates an illusion of changing the carpet to make it look like square 10. It is a terrible falsehood to go thru...but at the time it doesn't seem as such and actually feels very comforting.

I lost count of how many times people who are so vulnerable in their lives do this over and over and "give their lives to Jesus" to "make the problems go away." I saw this over and over many times in my life. People would come crying to church with so many problems, terminally-ill loved ones, suicide cases, pure desperate unemployment...it is the same deal. I don't blame them trying to find an answer through praying...it comforts them while giving nothing in return while managing to rip their money.

This is the same deal with every religion, you are born into it, you get the religious education, and you end up acting as if the religion you were born into is the true one.

An intellectual mind that strongly reasons is automatically hell-bound. I have people in my family whose automated responses to some of my sneaky tough questions are "you can't think like that" or "you can't ask that" and "you cannot question god." The best one is "those are god's secrets."

If a young child is brought up in a religious environment, he is not going to have any trouble believing. For an adult, the Cameron-tactic's (which is every preacher/evangelists tactic btw) success rate depends on the mental abilities of the adult along with any problems/issues he is going thru at the time. Evangelism has always been about the exploitation of those who are weak.

So no, the whole, "choose to believe" concept is nothing but a verbal safehouse for theists.

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