thoughts out !oud

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Religion only indoctrinates and brainwashes

Posted by Mathew | 4 April 08

Here’s my bold statement this morning: religion is the antithesis to all that is good. Religion seeks to indoctrinate and effectively brainwash all those who are put through it’s regimented system of controls, boundaries and misguided logic.

Indoctrination seeks to form a particular pattern of thought in the minds of its target audience at the expense of all other opposing thoughts.

Brainwashing seeks to render any alternate thought out of existence before it can take a foothold and challenge the agenda that is being pushed.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: religion sucks. Religion creates narrow-mindedness, bigotry and incites hatred and creates elitism and ‘holier than thou’ mentalities. Who can’t agree with prominent thinkers like Richard Dawkin’s that religion is, through and through, completely and utterly destructive in its design and in its intent?

If not, then at the very least, you should agree with Dawkins that, for instance, children at least should be given opportunity to have an open mind and not simply accept any doctrine their parents or their education would impose on them. Right? Dawkin’s said:

Just as you can’t vote until you are 18, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit those of your parents (or perhaps even those of the educational institutions).

Right on, Mr Dawkins. We should not be indoctrinating our children and giving them a choice. Letting them decide. Giving them the facts so that they can make up their own minds. Children shouldn’t take what their parent’s say for granted; they should not trust their parents because their parents can lead them astray. Hang on … if the parents aren’t instructing and teaching their children, then who is? Our education system? Run by the government? Is that really a system that frees up the mind to consider alternatives?

What about our biology and other sciences classes? What about our philosophy and geography classes? Are all of these ‘religion neutral’, not expounding one religion over another? On the outset, maybe the answer is yes. But consider this: if you teach that no one religion is superior to another, then you create a new line of thought. You in effect create a new line of doctrine; you formulate a new sort of brainwashing. You create a new religion, some new boundaries and some new controls that do not allow for debate that any one religion can be correct. It is a new religion of nothingness - don’t believe any religion, they mean nothing; you are an accidental product; your thoughts are accidental; you think you believe in God, but in reality its just a bunch of chemicals creating the thought that you have no control over. And if you don’t think, then you are nothing. The great ‘truth’ is nothing.

… okay, I think I lost my train of thought … purely accidental ;)

Back to the topic at hand. Atheism is in its rawest form a religion. It holds a bunch of hypotheses that are assumed (ie. believed) rather than proved. But it is this type of label that Dawkins and his ilk claim is the only road to freedom. But it achieves just the opposite. Atheism ensnares you; it can create a ‘holier than thou’ mentality because an atheist claims that all else is false, without factual proof. It is a new form of religion because it itself does not make allowance for the debate of a supernatural entity - it is narrow-minded and it is a religion that has millions of followers campaigning that it holds the way to free thinking. But it is just a belief. A belief and religion with controls and dictums and it is a belief that has been the seedbed for horrendous atrocities throughout the world’s history and to the present day.

If atheists like Dawkins want religion to be eradicated from the face of the earth and to have true intellectual freedom and a world without indoctrination and brainwashing, then they will need to eradicate themselves in the process.

Who was it who said this, again?

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free - (John 8:32).

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