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Cults use Ritual and Repetition |
Cults use ritual and repetition to instill their reprogramming on their members. Rituals are things that the group does together to voice support for the group and demonstrate their submission to the cult mind. It can take the form of group prayers, songs sung together, the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance, marching in unison, or other acts where the individual demonstrates submission to the group. These rituals help get the individua's mind into a more submissive state which is necessary when one is expected to believe the most bizarre things without question and without having any knowledge that one is being manipulated.
Ritual also creates a sense of community which is necessary for a person's well being. It makes the person feel on an emotional level, that they are part of a team, a great mission, and have a sense of family and belonging. This emotional connection is a religious experience and it creates a euphoric high that can be falsely interpreted as divinely inspired. Because of our evolution to function together as a group, our minds are hard wired to feel great joy by being interconnected to other people united for some great cause. This natural experience is exploited by cults to get people addicted and keep them locked in. What is an otherwise normal community connection is elevated to an experience of "God is touching your heart right now". But we know that God is not touching them right now or communicating with them, because the kinds of messages the group receives from God is generally something that is self-serving to the cult. There is always a human who lets the group know what it is that God is telling them because sometimes God just isn't able to get the message across like cult leaders can.
The human brain is based more on pattern matching than on logic.
Repletion is also heavily used by cults. The human mind is not a computer. It is an evolved biological organ that can do some logical processing. It is actually more based on pattern recognition than on logic, and that's something that cult leaders have learned (through pattern recognition) that works on people. Advertising and propaganda work the same way. There is the BIG LIE theory that if you tell a lie over and over again, that people will start to believe it. I've heard the big lie theory so many times that I am beginning to believe it; demonstrating that it does work.
The human brain has only so much capacity. Some people say we only use 1/10 of our brains, but I think those people should speak for themselves. Personally my brain is so full that in order for me to learn something new, I have to forget something to make room for it. If we do have vast memory storage, we certainly don't have equal access to that storage and the part of our minds that we have the most access to are the parts that we think about the most. Cult leaders exploit that by using repetition so that their message is always in the top of the mind. Their message then interconnects with the rest of the individual's life experiences and connects itself deep into the individual's sel- identity. It is like a poisoning of the mind where belief becomes dominant and rational thinking atrophies. The mind loses it's ability to reason and reprograms itself to parrot the message of the cult. The cult becomes like a virus that consumes the individual and the person becomes a sock puppet.
In the Church of Reality we believe that we are what we think. It is what our mind does and what we dwell on that makes us who we are. Our mental processes, our thoughts, are the way we experience reality. The sum total of all the thoughts in our life represents our life experience. If we become a sock puppet, then we are surrendering our life experience to someone else. We are being cheated out of what little existence we have. Time is something that is precious to us. We live to be real in the sacred moment.
As Realists, we do not use repetition to convince people to believe false information on faith. Our message, or perhaps ritual, is to spend time dwelling on reality. Thinking about reality and coming up with new ideas is healing to the mind. It pushes out the dogma and reprograms the brain to think in a healthy way. We want people to spend their mental time wondering about things, questioning things to test if they are real. And that is the distinction between reality based religion and blind faith religion. Cults prohibit questioning, thinking, doubt, and scrutiny. They are not intellectually accountable. Their belief systems fall apart when subjected to reason. In contrast, our beliefs are subject to doubt and scrutiny. If what we believe in falls apart, we learn from that and fix our mistakes. And if it doesn't fall apart, then we can have an earned faith in what we believe in because our truth is purified by accountability.
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