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What we are up against in Other Religions |
What we are up against in fiction based religions is that using the name of God they can promise you anything. They have everlasting bliss in Heaven, 70 virgins, omnipotent intervention, an inflated sense of self worth, a loving community, ego treats, a sense of some grand purpose, and of course, burning in Hell forever for those who fail to believe. One thing that religions understand is that they start brainwashing their children early because they understand that the earlier they establish mental patterns the harder it is to change them.
Like the tricks that the tobacco industry uses to make cigarettes as addictive as possible, religions have evolved techniques to make their religion as addictive as possible.
Conversion to fiction based religions is easier than reality based religions. If a person is in an emotional crisis and someone comes along offering them a solution to their problems, they might just go for it. After all, it's so easy. All you have to do is believe and an omnipotent protector is going to intervene on your behalf and take care of you forever. What a deal! People want the quick fix. Reality often isn't a pretty picture. If someone is in a real bind then they have to do hard work to get out of it.
If they have lost someone they want to believe that they will be reunited with their lost loved one in some afterlife. We want to believe that when we die that we are going to go to a better place, or at least something other than ceasing to exist. We want to believe that our total existence is more than 75 years and then we are gone. And it's really easy for religions to create false hope because there aren't any dead people out there who have come back from the afterlife to talk about it. If the dead could talk a lot of religions would be in big trouble.
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