I’m watching Apocalypse in the Tropics documentary on Netflix about evangelicals and politics in Brazil and it’s mind boggling. Why do the religious people just blindly do whatever the pastors tell them?
Evangelical in the sense of protestant christians or in the sense of that crazy cult that’s going on over in the Americas? Maybe it’s just the news giving me the wrong idea, but I really don’t recognise my religion just one ocean away.
I am a scepticist, but (or rather because) I grew up with a progressive church that allows and encourages critical thinking. Very tame stances overall, no overly aggressive rethoric, laughing and coloring you hair very much allowed. Then you cross the pond and hear fuming people talk about filthy infidels and holy wars like wth…
I think these people are not necessarily easy to manipulate, but indoctrinated to hell and back
Why are most
religiouspeople so easy to manipulate?Targeted Propaganda creates an online echo-chamber where everyone thinks that they’re correct for obvious -to them- reasons (Selective reporting, lying by omission, no one reads the retraction etc.). Add to that the addictive and isolating nature of smart technology, the sense of community they find in their personal traits/hobbies/beliefs/interests and the fact that the rich are actively trying to destroy the middle and working class. That’s how you get someone from group X, who believes they are wholly correct and smart enough to not be manipulated by media, asking why group Y is so easy to manipulate. It’s not about characteristics of faith, or anything like that. It’s the people at the top, telling you it’s other members of your class dragging you down. Through the global media monopolies that they control. We’re all part of it.
Think about how scary and tough life is on your own. Think about everything bad that’s happening, and realizing that no one is in control. This we are all aware of, but we choose to confront that. Christians at least (because it’s who I grew up with so I just have the most experience) find comfort in their church. It gives them the feeling that there is someone in charge, that it’s not all just chaos but there is a plan, and rules, and a defined right and wrong. (Again, ignoring all the things wrong with the church, just from my examples).
Believing allows them to not have to worry about the world. There’s a plan. It’s not chaos. It’s safe. To me it’s very natural why people choose it, it’s honestly scary facing the chaotic real world we have, and I honestly don’t think most people can handle it.
Survival of the fittest has failed humanity many cenuries ago.
Fittiest just means most adaptable to their environment.
Survival of the Fittest isn’t failing, it just doesn’t follow what you’d like to be “fittest”. If a person is more reproductively successful because they’re religious, guess what, that makes them “fittest”. It really doesn’t matter if it’s stupid and illogical, just that it succeeds.
No, because that’s not fit to the environment as in actual living space environment. Humans have largely removed themselves from the natural environment, so we are no longer nearly as subject to survival of the fittest in the way it’s meant to apply to a changing species ala darwinism.
Besides, Idiocracy like behavior only further proves my point, it doesn’t prove the environment is magically different.
No I’m sorrry, “the environment” is just everything around you. Your house is the environment, new york city is nature. These distinctions are made up in our heads but deep down there is no essential difference between your house and a tree, or the city you live in and a forest. We haven’t seperated ourselves from anything, we’ve just changed it. Changing evolutionary pressures doesn’t mean we’ve somehow unmoored ourselves from it, traits are still being selected for and against it really doesn’t matter how anyone, or thing cares about it. It MAY end up getting us all killed, but the process will continue anyways and the “fit” will continue to reproduce more successfully than the “unfit”. It’s not that I don’t agree with you that the things that get selected for aren’t what I’d consider good, or that will make us happiest as a species. It’s merely that natural selection as a process will not “care” about what we care about because it is a process, nothing more.
That is an insanely dumb way to look at what environment is as far as darwinism is concerned. It’s like pretending being on a ship in the middle of the ocean is the same as swimming out there.
Only one of these conditions is meant to apply to the process of evolution and darwinism.
“meant” what do you mean by “meant”? who meant? why did they mean for that? You’re not making sense, you’re ascribing special properties to manmade enviorns and acting like they’re polluted, bad, or different in some essential way. That manmade enviorns are polluted, harmful, or otherwise damaging is just incidental, they don’t HAVE to be that way, you cannot just assume that they’re innately worse than “natural” enviornments, they’re just different. I just want to understand how you think “manmade” is any different from the effort ALL fauna and flora makes to change their enviornment to suit their needs. Is it “natural” the bees build hives? Is it “natural” for beavers to damn creeks? Were trees “meant” to alter the soil chemistry around them to fight off competitors? Did bryophytes defy nature’s will by evolving a waxy cuticle to survive in locations untouched by plants before they evolved? Humans, nor any other animal whatsoever was “intended” to live somewhere or some way. This a fundamental error so many people make when talking about the ecology of our planet, there is psuedo-religious way of looking at things and ascribing of anthropocentric values. None of this has a purpose, none of it has a goal, none of it has an intent, or a desire, or any sort of human-like trait.
No, not toxic traits. Literal, absolute, augmentations to survivability.
I agree that THE WORD “environment” applies to them.
You need to understand that they ARE NOT “the environment” as applied to darwinism/survival of the fittest. They are augmented and artificial, and that removes humans from natural evolution, which is the entire point being made. Humans changing their environment so much as to have wholly separate spaces with wholly separate conditions than nature removes humans from the natural order of events of the planet’s biome. Yes species still change under artificial conditions. The point is humans are more subject to artificial conditions than natural. At least until natural conditions get bad enough.
Survival of the fittest is who is best at sexing not who is best at thinking
South Park sang it best.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3mDatFpNE
Joseph Smith was called a prophet (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) He started the Mormon religion (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb). (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) Joseph Smith was called a prophet-
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) Many people believed Joseph (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) And that night he-ee saw an angel (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
Joseph Smith was called a prophet (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
He found the stones and golden plates (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) Even though nobody else ever saw them (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
And that’s how the Book of Mormon was written (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) (Dumb dadumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) (Dumb dadumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) (Dahumb dahumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) (Dumb dumb dumb dumb duuumb, duuumb.)
Martin went home to his wife (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb) And showed her pages from the Book of Mormon (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
Lucy Harris smart smart smart (Smart smart smart smart smart)
Martin Harris dumb dadumb-
Lucy Harris smart smart smart Martin Harris dumb. So Martin went on back to Smith Said the pages had gone away Smith got mad and told Martin He needed to go pray (Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
(Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb)
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
I don’t know about across the pond, but to me that always seemed to be a loud minority of charismatic leaders gathering big flocks. Which the rest of The Church tries to distance itself from.
I think this isn’t specifically tied to religion. It’s just it’s noticeable when it is. People are manipulated by governments and the media all of the time. It even happens in largely secular states as well.
You say evangelicals, but there’s also the likes of Mormons, Seventh day Adventists (not really a big cult now as it used to be), Jehovah’s Witnesses. There are Sunni extremists and Shia extremists in Islamic countries. China had weird cults as well such as the Falun Gong. But that also had an atheistic movement in the cultural revolution. Nazi Germany’s movement was borderline pagan in nature.
Because they have been taught, from childhood, to just believe whatever the guy up front tells them to.
Watch documentaries on chimpanzees, watch what they do individually and as tribes and then you’ll understand. We are not far removed from those great apes, and it shows.
I think maybe you haven’t backwards people who are easily swayed/trusting of authority/gullible are going to be naturally drawn toward religion. Skeptics/those who don’t take things at face value are going to be naturally skeptical of it.
Religion doesn’t make you stupid but it’s very attractive to the sort
The flip side of that is manipulators are going to gravitate toward religion as a easy way to get what they want from the suckers.
It’s why religions make such a BIG DEAL about “faith”.
Faith is simply a commitment to believe things that otherwise contradict obvious reality (but which invariably work to some “leader’s” advantage).
They were conditioned to growing up. Their parents taught them to, they saw how the ingroup and the outgroups work and settled on the ingroup. Not much more to it than that i’m afraid.
when you believe one outlandish thing, it’s easy to be convinced of others. On top of that one of the main tools religions have is fear. Make people believe in some horrible fate, then convince them the only way to avoid that fate is through doing exactly as you say.
Their entire worldview depends on blindly believing things that don’t make sense and are unverifiable
They are trained from a very young age to accept anything an authority tells them.
This is how I look at it mostly. I also think, and statistics show as well, that religious folks are less intelligent on average… partly because they are taught a bunch of nonsense.
Another related question: Why are people seemingly more inclined to become more religious as they age?
fear of death?
I know people actually become slightly less conservative as they age, on average, but society in most Western places has moved socially left over time, so they seem conservative now. I’m guessing some of that is also true of religiousness.
Having to stare down your mortality and insignificance might be part of it. Young people tend to just avoid big picture questions because it’s easy to pretend they can. Now, of course there’s atheist answers to those big picture questions, but as far as I know committed atheists are always outnumbered by agnostics.
I mean they believe there’s a man in the sky that they don’t see who controls everything. Then that big man speaks through the pastor and this pastor interprets this book for them to hear. Everything good or bad is part of some divine plan. Then the whole thing is wrapped around the idea of wholehearted faith.
All throughout history, religious leaders plant themselves as a way to control people and power over them. See Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas.
I have the opposite perception - that people become in fact more conservative and buying into conspiracy theories more readily as they age.
