The hypnotism that is religion

I find religious people fascinating, especially when it comes to the way they ‘think’.

I’m not religious, you’ll be so very surprised to read (Not!). Yes, my blog is certainly full of articles dissing those who follow illogical rules and beliefs based on ‘faith’ rather than normal logic, especially when they clearly do bad things yet justify their activities as in some way being excusable because of their ‘faith’.

As an example, the pre-occupation with sex across most religions is bizarre.  I mean why ‘sex’?  Why not ‘golf’?  “Thou shalt not play golf before marriage.” “Thou shalt not play golf with anybody but your wife.” “Thou shalt not let thy golf ball stray to any other hole.”

Apart from an obsession with controlling the natural and sometimes impulsive desires of sex, which as any BDSM regular will tell you is essential for controlling the mind and creating a state of submission, religions also offer similar hypnotic re-enforcement rituals (based around ‘prayer’) to those hypnotic shows we find funny when we’ve seen them on TV.

Oh how we laughed years ago when Paul McKenna took bunch after bunch after bunch of people on stage and hypnotised them to ‘believe’ without question something that normal un-hypnotised people would, of course, normally question and certainly not believe.  (Whatever happened to these kinds of TV shows?)

What fun it was to watch a person completely and unquestionably ‘believing’ that he/she was a chicken and so, when instructed to so do, involuntarily start strutting around clucking without question and without thinking anything was odd about their ‘belief’ or the action they were engaged in.

If their ‘belief’ was challenged (as part of the on stage act) they would argue until they were blue in the face that they were definitely a chicken (Can chickens turn blue in the face?).  Their internal ‘logic’ has been dramatically altered by their unquestioning faith in the chicken ‘belief’ that they’d had installed.

It does worry me how easily humans can be hypnotised, and indeed even argue that they are not hypnotised whilst they are hypnotised.  One of my heroes is Derren Brown.  He presents hypnotism in a slightly more spooky and confusing way that the old style Paul McKenna method.  For the purposes of our entertainment, a lot of his ‘victims’ don’t appear to know he has hypnotised them or ‘programmed’ them to act in a specific way in order that we the viewers can be entertained.  This surely, taken at face value, is no different to the hypnotic suggestion and re-enforcement action that is used to ‘program’ followers of a religion.

The hypnotic suggestion that the pushers of religion use is of course far more subtle than the turning of its subjects into hilarious chickens for a few hours. Instead it distorts their reality just enough to mute their ability to use any logic to escape from the hypnotism which then lasts not for hours, but for days and months, even years.  It takes a very strong mind to break free.

Those who have been hypnotised by religion think it is perfectly logical to accept without question certain elements of the ‘faith’ that has been installed into them.  When presented with any logical questioning of their ‘faith’ they become agitated and upset.  I guess this is like the reaction the human chicken has on stage when his chicken credentials are questioned.  A lot of religious people turn to drink or drugs in order to deal with the ‘conflict’ between the ‘installed logic’ and their now muted natural logic, the rest are so consumed by the hypnotic spell they are under that their entire waking life is spent keeping elements of the religion around them and in as many conversations as is possible.  The more deeply hypnotised, the more they will undertake re-enforcement rituals to ensure they don’t ‘wake up’. The followers of Islam do this five times a day, every day, which is why the logic of blowing oneself up when required to so do is rarely challenged by a suicide bomber to be.

From birth, children have the hypnotic suggestion installed into them by their hypnotised parents.  This is why it can be so difficult to break-out from a lifetime of re-enforcement action to mute natural logic.  It is also why when people do manage to break free from a religion, as people increasingly are, they realise how horribly violating the whole experience has been.  It’s also why I feel so very sorry for those still under the ‘trance’ of the religious doctrine their parents forced upon them.

My ‘logical’ belief in freedom of mind is why I talk about it a lot and I strongly believe everybody should be allowed to enjoy free-thinking as a very basic human right.