Then why do ppl believe.A huge majority of ppl are believers, do you really think they were ALL brainwashed? What is the likeliness of that? Think about it. Please,only intelligent answers that make sense.
2007-09-25 06:47:07 · 45 answers · asked by simple serenity 3 in Society & Culture ➔ Religion & Spirituality
I don't think they were brainwashed. They simply believed what they were told. There's no need for the inflammatory term "brainwashed" in this situation.
If you think that the fact that a huge majority of people believe in gods is evidence that there are gods, you have a serious misconception about how people form and retain their beliefs. There are MANY false things believed by vast majorities of people.
2007-09-25 06:51:29 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 19⤊ 2⤋
One of my Christian friends put it this way. She said, "if I spend my whole life believing in something positive, having hope, doing the right thing, being a good person, etc, and then in the end find out there's no god... what have I wasted? At least I've led a good life."
A lot of people CHOOSE to believe that there's a good - they aren't all brainwashed into it. The brainwashing comes not with the belief that there's a god but with the other laws/beliefs/etc that any religion makes their church follow.
2007-09-25 07:01:30 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 1⤋
this, like pascal's wager can apply to anything:
If Zeus isn't real?
Then why do ppl believe.A huge majority of ppl are believers, do you really think they were ALL brainwashed? What is the likeliness of that? Think about it. Please,only intelligent answers that make sense.
2007-09-25 06:53:48 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 2⤋
I saw the answer on Bill Mawr show yesterday. When people always pose questions about a topic... then it's called science. When people stop asking questions about a topic... then it's called religion.
How convenient of a book to tell people not to question it's validity. As a human being I feel I have the right to question anything I live in and if the answers I get do not satisfy my logic, then I have the right not to believe.
The way a church would handle a person like myself in the past is I would be condemned, executed, tortured, or ex-communicated. Now that we have gotten rid of all (intelligent) people, we can have our little religion here.
That's the problem, intelligence is deemed unacceptable, when it comes to religion. How can an intelligent person actually relate to "believe what I say, because I said it"... "Oh yeah... GOD told me this, so you have to believe". Not very intelligent... is it?
2007-09-25 06:57:34 · answer #4 · answered by Ilya S 3 · 3⤊ 1⤋
Yes some people are brainwashed its true, however, more importantly, many people have become confused about god. God is real but only in the sense of being a concept, an idea, a myth, a picture in your mind. People have come to think that the idea is actually a reality - that is that it exists in physical reality. That is the confusion. God is a real concept but there is no real 'god' who exists physically in the universe. As a concept the idea of god can be useful. When you lose that and begin to think that god is physically real you will have all sorts of problems like thinking that there is no such thing as evolution or that there was a talking snake in the garden of eden or that Adam and Eve were real people or that a man walked on the surface of a sea.
2007-09-25 06:53:20 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 7⤊ 2⤋
Humans have a need to place ultimate responsibility with something other than ourselves. Therefore as long as there has been man there have been god/gods of one sort or another. Perhaps it is fear of the unknown, after all look how preoccupied all religions are with death.
As for brainwashing...my children firmly believed in Santa because we embraced that family tradition, which I enjoyed immensely. Children will believe what they are taught to believe. Adults will believe what they were trained to believe as children if it is what "society" says is true. Look at cultural values that differ from your own. Why do people believe them?
2007-09-25 07:07:10 · answer #6 · answered by Peter P 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
i don't think it's the matter of being brainwashed. i think it's just that they have to have some reason for being alive. some people have to have a meaning to life, so they turn to religion. and once they start going to the church or temple, they start to believe the words that are said to them. it's just like a child if you repeat something a numerous amount of times people will start to believe it. the only brainwashing i think that happens is when people are told that if they don't do things and live life a certain way they will go to hell. it's very ridiculous. that is way i have no part in it. and if that means i burn in hell then i guess so be it. but i have never had my prayers answered and have never had any reason to believe.
Plum
2007-09-25 06:58:23 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 0⤋
Religions are our history. They played and play still a large role in control over peoples lives. Governments/culture were run by religions and some still are. People went to and go to war for there religion. The idea of there not being a God or a true/right religion is not a knew idea, but it is knew to open discussion. I don't know what the cosmic truth is, but I do know what feels right and wrong to me. If anything is true in religion it is the messege of tolerance, peace and love that so many who are faithfull ignore.
2007-09-25 07:00:14 · answer #8 · answered by smooth_stalin 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
About 350 years before Christ, Aristotle developed his Solipsistic philosophy, which asserted that each person's subjective (perceptual) experience was the basis of reality. Solipsism also maintains that the physical realm is not real, but rather a creation of the human mind. If a tree falls down, solipsism alleges that it makes no sound, unless a human was present to hear it. Indeed, a solipsist would assert that a forest could not exist, unless there were humans there to perceive it. Solipsism totally dominated Western Civilization for two-thousand years. Christ and all His followers were solipsists. The founders of the early Church and the theologians who developed the foundations of Christianity were solipsists, as were the men who wrote the books of the Bible. Christianity was developed by solipsists, for solipsists, and makes perfect sense when viewed from the solipsistic perspective. Unfortunately, Aristotle's unsubstantiated opinions caused all of Western Civilization, including Christianity, to get off to a false start.
About 1590 CE, Galileo Galilei began to question Aristotle's "wisdom" using physical experiments and discovered the ancient Greek philosopher was seriously in error. By 1680, Isaac Newton's mechanics had proved that the physical realm was absolutely real. It was also quite obvious to those who preferred truth to unvarified speculation, that human perception was NOT the foundation of reality.
It is important to understand that the scientific revolution was absolutely necessary. The dark ages were "dark" precisely because the Church enforced the solipsistic view that the physical realm was imaginary and that auditory and visual hallucinations were utterly real. Western culture became little more than a growing collection of ignorant superstitions. The human species finally began to reap the benefits of the scientific revolution during the eighteenth century, and especially after Maxwell published his famous equations in 1865. Since then, scientific knowledge has benefitted mankind in countless ways.
Why does this matter? Because everything that happened before the seventeenth century -- including the presummed existence of God, the soul, and the afterlife -- was based on the false assumption that a person's thoughts and perceptions were real. Just as nearly all modern believers are recalcitrant solipsists, most atheists accept the scientific view that the physical realm is the only objective reality. Modern scientific thinkers know that the source of their conscious awareness is their own living brains. Modern thinkers know that their living brains create the subjective illusion of reality within their mind's eye, which is itself also an illusion. If subjective (perceptual) experience is an illusion, then all the perceptions which occur within it are also an illusion. If God manifests Himself within a believer's mind, then God cannot possibly be real. That God exists is simply wishful thinking on the part of people whose concept of reality is fundamentally flawed.
Do I think the majority of people who believe are brainwashed? Yes, emphatically yes. They were brainwashed by their own similarly brainwashed parents who callously indoctrinated their own children before those children were old enough to protect themselves.
The truth of the matter is that only the physical realm is real. God is nothing more than a cultural phenomenon, a socially derived concept, which has plagued humanity for thousands of years.
2007-09-25 08:22:48 · answer #9 · answered by Diogenes 7 · 4⤊ 2⤋
There is a lot of talk about 'sheep' and 'flock' and people getting ‘lead into the promise land of where ever’ in the Bible ...and I suggest people who look to religion are looking to be lead.
I personally refer to myself as spiritual, but not connected with any organized religions or as The Waterboys put it ...church not made with hands! Let's face it; there are a number of religions and a number of Gods. How do I know if it's church door no. 1, church door no. 2 or church door no. 3? People all over the world are looking for a supreme deity, because people all over the world would love to transfer their pain and suffering to some God ...even if it is imaginary. This transference of quilt is the basis of many religion ...as is as fear!
I believe free thought is one of our most important inherent right. We loose much of that by committing to or looking to organized religions for answers to personal questions or concerns we have about our existence and life and death. Look within ...after all who knows you better than you!
You might like to hear that I condone religion, if the person actually feels it is improving their life in any way ...how can you argue with that?
2007-09-25 06:56:26 · answer #10 · answered by WARREN 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋