[sjbr]

BITE = Behavior Information Thought Emotional Control

All cults use that but all religions do too to a certain degree.

No sane religion will allow members that can think for themselves to do an independent research and decide if they want to join or not. That would remove the easiest prey, children. Children have an implicit trust in his parents so religion will hijack that and insert themselves at the center of their lives. As Paine said: All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

[rsyring]

I can't speak for other religions or even Christianity as a whole due to its breadth and differences of practice, but there were and are certainly those in the Christian church who independently reasoned their way to an understanding of the existence of God and a corresponding faith in Christ and encouraged others to do the same.

See, for example, the history and works of Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis. I also think the work of John Frame on epistemology might reveal some of the underlying presuppositions seemingly evident in the above comment.

I'm not making any other assertion about their works or perspectives on religion, faith, or lack thereof. I point it out solely as a counter to the above perspective, which is a bad caricature at best.

[throwaway290]

If ideas of Christ/God/etc. were truly independently reasoned into by someone never exposed to Christianity (as anything else would not satisfy any definition of "independent"), it would really be a miracle. However, it is much more likely to be a post-rationalisation.

Yes, conceptually similar philosophical ideas could be reached from first principles, but those would not come in the same exact packaging as Christianity (and it is packaging that makes many religions not that different from cults preying on vulnerable people).

[incompatible]

You can't independently verify that a religion is valid. There's no experiment that will demonstrate the existence of gods, let alone establish what a god would supposedly want you to do.

I don't understand why a god would care what a human does, in any case, especially in the case of an all-knowing god who would already know every detail of what the human will do before they are even born, or an all-powerful god, who wouldn't be emotionally hurt by the choices a human makes.

[xabotage]

Faith is belief without evidence or belief in the presence of contradicting evidence - people don't "reason their way" into faith, they rationalize. C.S. Lewis is popular because he uses humanist principles to spin a fundamentally authoritarian, controlling religion into something easier for the modern mindset to rationalize. The GP's perspective is extremely accurate - child indoctrination is religion's primary mechanism to maintain it's power and control.

[swayvil]

Most of us don't independently research the science either. Trash epistemology is the norm.

Also, every ideology seems to be enemies with the others. No seeking of common ground. Each painting the other as pure crazy evil. That's an interesting constant.

[xabotage]

Trash epistemology is the norm. But it would be nice at the very least to normalize evidence-based knowledge as the default instead of religious mythology. Just because the ideologies are enemies, doesn't mean one of them isn't significantly less wrong than the other.

[elefanten]

Alternate possibility: religion is a pre-modern adaptation to encourage co-operation / unity / pro-social behavior and it likely correlated with fitness of societies for a long time.

To the extent it played that function, indoctrinating children was no different than teaching them to hunt or gather.

[MattPalmer1086]

In practise, both are probably true.

I fundamentally dislike religion and the tribal, irrational cult like mind control they seem to all exhibit. But I have seen it in a different light after reading "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari. So I now acknowledge that it has probably played a useful role in human society, despite its large negative traits.

[jimmaswell]

There are certainly exceptions like Buddhism, if you consider that a religion.

[m0llusk]

In theory that is true, but in practice Buddhism breaks down into the usual behaviors with reverence for the central figure and tenets and tribalism for the followers.