Update: fixed those typos in there. /shrug Sorry you had to read it like that. 😛
I heard on This American Life recently a story about the original Hell House. A hell house being like a haunted house put on by a church to show ways of getting to hell in an attempt to scare people, usually the young, into joining the flock. In the story they describe how the hell house being covered did scenes of rape, suicide, and school shootings. It sounded pretty intense and graphic.
These scenes generate intense emotional states. I don’t deny that religion can have strong emotional appeal. After just witnessing the senseless murder of a beautiful young person full of potential it seems a natural emotional response would be to want to believe that the evil doers get punished and the innocent get rewarded.
Hell houses put paying visitors through an emotional ringer, specifically designed to manipulate people into being primed for the finale, where they are asked to pray with the church, and join. Those who don’t agree to, have to walk past those who do, so they can be identified and shunned. This is a very powerful use of emotional and social pressure. In this instance the church asks you to abandon reason and thought and bow to your emotions and the will of those around you.
But they don’t always encourage such behavior. The church tells you to ignore the emotional and social pressures to have sex, for example, except in very special circumstances from which they profit. Many of the teachings of the church are about controlling ones emotions and going against one’s nature. It is natural to have sex out of wedlock, it is natural to covet, it is natural to kill. I mean, when you’re very angry if you ignored reason and went with your emotions, don’t you think you might have killed someone by now?
This is called internal inconsistency and it’s a bad sign. Any time you come across a belief system of any sort that doesn’t promote or discourage the same basic beliefs in all circumstances you should be worried. It means either that what you think is the core belief isn’t, or that the organization is just changing the rules as is convenient. In the case of the church, it’s the former. The church doesn’t actually support making decisions with your emotions. That’s just a tool they are using against reason. It supports making decisions with the church.
As Glenn Beck or someone else on Fox would say, tricking children into believing what you want them to is despicable, and it reminds me of the Third Reich.