Why do intelligent people still believe in religion? p. 39 "Look deep into the eyes of Jesus"

Focus completely on Jesus. In my church growing up, everything and I
mean everything we did required us to think about or have something to do with Jesus.
To spend any time not thinking about Jesus gave the devil a chance to make us sin. Even
secular songs like “She'll be coming round the mountain” got the words replaced with
“We will learn of Jesus when we go to church”. It didn't matter how wholesome or moral the
song or activity we were doing, it required to have something to do with Jesus. Prayers
before any activity, one of my friends at the center who is a former creationist and
still has to hide it from his fundamentalist family. reminded me of this when we were going
to start playing settlers of catan and he half jokingly asked “you mean praying before
playing this game isn't in the rules?” As a child I was obsessed with Christianity,
on top of an asperger's like obsession, my fear of hell and the fear of hell for others
kept me incredibly focused on Jesus. Hypnosis is the act of focusing on one thing to the
point that you reach an altered state of thinking where you are open to suggestion. This allows
your reality to be twisted, it can be used for fun like stage magicians tricks, or it
can even be used to implant false memories by bad psychologists who want to make money
off of you in counseling when you have a fake repressed memory rise of your father molesting
you. Scientists really do not know what causes a person to be more or less susceptible to
hypnosis. Children are especially vulnerable and open to suggestion. Perhaps one of the
positive side effects of Media induced ADD in the new generation is their inability to
focus preventing them from being effected by suggestion.
Hypnosis was of course considered evil by my church and a possible way for demons to
get in. We didn't even know what it really was and that our single-minded focus on our
faith was hypnosis as deep as you can get. I have a very vivid memory of playing baseball
or one of our calvin-ballesque version of it out in the front yard. I remember it hitting
me that I had not thought about Jesus for an hour because I was focused on the game.
I felt a pang of guilt shoot through me. I seriously wonder how much of my intelligence
was wasted because of the narrow mindedness of my beliefs.
This religious hypnosis has been key to recruiting people especially children and passing the
meme on in the religion. Reality is distorted, mindsets are changed, possible avenues of
thought are closed off, you are now controlled and locked into a way of thinking that facts
and reason cannot penetrate. Learning self-hypnosis and the mechanisms of it was a major game
changer in my life, as I was able to go in and change the way my mind worked so that
I could become socially capable and not so prone to panic attacks and depression of all
the people I knew who were going to burn forever in the fiery pits of hell. My mind expanded
to other possibilities and helped me to overcome my fear and change my habits.
Self-hypnosis requires you to reach a state of extreme relaxation, usually using a particular
technique that slows your breathing much like a ritual. Mine involves starting out with
the count of twenty with my eyes wide open, but focusing on relaxing, when I've reached
a certain state I'm at 15 with my eyelids heavy, I close my eyes at 10, 5 and zero are
even slower breathing and relaxation. Unlike meditation, it doesn't require you to stop
thinking and focus on one thing, your brain can wander all it wants, but you then focus
on what you want and what you want to change and figure out little ways to mentally feel
like you've exerted that change. For me I imagine a column running through my brain
and I will run a string underneath the column, I will then focus on something I need to change,
or need to keep in mind and I will pull both ends of the string thrusting up the column.
Depending on how opposing to my normal ideas the thought is depend on how hard I need to
mentally pull, whether the column will shatter or pass through. I usually need to do this
exercise around 3 times before I've made significant changes to my thoughts and behavior.
I never used self-hypnosis to overcome religious beliefs, until after I had become an atheist
and was dealing with some of the after effects of things like hadephobia and the feelings
of guilt I had for studying our evolutionary ancestors. Mostly its, I'm slacking too much
I need to change that, or I'm too socially afraid, I need to change how I view a social
situation so I don't end up feeling embarrassed. Changing these things about me also had the
side effect of making me less afraid to question and less afraid to doubt and less afraid to
study new ideas. Hypnotism requires several factors, relaxation
the feeling of community and singing helps with this in the church, It uses ritual to
get your mind out of reality which religion is rife with. Many of their buildings are
intentionally set up to be so different with the pulpit as the central focus of the viewers.
Then it requires you to focus and think only about one thing. The church is great about
this as well. It requires slowed breathing, which reduces oxygen and CO2 exchange. The
church doesn't have this but it does make you short of breath via group singing, especially
the more charismatic churches. Eddy Izzard's rendition of the Anglican Church's worship
service may indicate why their numbers are declining yearly. Lastly symbolism to focus
on changing your mind, religion is nothing but symbolism and allegory. The ability for
the mind to wander also occurs in the sermon, believe me I have spent many a Sunday morning
with my mind wandering while trying to focus on yet another redone sermons.
So there we have it, all the elements of hypnotism all encompassed by the church. They need you
to come back for repeated doses or the effect may wear off. Ones better engineered at capturing
your focus do better which is why the mega churches are so powerful. Its been shown that
if you use hypnosis to try and quit smoking it works very well but if you have a bit of
weakness like you were drinking or something and you smoke, it requires a lot more effort
to rehypnotize you to get yourself back to that state of mind. It is why its so hard
for a hardcore christian to return after losing his faith, he knows the methods used and is
now immune to them. It would take something extremely mind altering like death to cause
the return to religion. I recently talked with someone who still goes
to my old church which has given me a new perspective on my past. I felt like our youth
group was losing focus on Jesus back when I was in it. It confused me and disheartened
me. We did a lot less that was focused on Jesus and actually allowed more secular entertainment
in. We spent one night watching Grease which I thought was just appalling condoning sex
and pre-marital sex. As it turns out now, the youth group has been taken over by my
youth pastor's daughter and the beliefs and teachings are a lot more moderate, Focusing
more on social community and charity and much less on brainwashing, changing with the times.
It must change or die, religion has continued to evolve with every generation and will continue
to do so, although many are completely oblivious to it. If they went even 25 years back in
time, I don't know if they would recognize the church and its attitudes, much less back
in the years of the early church. Forcing children to focus on Jesus out of
fear or love is a power tactic that works, but if they ever break out of the hypnotic
spell, they will never return.