My workplace sometimes hires teenagers part-time. One of these was a fundamentalist who for some bizarre reason decided to latch onto me as his special project. I don't know why. There were several other people who were much more obvious sinners than I, some of them teenagers. Anyway, on a few occasions his mother came in and I spoke to her a little. She was most certainly not a fundamentalist. She seemed more like an alcoholic slut. My guess is that the boy turned to fundamentalism to seek comfort. He did not get it from the home.I have met many fundamentalists, and while they often claim to have come from a non-religious background, I have found that upon further investigation, this always turns out to be a lie. There is always a significant religious influence on their early upbringing.
Of course it does, but then the vast majority of people are rather stupid.Of course, rank stupidity helps too.
Sadly, you are wrong. A person is naturally very capable of believing the most idiotic, bizarre, illogical, irrational, immoral garbage without any special "preparation," though maybe you are a little bit right. No thinking person will easily accept Biblical literalism, but thinking takes work. Humans do not have to be taught credulity; we are born with it. It is critical thinking that we must learn and then work at. It is also wildly stupid to believe that aliens from another planet, who just happen to be almost identical to humans, have traveled hundreds or thousands of light years to Earth just to perform experiments on human sexuality and that, despite the genius it would take to create a FTL drive and to remove people right out of their city apartments without anyone else seeing the ship, these aliens cannot figure out how to anesthetize their subjects. Yet, there are many people who believe in alien abductions with no more brainwashing that reading a book or wathing the "Discovery" Channel. Without someone else's guidance, one might not decide that the Bible is true, but one might come up with all manner of bizarre ideas anyway.No, it is brainwashing. No one, even with a desperate desire for faith, is willing to entertain the notion of the Bible being literally true unless they've been indoctrinated to some extent in that particular notion. It is so wildly stupid that no thinking person can possibly accept it unless they've been "prepared".
You're right that a person needs to be prepared to believe an idea before he will accept it, but it takes only a little superficial preparation. I think you are being to liberal with the term "brainwashing." By your definition, a person raised in a very rational, scientific household is brainwashed into believing in reason. Humans are born largely blank slates, and we learn what is reasonable to believe and what is not. We are all "brainwahed" to accept what our family and culture tell us to believe. A person raised in a skeptical household likely would be inclined to see the Bible as so much humbug, but that would be no less brainwashing than what a liberal Christian receives.
