The Allen Almanac

There is a journal up on DailyKos from someone who grew up in a dominionist, “Jesus Camp”-like community. It’s a great story. What really caught my eye was this section where he quoted someone else:

When confronting a Pentecostal, one must remember that Pentecostals are stuck in a mental thinking loop that prevents them from thinking in the normal sense about anything relating to religion. They have designed an enormous list of code words designed to trigger thinking patterns in a particular way. Think of it as a computer program or a computer virus. When you hear the words “reprobate” or “backslider” or any other code words, they are designed to trigger a particular thought pattern. Another phrase that comes to mind is “touch not mine anointed!” The last one triggers thoughts of incapacitating terror at the thought of questioning the pastor about anything. Also, there are particular gestures that are designed to trigger certain thoughts like the tightening and closing of the eyes followed by something like “Woo, I feel something in this place, let’s pray for that guy right now!”

And, so it is. It is hard to even speak about religion to these Pentecostals stuck in the mental traps because the minute you try to question them, those code words, and those gestures come into their imaginations, without even them hearing them or seeing them, and these things short-circuit the mental processes to the point where they cannot hear the words you are saying. The mind is stuck and has something like a computer virus.

Often, it takes a tremendous effort to break these people from this state of self-hypnosis. Sometimes it takes a dramatic event for them to begin to question. Sometime the pastor betrays them so deeply, they go through terror, depression, and many other things that are so unbearable that they have to begin to question the system.

The services are designed to nurture these thought systems and loops that they cannot break out of. All the emotional things that go on from excitement to terror, to grieving, to anything with extreme emotions - all this contributes to the deadening of the mind to thinking outside of the particular mind set.

Their minds are stuck. They do not know this. You can tell them this and often, they do not understand what you are telling them because their thoughts are stuck in a short circuit. Sometimes we have to spend many years or months trying to figure out a way to break within a particular person’s mind to break it out of the shorted-loop. Each of us has a lot of work to do if we are to do this. Each case is different, and I suspect that there is a particular KEY to each person to break them out of the loop. It just might take a long time to find the Key to break the code and delete the looping control loop of their mind’s software programs, in a manner of speaking.

So, do not ever be surprised that you cannot communicate with these people. It is part of the design of the system to keep them trapped in the mental control loops triggered by words, gestures, music or whatever a local preacher can design. The pastor does not do this deliberately as in, “How can I design a system to keep them trapped,” but he simply does it by trial and error in Darwinian fashion as to what works with a particular person and congregation and what does not. This is how it works. And whatever system of controls survives the experimentation is what survives in the same way as animal species survive in the process of natural selection in the Survival of the Fittest. The better the system design, the harder it will be to break them out of the mental loops.

I think that you can easily take what he is saying about Pentecostals and apply it to any religion. I don’t think it is usually done intentionally. Its like the author says, the methods that keep people trapped continue to be used and the ones that don’t get abandoned. The religion as a social virus metaphor is a really compelling one to me. Richard Dawkins also uses it to describe the spread of religion from parent to child.

There really is only one “cure” for this virus in a free society. Obviously, parents should be free to pass their beliefs on to their children, but we don’t have to respect them. We shouldn’t respect these beliefs anymore than we respect the beliefs that the Holocaust never happened or that germs don’t exist. The only reasonable cure to wrong ideas in a free society is to call people out on them. You want to believe that a book written 2000 years ago by a bunch of backwards tribesmen is the literal word of your god? Go ahead, but you should have no expectation of having that belief being taken seriously. You want to believe that an all-powerful loving god created us and will condemn us to eternal torture if we follow the desires that he created us with? Fine. But you shouldn’t be able to expect a special staus for that belief just because you call it by the magic word “religion” anymore than someone else would be respected for calling their belief that the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is made of garbanzo beans and dental floss a religion.