I agree I don't like the amount of Brian Washing that goes on within some religious cults. It's like they prey on weak minded people to get them to do there dirty work for them.
It seems to be something in human nature that makes certain people, especially during dire times, follow certain ideologies/philosophies despite their lack of rationality. There are various examples of this throughout history, so I won't even bother citing all of them as they should be familiar to the general public, but religion (in the organized sense of the word) certainly seems to be among the top models for chaos. There was the Inquisition, which killed off Jews, Muslims, and Pagans who refused to convert to Christianity, all by order of Pope Innocent III and his successors. Then, of course, there were the witch trials in both Europe and the New World, which were encouraged by religious authorities through "fire and brimstone" sermons meant to scare the populace into blind obedience in order to advance certain religious leaders' agendas. Then, there's Nazi Germany, whose leaders combined Christian principles with Paganism. Himmler even considered himself to be the High Priest of the SS, and created many celebrations around Pagan holidays which made him the ridicule of te Reich and a constant source of headache to the more sober Hitler, who did not ascribe to these ideas. More importantly, herein can also be observed the creation of a sort of "religion of the state," meaning the figureheads of the government were basically revered in the same way a religious authority would be.This "religion of the state" phenomenon can also be observed in atheistic Soviet Russia--whose leaders created a sort of cult behind figures such as Lenin and Stalin, requiring portraits of them to be hung in every home, songs sung to Lenin, etc.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with the notion of believing in a complex being or set of beings who rule the universe and people (illogical, yes.) However, when these abstract musings and hypotheses are concreted into an organized set of religions, and the principles behind these organized manners of worship are applied to things outside of religion in a way which is very much reminiscent of organized religion, there is much to fear, because the masses appear to be greatly susceptible to that appeal.
Additionally, I find it a wonder that people are willing to believe something written in a book which has been proven to have various historical, time/space inaccuracies. I'll never be able to understand that--and there are those who come up with the argument that some religious texts are to be taken as metaphors--well, how do you decide which ones are metaphors and which ones are meant to be taken literally without cherry-picking. Then, there's the whole Old Testament God and New Testament God discrepancy--why bother writing an old Testament in the first place, telling people to sacrifice their kids to you, etc. only to replace it with a new Testament with a whole different set of rules! What kind of games art thou playing at!? They tell me to disregard everything and pick up the new copy just when I was getting into this whole Old Testament thing!
