Thank you for your response, I appreciate your time. I do however disagree with your assertion that the only way adults can be brainwashed is through a cult. We are indoctrinated all the time, through media, advertising, the culture of the workplaces we participate in, through our peer groups.
Case in point, I entered the university system as a person of faith, specifically the Christian faith. I quickly learned that speaking about my religious beliefs was frowned upon, even actively discouraged. I sat in classes where professors denigrated those with spiritual beliefs while touting science as the ‘rational’ answer. I left college an atheist.
In the science classes I attended, I wasn’t taught a wide-variety of theories (even if they contradicted each other), I was taught the most popular ones. Same with history, psychology.
I was encouraged more than most to think for myself, as I was in art school, and yet even in that bastion of creativity, there were ways things got done, and clearly ways that were unacceptable.
Human minds are influenced and can be manipulated at all stages of life. It takes a great deal of awareness and courage to question what you are being taught and to decide for oneself - that is not rewarded.
Even your particular viewpoints about science and religion, was heavily influenced by your mentors and other thought leaders who believe the same things. University is not designed to produce free thinkers, it’s designed to prepare workers to comply with the future demands of their employers.
Acting like as a scientist, you have superior abilities to question and think freely, while others do not, is condescending. I am a great example of a person who was involved in the church on a weekly basis (however I never felt my parents were forcing it on me), then became an atheist of my own choosing, then later had a spiritual reawakening when I realized that secularism, materialism, is hollow, empty to my soul.
As a spiritual teacher now, I still have to work on choosing my own beliefs, because in the metaphysical world, there is just as much dogma as in religion or science.
The condescension is why so many people reject science, if scientists could work on humility, recognizing there is more in this world we don’t know or understand than we do, then we might be getting somewhere. But when what is actually a theory, gets spread across popular culture like a fact, then is debunked or changed because of new evidence, people get wary.
