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"I think religiosity and cults rise when secular society fails at something."

I think it's more useful to think of it as a psychology hack that can strike almost anyone. Not any person at any time, but any person at one of their vulnerable moments.

Worth remembering though that there are many cultish aspects to the mainstream, e.g. political movements fight tooth and nail to influence what young children are taught at school.

> there are many cultish aspects to the mainstream

Quite literally, given how many aspects of 'cults' went mainstream. Environmentalism, meditation...

...anti-intellectualism, NASCAR...

... The Iraq war ...

... Anything social group that you don't agree with ...

... and which offers illusory salvation (a safer, democratic Iraq, reduced terrorist threat) from spurious ills (WMD, Al Qaeda support by Saddam) delivered by a charismatic leader with access to a divine hotline (Blair, too!) and engages you by blatant falsehood, psychological manipulation and peer pressure ...

No, I think even groups I do on later reflection agree with are acting questionably if they try to influence my early education. They probably think it's usually wrong to do so but they make an exception in the case of their ideas because they consider them uniquely urgent and important. That's just an old mistake. Twas ever thus. The more important an idea is, the more important it is to be able to think freely about it.

Same with technology choices & favored practices.

It is interesting to note that one of the cults he shut down used a juice bar to recruit candidates.

This fits well with his point that as the times change so do the "cults", as the leaders are just con-men praying on people's loneliness and insecurities.

Anyone would be skeptical of a group of people it had all of the earmarks of a cult from the 60's (robes, rituals, communes, dirty hippies, etc.), but what could possibly be more innocuous and "normal" than a group of attractive women wearing yoga pants indulging in the latest diet fad? So what if there if there is a side helping of brainwashing, you're part of a hip new community!

>a lot of what's being offered is actually good...meditation...society

Indeed.

>I don't see too many gen-x'ers and gen-y's dying to get up early to go to church to be sermonized by the ravings of 1st century zealots. I don't see how that's remotely in their interests.

Here you hint at a problem: when you take away religion you leave a vacuum. What fills that vacuum? In our society, today, by default it is filled with "the pursuit of wealth". Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema. Jordan Belfort is a real hero in 2013 cinema. People sense the emptiness of greed, and our nascent popular skepticism prevents them from filling the vacuum. Who can read this riddle?

Clearly, we need something to fill the vacuum that religion leaves that is also compatible with our skepticism. What replaces it is not necessarily a religion, but it serves the same purpose: morality and self-restraint. Secular humanism is clearly not enough.

> What fills that vacuum?

Religion is a cultural construct to address certain issues like morality, cosmology, etc. It didn't fill any void, its just an outward expression of culture. Current culture is to handle these things inwardly and via some level of rational inquiry. We don't need a turn-key replacement. The only turn-key replacement for religion is more religion. Religion as a category and part of human experience needs to be eliminated. There's nothing to fill past that point.

This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and use other tools to determine what people do via personality testing, statistics, psychology, etc which do not have the false certitude the pseudoscience of phrenology did the same way modern understanding of the world does not have the false certitude that religion delivers.

>Gordon Gecko was a fictional villain in 1987 cinema

Gecko and non-fictional villains of that age were all baby boomer monotheists, if not extremely faithful churchgoers, and often justified their negative aspects via faith. Or on a more everday front, see the Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, etc. George Bush still justifies a lot of his disastrous decisions in office via faith, including the invasion of Iraq which has killed at least 120k innocent civilians. Pardon me if I find the "but without religion we're lost morally" argument unconvincing. If anything, religion lets us act immorally without consequence.

>>This is like saying, "Now that we don't have phrenology, we need a new phrenology." No, we just accept we can't figure out how people work or what kind of people they are by feeling their skulls. We live with the ambiguity and...

But that's the whole point: a lot of people simply cannot live with the ambiguity. For them, ambiguity means uncertainty, and uncertainty means fear and a lack of stability in general. Instead, they need to be told what to do and think and how to live their lives. They need some sort of compass, ideally one they share with a lot of others.

That is why religion has been so massively popular: some figures in the sky say, "this is how shit works and you can't question me/us about it" and that is sufficient for most people. They now have that area of their life handled and can comfortably think about other stuff. They can sleep well at night knowing that some omnipotent being is protecting them, and if shit goes wrong they have something they can attribute it to, like "we must have angered such and such omnipotent being."

Phrenology never played such an important role in people's lives, so its going away never created the type of vacuum that lack of religion creates for people.

Do they really need that certainty, or has that been trained into them from an early age?

That is a very good question. But it appears religion (even atheist religions) manifests itself in just about every society so it probably is a need of most people to a certain extent.

Maybe the answer is to keep inventing better religions. The old ones keep appearing more and more ridiculous and pernicious. I suppose this trial and error produces lots of cults and casualties.

Or maybe the answer is for people to grow up and take personal responsibility and truthfully examine what we really know about life and stop trying to hide from reality. That's the path I personally have chosen. But I think the first might be easier on a mass scale. IDK.

Obviously very hard to test. But no one is told they need certainty. And a lot of people get existential angst -- a topic discussed on HN at length.

And we clearly have a strong need for social belonging, most of us.

Spiritual experience is scientifically measurable brain activity. People enjoy it.

People are not told they need certainty, but they are subject to a great deal of emotional violence to get them to conform to systems. You bring up the topic of social belonging - being ostracized is the primary form of shaming that is used.

Having been wounded in this way, people seek any path out of their suffering.

Spiritual experience is observable in the brain, but it is certainly not understood, nor are the mechanisms. This is equally true of psychedelic experiences caused by drugs.

You seem to forget that we, as a species, are wired for religion. Remove it and it will leave a void, a god-shaped hole, that is going to be filled with something, no matter what. You can't just leave it empty in the general case, you need to replace it with a powerful heavy NOP, like an Indiana Jones switch. Otherwise you're just going to have a really bad time.

Sure there's people that can be secular on their own selves, without too much conflict about it. But I believe most of them have put something to fill that behavioural slot. And even if they didn't, you have to see that the majority of people are never going to bear that vacuum and be taken advantage, of the moment their belief-system is vacant.

Living in a country where religiosity is low (France), I can attest I don't feel any void. What I often see however is other people pretending I have a void. Some even say I don't believe in anything. Well, I believe in the potential of Science, I believe in a small hope of actual immortality (if not for me, maybe for later generations), I believe in love, and lots of other fine things in life.

But if I were to out as an atheist in a deep corner of Religious America… I guess the resulting ostracism would leave a void.

As for being wired for religion, I don't believe it. Granted, we have some biases, like our tendency to see sentient agents everywhere, that tend to favour religious interpretations of our observations. To suggest however that more accurate interpretations leave a void is a stretch. If I have a God shaped hole, it is mostly filled with physics. Any remaining void just fuels my curiosity.

We are also wired for racism and magical thinking but we tend to just avoid it with the use of education, not debating how we are left with racistm-shaped hole.

Good point. I'm not an expert on racism, but it would seem that racism does have positive attributes, especially for the "in" group - social cohesion first among them. I'd argue that the racist hole left in Americans, anyway, was filled with it's opposite: tolerance. The only thing we don't tolerate anymore is intolerance (which, BTW, is a very good change).

The "shape" of the hole left by religion is more complex. I suppose the best way to describe it would be to compare all extant religions and see what they have in common. My lay-opinion is that they almost all give the adherent two things: a) an almost Newtonian, absolutist world-view, in which b) some sort of father or mother figure that will make everything all right (in the long run). So, it's a kind of certainty about one's own personal insignificance. It's an excuse to "let go".

From this perspective, ignoring differences in specific dogma, religion is actually far more realistic than humanism, which usually tends to stress individual importance. But most people (and I include myself in this) are not important. Heck, think of any of the most important people in history - will they be remembered in 1000 years? 10,000? On an even somewhat long (human) time scale, almost none of us matter.

It's hard for me to see how a belief that you can have a personal relationship with creator of the universe can make you more aware of your insignificance. Scientific view that places you on speck of dust for barely a moment in universes time, until you dissolve into nothing leaving at best some memories in your culture is much more humbling.

People use religion mostly to keep disbelieving in injustice of physical world and to combat loneliness and meaninglessness.

You are spot on that in USA intolerance towards intolerant replaced racism. Nowadays people get fired over careless comments that can be percieved as racially loaded. It's almost funny when observed from a country that has 99.9% of population of one skin color and nationality and where racism by pople who hate it is perceived more of a sheer stupidity than capital offence.

I never 'had' religion - I was raised by atheists. So, I never had a 'void' to fill.

So, what does that make of me? I feel like a 'moral' person - do I need something other than common sense, empathy, and civility to be moral?

No, of course not. You're obviously just fine as you are.

That said, your atheist parents may have done a particularly good job teaching you common sense, empathy, and civility, or you may be naturally inclined towards common sense, empathy, and civility in a way that not every person is.

For those individuals who aren't inclined to common sense, empathy, or civility, and for those individuals with parents who aren't so good at teaching common sense, empathy, and civility, religious organizations can play a very useful role. The god-talk isn't the important part, it's belonging to a broader community that specializes in teaching moral lessons. The decline in religious institutions really doesn't affect smart well-off people with good parents, but it's been terrible for the rest of society, because no secular community has replaced it.

As an aside, the void that so many of these cults fill isn't an absence of moral precepts, it's that sense of community and belonging.

>>For those individuals who aren't inclined to common sense, empathy, or civility, and for those individuals with parents who aren't so good at teaching common sense, empathy, and civility, religious organizations can play a very useful role.

It can also make them use religion to justify their lack of common sense, empathy and civility.

The trouble is when a serial killer says the same thing.

Like John Wayne Gacy who read bible verses to the young men he was strangling?

I have a hard time believing that a serial killer will be cured by religion.

I don't know about serial killers but I know a slave trader who was cured.

Serial killers are practically defined by their lack of empathy, so no.

Serial killers who are almost universally white Christian males?

So... secular, non-cultish meditation schools? Spirituality without the guru-worship trap?

This might be controversial here, but I'm going to say it anyway. There's a lot that the old spirituality of India did very well. They came up with an incredibly rich array of meditation techniques, suitable for just about any temperament and inclinations. But they had an Achilles' heel: the divinization of the guru. That was the open door where all the evil came in.

People don't need gurus. That is just a mask to the problem.

What they need is therapy. Real therapy. But we live in a culture where we think some mystical shaman in Mumbai has the answers we seek, not some medical professional who studies the mind and how it works.

Many of the so-called 'swamis' of the world would be considered mentally ill in the Western world. I'm not being hyperbolic. Many of them are not well and the behavior is what you might see from an unbalanced homeless person wandering the streets of major U.S. cities.

And even in the West, insurance companies and the societal culture shun the idea of therapy. So while meditation and mental focus and all of those things can help people, they are tiny, usable sections of real therapy. But people take the easy way - the 'quick magic bullet' and clamor for the populist ideal of a mystical guru, whatever form that may be in.

People didn't have it 'figured out' hundreds or thousands of years ago. Hundreds or thousands of years ago people use to cut out other people's tongues or raid each other's homes to kidnap slaves. The human race has done some horrible things to each other over time and I don't subscribe to the idea that somehow we should be looking to those generations for advice on mental wellness.

Who determines what 'real therapy' is?

I can't tell if you're being serious but medically certified psychologists are the most qualified to answer that question. Therapy is a medical science, but every layperson seems to think they have enough knowledge to comment on what it is or whether it's needed.

> Therapy is a medical science,

Therapy is a practice, not a science.

> but every layperson seems to think they have enough knowledge to comment on what it is or whether it's needed.

Ah, the "leave it to the experts" trope.

Giving that responsibility to someone else is the same as relying on a guru or a religious personality to tell you what to believe & do.

If you look into psychology & related fields, there are different traditions & approaches. A practitioner will go to school for a few years learning a particular curriculum. What is to say that that curriculum & approach is correct for you? That takes a leap of faith.

The workings of the human brain & the dynamics of personality is actually not fully known. There is a lot of progress being made and that knowledge is something that you have access to. Hopefully you can have an independent & thoughtful mind to make your own decision.

There's also issues with the Pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies want to make money and making money means selling drugs. Hence it is in their best interest to have people regularly take their drugs.

Also notice that natural remedies, used for most of the history of life, are discredited. Why? The Pharmaceutical industry has an interest in controlling the channel of your medicine. They cannot profit from natural remedies that are commodities.

A side effect of many anti-depressants is suicide, yet these drugs are heavily advertised and prescribed. Billions of dollars are being made every year. Notice that there are ulterior motives that do not relate to your health.

Btw, Pharmaceutical companies also visit doctor offices and have a symbiotic relationship with the doctors. Some doctors are ethical & some doctors are not...

Medicine is based in science. Not sure what you are getting at by claiming it isn't.

Psychotherapy is still at a woo-woo stage in its scientific development. Primarily because nobody has a real clue as to what connects the "mind" to the "brain" at the fundamental functional level.

A century after Freud, Jung and a host of their 'intellectual' descendants, "therapy" might as well be a pseudoscience as much as it is (claimed to be) science. Sure, modern day variations may appear quite different in practice than what was being done a few decades ago, but just because "it works" (for some) does not mean we understand the working of the mind well enough to call it a science.

A (poor) analogy might be like saying that just because a 3 year old kid can use the iPad to play games (cause-and-effect learned from touching, moving the device), he/she understands the workings of the ARM processor inside. Or even the code that game runs on.

> Not sure what you are getting at by claiming it isn't.

Semantics & accuracy.

I'll appeal to authority for you...

“Some doctors are scientists – just as some politicians are scientists – but most are not,” "Indeed, most doctors are incapable of critically appraising an article. They have never been trained to do so." Richard Smith - Editor British Medical Journal http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC428500/

Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc are sciences.

Pediatrics, Oncology, Counseling are practices.

The technique will use science, however they are not a science in themselves. Even though the practices are "based on science", sometimes there issues with the initial studies that we later find out in later studies.

Dealing with the inner working of reality is hard. There's lots of unseen complexity. The unknowns are still unknown. Science often lags practical application because it requires fundamental understanding, capital, accredited scientists, & peer review. E.g. we knew how to create catapults before we had Newtonian Physics.

Also, be careful because the definition of "based on science" has become heavily politicized & driven to sell something to the public. Monsanto created GM crops that are "safe" "based on science". We are now finding out that their crops are wreaking havoc to the ecosystem. e.g. the Bees & Monarch Butterfly populations have collapsed.

In the 1950s, Cigarettes were deemed "based on science". Asbestos was deemed safe "based on science".

I speak because I do know a renowned medical practitioner & researcher. I have a glimpse on how the sausage is made.

--

> Many of the so-called 'swamis' of the world would be considered mentally ill in the Western world.

That is more of a condemnation of the Western world. Locking someone up just because they are not "gainfully employed" and "another brick in the wall" is hardly healthy.

> People didn't have it 'figured out' hundreds or thousands of years ago.

We don't now either. Look at how humans have impacted the environment in such a short time. Also look at our pointless & expensive wars that we engage in. Look at the obesity epidemic. Feel the cold unhappiness & judgement of modern western culture.

> Hundreds or thousands of years ago people use to cut out other people's tongues or raid each other's homes to kidnap slaves.

We still do. People are still murdered, oppressed, silenced. Slavery still exists, more so now then ever.

> The human race has done some horrible things to each other over time and I don't subscribe to the idea that somehow we should be looking to those generations for advice on mental wellness.

It's not so much the time period or ethnicity. It's more about the attitude we have toward each each other. There are good and bad people now. There were good and bad people then. History teaches us on what works and what doesn't work.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

- George Santayana

---

Note: I find it amusing that my previous comment, which basically says "think for yourself", have a "critical view of things", and "understand causality", is downvoted on HN.

Psychotherapy is not the same as physical medicine.

I think the issue is people thinking that there is a vacuum in themselves that can be 'filled'. Too many people want to find an answer outside of themselves, possibly for the simple reason that true self-growth is really fucking hard.

On one hand, religion serves to control people who would otherwise not be controlled. Fear is the driving factor - don't steal, or you won't go to heaven. Don't murder, or you won't go to heaven. For some people, it just apparently isn't enough to not murder because nobody wants to be murdered. The need a belief that there is an invisible man in the sky that will 'get them', so keep it clean.

But it still doesn't work. Because supposedly religious people steal, lie, cheat and murder all of the time.

Think of how many prisons are full of people who still believe in God or Allah.

I don't think most religious people think of it as that kind of quid pro quo. Most people, regardless of conviction, want to do "good," whatever that means. Religion tells people what they already believe: that helping other people is a good thing, even when it's not comfortable, and there is some reason for you to do it -- some kind of meaning. They don't obey God out of fear of hell; they use heaven and hell to rationalize what they already feel is right. Regardless what the doctrine may say, people believe in God because they want to be good, not the other way around.

This instinct gets manipulated by certain religious institutions that emphasize political and scientific claims made either by church leaders or their religious text. They use it to justify other things that they already "know" without strong evidence. Ideas like racial purity, xenophobia and the like. And they often make the same mistake that you have, in believing that people who believe differently only do so for material reasons, and without the fear of eternal damnation, we'll immediately descend into a society of savages and psychopaths.

> morality and self-restraint.

... and hope.

Note the lack of hope among so many skeptics. Start talking to them about the future and you quickly discover that not only is life meaningless and success essentially random, but human civilization is doomed to extinction due to ecological overshoot soon so who cares...

This lack of hope can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It causes people to disengage and stop investing in the future.

I'm a humanist, and it has made my worldview much, much brighter. I don't walk around with a load of guilt anymore. The things that happen to me are not "God" punishing me for something my great^n grandparents did, but effects with causes, some of which I can control. I get out of bed. I believe in myself.

It's nice. It's hopeful. It makes sense.

Unfortunately religious guilt often gets replaced by secular neo-Malthusian doomsday ideology. That might not be your experience but it seems to be common. It plugs into the same port: "forgive us nature for we have sinned... we have overshot our ecological carrying capacity..."

Another thing about secularism that bothers me (and I am not religious) is the strong negative association with birth rates. Look up the statistics. The more rational your worldview is the less you reproduce, to the point that most very secular nations are in demographic decline. Difficult investments in the future such as child rearing seem to be replaced by an evolutionary dead end Epicurean lifestyle.

I'm not arguing that everyone should join the Quiverfull movement, but it bothers me that fertility is inversely correlated to a rational worldview. Darwin is clearly on the side of fanaticism and superstition, in that if there is any genetic basis to these traits we are strongly selecting for them. Even if there is no genetic basis, beliefs propagate most strongly from parent to child so we are certainly culturally selecting for fanatical religious ideologies in the long term. A higher proportion of tomorrow's children will be the product of today's fundamentalists. I suspect this is why severe religious ideologies are historically so powerful. Those that didn't hold them left fewer descendants.

I see a connection there -- between deep pessimism and lack of fertility -- that points to some kind of psychological vacuum related to motivation and hope. Seems like when you take away myth, you take away teleological action. Actions belong to the realm of narrative -- storytelling -- not fact. This is as true in the secular realm as in the religious -- progress is a myth, not a fact. In the extreme it takes on a quasi-religious tone in the form of "the Singularity" and similar ideas. Even companies have myths, and startup founders often have to put on at least a little bit of a guru hat.

You also seem to take away the idea that one can stand up against overpowering adversity. It's certainly true that humanity faces difficult challenges, but those who have secular worldviews seem to easily default to hopelessness the minute their logical analysis turns up a probability of success that seems less than 50/50. Perhaps there's something adaptive about the craziness of faith... it causes us to actually try in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.

I'm not convinced that lack of religion and pessimism are correlated at all. In my experience, religious people are as likely to be pessimistic as non-religious people. The latter may be more cynical, but those people were almost always religious at some point in their lives and their darker attitudes are caused by their disillusionment about religion, rather than by lack of religion.

I think you have some deeply rooted misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and fertility. Religious people have more kids primarily because most organized religions frown upon birth control. It has nothing to do with hope or optimism and everything to do with the fact that they are having sex just as often as non-religious folks but are much more likely to conceive. Another reason is that non-religious people tend to be more independent in their thinking and they question and resist social pressures -- and even economic incentives -- to have kids. Atheist couples are much more open to sitting down and having a conversation about whether they want kids and, if they do, whether they are ready.

As for religion and evolution... I don't even know where to begin. Just because you're popping out child after child doesn't mean those children are likely to survive, prosper and reproduce. That is traditionally why people have felt the need to have lots of kids: you didn't know how many of them would live long enough to have kids of their own. It is only very recently that modern medicine has significantly decreased child mortality and increased lifespans. This is yet another reason why developed countries have lower birth rates.

The bottom line is that your entire narrative seems to be that lack of religion leads to pessimism, which then leads to lower fertility, and this is somehow going to have evolutionary implications. To anyone who is knowledgeable about any of these topics, this is just sheer, unadulterated nonsense.

Religious people have kids because of a commandment to "multiply and replenish the earth". There are lots of religious families with six or more children, all spaced two or three years apart using birth control.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that higher education is correlated with lower birth rates, all the way down to sub-replacement levels. This is indeed a problem for anyone who wants to promote secular policies in a democracy, if they quickly find themselves outnumbered in a few generations (assuming that "conversion" to secular politics happens at a lower rate than the non-secular birth rate). That is how I read the parent comment.

Exactly. Liberal types try to win by being right. Right-wingers win by... Umm... Winning. I was not arguing that the inverse correlation between secularism and birth rates is a good thing.

Says who? All of the atheists I know tend to have some like of Star Trek-like futurist beliefs. Or watered-down Tim Leary beliefs of mind expansion and space migration.

Also, its probably not in our best interest to pretend that extinction events don't happen. If anything, if we're seeing some paranoia, it might be healthy paranoia. Imagine if Al Gore was a "everything happens for a reason" type person and didn't care to invest his political life into the environment. Instead he fought to popularize global warming and has helped moved policy forward. Policy that will probably make a difference to our grandkids. There's a lot of middle ground between the optimism of 72 virgins and the strawman doom-and-gloom person you describe.

The most hopeless people I know tend to be conservative religious types for whatever reason. "Get while the gettings good" seems to be their collective motto. Who cares about the future when Jesus/Buddha/whoever is coming back any day now!

Correction -- all of the atheists you know who vocally express their beliefs have Star-Trek-like beliefs, or other generally optimistic beliefs about the future. The atheists who think that there's a significant chance that we'll manage to wipe ourselves out in the next century generally aren't going to vocalize those beliefs, unless there's something actionable that can be done about it (though I don't think I actually know anyone who thinks that ecological overshoot is a real threat to civilization, much less humanity).

I think you see the pessimists on both sides of the secular / religious divide. The difference is that pessimism is generally low-status and frowned upon in secular groups, meaning that pessimists in those groups are generally not very vocal about their pessimism.

I think we are firmly in YMMV territory here. :)

I always noticed that at academic conferences the casual greeting seemed to be agreement about the impending human die-off due to global warming / ecological doom / whatever.

It's an empowering sort of hopelessness, though, at least for me. It's a dark world, with lots of horrible people, and humanity seems to only make bad or worse choices, but at the root of things, they are OUR choices, so it's for us to work our asses off to fix them. Even if success is essentially random, if you try more you'll succeed more. I've always felt that it was disingenuous to not look at all the terrible aspects of the world head on, but I also see no reason this shouldn't be a tool for those who can see it, depressing as it may be.

People* like to belong to something.

Quite a lot of people like to delegate their worries to a leader with an answer. Other people like to feel that they're "in the know" (gnosis), that they know something other people don't that grants superiority. This goes for spirituality, politics, and JS frameworks alike.

There used to be essentially one option for meeting these needs: attend your local church.

Population growth, mass communication, and intellectual freedom have resulted in a huge explosion of things one can belong to and things one can be gnostic about. It's not that there aren't cults any more - Scientology is still strong, Mormonism arguably qualifies - but there are so many things you can cling to (mostly "fandoms" these days) that there's no reason to put up with a bad cult. Or a difficult or demanding one.

It's still too early to call the death of religion until the shooting has stopped in the Islamic world, though.

(*"I don't" is not a useful reply to this; I'm talking about people in general)

>>> You can engage in a personal spirituality without feeling guilted to show up for social functions (that only seem to empower the leaders of congregations).

This.

So many people equate spirituality with religion. The deepest things I've learned about spirituality was when I was studying Native American religions and Shamanism. I was brought up Catholic, but it wasn't until I realized my spirituality didn't have to be connected to my religious beliefs that I really started to see the world in a whole new way.

It just opened up so many new paths of exploration and understanding. It truly was an "ah-ha!" moment.

If spirituality was an entirely new term that we invented today, we would call it brain hacking, or consciousness hacking.

After reading the relevant chapter of Cialdini's Influence, my take is that it's easy for cult leaders to brainwash people because they've read it too. And, of course, because they're evil, greedy bastards. Presumably, many people could do it but don't.