Golmer's Blog

Heidi,

I have to say your experience is very typical, and not entirely out of context with what I said about indoctrination and inculcation. I in no way want to belittle your experience or say you didn’t have it, because you most assuredly did have it. I have seen the same thing with my sister, with her children, and with several people in my life.

Suffice to say that that process you went through (I still don’t know what age you were when you started going to church, but I can only assume that it was quite a bit younger than 10) didn’t really work with me at a young age, later in life when asked as a guest to my sister’s church, or even later in life as an event that I will tie in in a little bit.

When I was very young (2, 3, 4, etc.) I attended a Methodist church with my parents. I got the standard church experience (as much as any methodist can), but I was always one to ask why?, and I also never really felt susceptible to the methods used in church to make the crowd groupthink like it is desired by the people who indoctrinate people into such systems as a profession. When everyone else in the church was concentrating on every word the pastor said (by design) and tuning everything else out, I at a very young age thought the whole exercise was boring and frankly a big waste of time. And I kept asking that question why? and even at that young age was not satisfied with “because God did it.” I found the stories implausible (the Ark, the Flood, Genesis, etc.) - there were too many holes, etc.

So anyway, jump forward to 1987 or so, when I had gone off to the military. During the time I was at my first military duty station, a hypnotist came to the base club as part of a show for the troops. He asked for volunteers from the audience to be hypnotized and of course I volunteered as did about 150 others. The hypnotist started using his technique on the group of people who volunteered, which largely consisted of speaking monotone mixed with passion, throwing in emotion, and really skillfully getting the volunteers in a calm mode where they only concentrated on his voice. He performed exercises with the volunteers to get them thinking, talking, responding, and exercising in unison. He continued that and some other techniques to get everybody on the same wavelength, and then started weeding those out that the method wasn’t really working on. (I happened to be one of those.) I was toward the back of the group, so I could readily see what was happening with the group as a whole. That peaked my interest on how a hypnotist actually does what he does.

So anyway, shortly after that I went home to visit my sister. Between 1985 and that time I visited her in 1987, she had become “born again” thanks to her husband (at the time)’s desire for her to attend church with him. And she was REALLY into it too! I went home on leave to visit them, and everything I could see had a blue dot on it. The mirrors, the door knobs, doors, windows, refrigerator handle, sink knobs, etc. I asked what that was about, and the answer was that every time you saw a blue dot, you were supposed to think of Jesus!!! My point is, she had just been “saved” and indoctrinated in to to the particular church her husband attended, so she was rather zealous about the whole affair and felt she needed to share the good word with me. So I was invited to attend church with them (since they were going to dinner afterward and didn’t want to have to come back and pick me up).

So I went. And do you know what? The experience there was almost exactly what I had seen at the show with the hypnotist. The same techniques were used to get people into the mood (or into the “spirit” as it were), concentrate on the speaker, and become a mind of one. As this didn’t really work on me as a young child or as an adult, it certainly didn’t work on me then. The main difference between the two experiences was that the ones that it didn’t work on at the hypnotist’s session were weeded out and told to sit down and watch the show - the ones it didn’t work on at the church were singled out (thank you not) for a lot of added peer pressure - we were brought to the front and prayed over, sung to, (sung with), praised, touched, and otherwise coerced to go along with the existing groupthink. I saw it work with several of the other people who were brought up with me.

Since that time, I have looked into the factors and methods used during what I witnessed in that church, and also looked into by what mechanisms people could indoctrinated into such systems. I looked at how cult indoctrination works, how Stockholm’s syndrome works. I looked at why people JOIN cults - I looked at whom cults target for indoctrination and why. Certainly those were factors - if you look at statistics the most easily indoctrinated are those very young, those that have reached a low point in their life, those rejected by society, and those with deep seated emotional, alchoholic, behavioral, or drug abuse issues. And what I found was the methods and techniques used to indoctrinate susceptible people into any cult was exactly the same as those used to indoctrinate people into not just any church but into any religion there is.

But ultimately different areas of research and experience tied it all together for me.

- Pain. My father had polio when he was a child. He was one of the kids that had his feet and hands and arms and legs literally strapped to boards and was bent the opposite way that his muscles tried to contract from the disease. He suffered unending and constant pain for weeks, and to this day he still gets out of bed and has to walk off his leg muscles contracting in painful directions. He told me that over time, he basically learned to control his own pain by putting his mind in a special place, and then he could will the pain away. I learned much later in life that that is a form of biofeedback, whereby a person learns to reach a mental state that allows them to “self dope” by releasing brain substances called endorphins, which are your own body’s natural opiates for pain control - essentially the same as heroin.

-Thrill Seeking and Runner’s High. Of course people can self-dope endorphins using other methods- by pushing their body to produce endorphins to counteract pain by causing themselves pain (or having someone cause it for them) and also by “thrill seeking” - putting one’s self in situations that cause release of endorphins.

-Drug use. Of course if you are of an “addictive personality” you may just opt to short-circuit relatively weak biofeedback mechanisms and resort to doping yourself chemically using other sources.

What do these things have to do with religion you might ask? Plenty. It turns out, by scanning the brains of people during these activities, brain chemistry, temperature, blood and oxygen saturation (and usage), and other measures, scientists can figure out what parts of the brain are stimulated by various things. They can watch the cascading releases of various chemicals (including endorphins) that occur related to those activities, and the effect those chemicals have on the brain and the physiology of the affected person.

And guess what? The same is true for religious and other brain doping activities. The same parts of the brain are stimulated (i.e. making oneself high) irrespective of which of the above activities are performed. People basically learn a biofeedback technique that allows them to “self-dope” just by thinking about a particular subject. Whether that subject be Jesus, Abortion, Trees, Animal Rights, bondage, various fetishes and sexual disorders, etc. - the same mechanisms of doping are in effect and the same areas of the brain are affected.

Not only that, but recent studies have shown that certain parts of the brain can be electromagnetically stimulated to induce exactly the feeling you say you had - presence of a being and oneness with the universe, etc., and they have also shown that when those regions of the brain are damaged through trauma or disease, that a person’s religiosity can change or be eliminated completely, suggesting that the whole affair is nothing more than a matter of brain chemistry.

It is entirely possible (and even probable) that the “religious experience” you had as a young child was really nothing more than the exact moment you learned the biofeedback technique that was taught to you by indoctrinating you into a system meant to do just that. And it is also entirely possible that you have continued to use that same method on yourself since then.

Take from it what you will - I make no assertion that my supposition HAS to be correct - I only ask that you think critically about what it is and why it is that you believe. I think if you do think critically about it and try to break out of the paradigm, you just might start asking why? as you may have done as a very young child before you were inculcated, and by exercising that muscle again you may just no longer be satisfied with the answer of “because God did it.”

I invite you to do your own research into biofeedback, pain, pleasure centers and mechanisms, cults, brain damage research, etc.