One thing that’s fascinating about brainwashing is how transparent the tactics are of other groups, yet evidence for those same tactics is highly elusive in your own group. There was little dispute as to the motivations for Scientology offering free “screenings” to victims at the Virginia Tech shootings a few years ago, or doing the same for the Haiti earthquake victims. In both these situations people have had to face the shock of tragedy and, in some cases, losing a loved one or close friend. Because of this they are put into an emotionally vulnerable state, which makes them easy pickings for cults which promise escape, happiness, or the possibility of seeing your loved one again.

Anyone who has been on an LDS mission has probably been told to seek out people who are in mourning for this very reason. Even the slightest feeling of vulnerability or insecurity will destroy your defenses against brainwashing. That’s why it is of paramount importance that the church use any technique it can to make you feel vulnerable when you are being indoctrinated. Bearing your testimony in front of the congregation is an obvious example, but of course when it comes to brainwashing the whole concept of the testimony is an obvious and easy target, so let’s skip that one.

Using Scientology as an example again, since few who are not Scientologists would dispute that they’re a textbook cult; imagine yourself alone in a room with a man who is interviewing you probing for any “regrets” or anything that you need to be “cleared” of. In other words, sins. He has a crude lie detector so you know he can tell if you’re being dishonest, and the outcome of this interview could have a major impact on your life here and in your next life. You are loaded down with guilt, more and more as the interview goes on, and are made to feel terrible and guilty. That guilt leaves with you, and you have to come back for his help in clearing you of your body thetans. It’s not hard to imagine how in such a situation you would sign your life away at a moments notice in order to clear yourself of that guilt, and you will believe almost anything this man tells you because he is in authority.

Replace the auditor in his little office with a bishop in his office, the lie detector with the spirit and the “gift of discernment,” and getting “cleared of your thetans” with “repenting to secure your place in the Celestial Kingdom” and you have the exact same situation. What’s happening here is you feel vulnerable in this little room with a man who has authority over you, and who can potentially control your fate in the hereafter. You are likely to believe anything this man tells you, and the experience will create a dependency to get rid of the guilt. In Scientology’s case you need to come back for repeated audits, in Mormonism’s case you need to come back to proceed in the repentance process.

Anyone who has been through an LDS Endowment session can easily identify another place the vulnerability tactic is used in Mormonism. Your first time attending the temple is always strategically placed at a major life decision where commitments have already been made, such as marriage or a mission, and while surrounded by family thus heaping on tons of extra pressure. At one point in the ceremony they even have the audacity to invite anyone who doesn’t wish to “take these covenants” to leave, conspicuously omitting what said covenants actually are. Being surrounded by family, or worse, your soon-to-be spouse; you are under enormous pressure to conform and accept these covenants (which ultimately amount to giving your entire life to the church). This is not the only brainwashing tactic used in the temple (others include exclusivity/superiority, chanting and repetition) but it is by far the most penetrating and serves to intensify the others.

Finally, for years, the Catholic church has been using massive buildings and impressive art such as sculptures or murals to create that sense of vulnerability. A casual stroll through the Vatican is very impressive even to our modern eyes. In such an environment, a skilled performer can create any emotion they want for their participants and tell you that these emotions came from another source — perhaps divine. Sports venues and other sectors of the entertainment industry have been using this technique for years, take a look at sporting arenas and the flashy presentation used in broadcasts. More recently, mega churches have caught on to this idea and began building massive auditoriums to house their congregations. Brainwashing is frighteningly easy in such an environment where the building itself creates the vulnerability needed in order for the pastor to penetrate your natural defenses. Ultimately the LDS church caught on and added this technique to their arsenal of brainwashing tools.

Since this is a recent addition to the church’s brainwashing tactics, they have only two of these auditoriums so far. (to my knowledge anyway) The second, on the campus at BYU-Idaho, is pictured below.

The church knows very well how effective the use of such facilities are in creating that sense of vulnerability. You are in a large, impressive building surrounded by thousands of people who are all like-minded. Imagine how intense the social reinforcement is here. Imagine the pressure to believe exactly what everyone else believes.

Imagine.

Having grown up in an organization that uses brainwashing, then later managing to break out of it, it seems every time I turn around I discover something new that surprises me. I have fond memories of Young Mens activities and camping trips; and while I may not be in contact with any of those individuals now, at the point in my life when I was going through young mens their friendship was something I really needed.

More recently, I was able to talk to some female ex-mormons (alias BlissfulHeretic in particular) that shared with me what the equivalent experience for young women is like. And what I heard came as something of a shock. She described youth camp where they could force false emotions under peer pressure, particularly at the testimony meeting; they would do “spirit walks” where they would go blind folded to their campsite holding on to an “iron rod” (rope) while people try to “tempt” them into letting go — and failure meant starting over from the beginning. The description of girls still clinging to the rope as they carried it back to their campsite is still haunting to me.

Then there is the recitation of the Young Women’s Theme. Picture a room full of girls reciting this in a chant-like monotone week after week on Sundays:

We are daughters of our Heavenly Father, who loves us, and we love Him. We will stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places as we strive to live the Young Women values, which are:

Faith
Divine Nature
Individual Worth
Knowledge
Choice and Accountability
Good Works
Integrity and
Virtue.

We believe as we come to accept and act upon these values, we will be prepared to strengthen home and family, make and keep sacred covenants, receive the ordinances of the temple, and enjoy the blessings of exaltation.

The guys had nothing like this. I grew up completely oblivious to the blatant cult-like brainwashing my own sisters were subject to while we “priesthood holders” could barely keep straight who was supposed to cover a lesson that week. It is true that the men go on missions which makes up for this, but even then it’s still worse for the women; and most men won’t realize this without stopping to think about it.

Mormons have fairly desirable promises for men. In the hereafter we get virtually unlimited wives, get to become a god and stand atop own own topless throne for our own people to worship. Women get to sit back and spit out spirit babies as rapidly as possible (remember, they have to produce billions of spirits!) all the while disappearing into their spiritual kitchen to serve their divine husband that they have to share with other women. No wonder Utah leads the nation in depression!

It may seem that all that brainwashing is used to counter the misery that the church causes for women. On the contrary, the misery increases the level of commitment and by extension strengthens their emotional bond with the church. Believe it or not, the absolute misery the women in the Mormon church put up with works in the church’s favor. While there are some newer, more progressive sects of Christianity out there that don’t have this problem, they’re in the minority, since there is actually a scriptural basis for the mistreatment of women in the bible. Consider Genesis chapter 3 where God chastises Adam for partaking the fruit. He then turns to eve and… well, read it, verse 6:

To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”

Read this in context. Adam gets a slap in the wrist while Eve is cursed with… painful child birth. The attitude of the bible authors becomes even more clear a few chapters later when they start a verse this way (emphasis added):

that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

When you consider the conspicuous absence of Lilith despite her being known to early Christians and even appearing in the Dead Sea Scrolls it’s apparent that Christians didn’t want their women getting any ideas. Joseph Smith continued the proud tradition of Christians mistreating women by the inclusion of D&C 132 and his practice of polyandry. Even so, if Mormon tradition doesn’t tear them down, the church’s Christian roots will.

Now, despite all this, I don’t think there’s much to be gained from overzealous feminism, changing the spelling of common words to remove masculine references (such as “womyn”) or anything ridiculous like that. My point in all this is to point out something for the men out there that they may not be aware of, or may not have noticed because they were themselves brainwashed by the same organization. Women are treated really poorly in the LDS church, and that poor treatment makes the brainwashing far harder to penetrate. It’s still possible, it just requires patience and understanding. They have a bigger barrier to overcome. But they have you to help them do it.

For women who are reading this and have male loved ones that are trapped by the bonds of brainwashing, understand that a mission can and often does give their brain a thorough scrubbing; but take heart. They don’t have the strengthening factor that comes with the sacrifice, which means there’s a lower barrier. You got out, so can they.

Describing how to get them out is beyond the scope of this post, but I hope this puts some new perspective on what’s happening and why getting your loved one out of the church would be such a huge blessing for them.

I remember the first time I realized that the Mormon church is a cult. That was the most uncomfortable Fast & Testimony meeting ever. I had coincidentally been reading about brainwashing just hours earlier and had learned that one of the easiest and most widely used brainwashing techniques out there is to get the subject to say (often repeatedly) whatever it is you want them to believe. When the first person got up there, got all emotional and declared how she knew the church is true my heart sank. Cult brainwashing uses your emotions against you.

I sat there for the full hour watching in horror as members of the congregation wandered to the front of the room and participated in what I had just realized was a cult brainwashing technique. I had seen meetings like this for as long as I could remember and never once did I make the connection before now. Of course my mind spiraled into a whirlwind of thought as the church became more and more transparent. Part of what makes testimonies so effective is the fact that what they believe is not only false, but patently absurd; and members have to justify it. Sharing their conviction justifies their belief and makes the dissonance go away; but more importantly, it acts as a thought stopping technique. Presented with a really hard question about the church? Just bare your testimony and “their heart will be softened.” The church teaches that, but not to get the subject to convince the person they received the “bad” information from, but to prevent them from thinking any further on the issue.

There is a silver lining here though. When you argue with someone over the “truthfulness” of the church, or simply challenge them on the idea of whether or not it is true, they usually bring out what they think will be a trump card very early on in the conversation, and you can use this to your advantage. Once you destroy that they will still fall back on their testimony as a last line of defense, but you can still get your message past the first line of defense just by making them realize that their “strongest argument is weak.”

So the testimony is one of the weaker brainwashing tactics the church uses, and is just one of dozens, but it ‘s also the most obvious and easy to recognize. Always remember that real truth is self evident. It does not need weekly reinforcement, no “testimony” that can be lost, or faith. It just is what it is. If you believe in something that is not necessarily self-evident, then that may be cause for concern.

It’s amazing to me how many gems you find in the bible once you start looking. It’s not 100% evil and does have some wisdom in it.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. — 1 Corinthians 13:11 (NASB)

What I find sad is the overwhelming majority, particularly in the religion I was raised with, actively reject many of the good things in there and hold fast to the atrocities or absurdities. But I feel like when you reject religion as your moral compass, it’s far easier to recognize good when you see it; even when the source is the bible. Read the above verse in context, in the NIV this time:

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,

10 but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The first book of Corinthians, or the 1st Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians is a letter Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth. Given the lack of scientific advancement at the time I don’t think much brainwashing was needed to make people believe in religious dogma, but not all dogma is evil. It’s easy to criticize the Old Testament and how evil Yahweh (the Judeo/Christian/Islamic god) is portrayed there, and you might assume that’s where I’m going with this. But what’s interesting though is that much of the “good” you find in the bible didn’t come from Jesus, but from his desciples. In fact, Jesus doesn’t fare all that well when you count those times he got angry over petty things, or this gem in Luke 19, where he commands his disciples to steal a horse:

29 As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them,

30 “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here.

31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’”

32 Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them.

33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”

34 They replied, “The Lord needs it.”

35 They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it.

I’m sure Joseph Smith would have gobbled that one up had he known about it, he might not have needed to include the ridiculous slaying of Laban in the Book of Mormon to justify his deeds.

I love reflecting back on experiences that I’ve had while I still believed in the church. It seems that every time I do, I discover a little more about myself, and about how and why I believed in the things that I did. I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog post how looking at many aspects of the church often gives me pause as I have to ask… it’s really this obvious? Well, no, it’s not; at least if you are subject to the mind control that the church uses.

During the years when my cognitive dissonance was in rapid incline, I once prided myself on the fact that I could successfully and (I thought) thoroughly defend my beliefs and the church to anyone that would challenge me on them. And challenge me they did. I’ve even had atheist coworkers who knew little about the church ask what would normally be very tough questions, but my answers were swift as they were clever. The guy knew little about the Mormon church, and so could not effectively counter my arguments. (I can destroy my old arguments now though)

Despite the cognitive dissonance I already felt by then, I honestly thought I could argue against anyone that tried to challenge my beliefs. I thought I had the truth™ and everyone else was dwindling in unbelief. The thing is, it didn’t go so smoothly as I liked to think it did. If something I truly could not answer was thrown at me I would dismiss it, assume the answer is out there somewhere, and move on. For this reason I don’t think anyone, even master religious debater Christopher Hitchens, could have really convinced me that I was wrong about this.

But a religion teacher at BYU could.

When I started getting what I now describe as Bludgeoning by Bullshit in a religion class, being told things that I knew weren’t true and had reconciled as being metaphors or parables not unlike the Good Samaritan, I began questioning. The difference here was that the questions and criticism came not from someone challenging me, but myself. I finally found someone clever enough to counter my arguments. Me.

One of the tactics that the church uses is the “devil over the shoulder” approach, which works like this: Anything that is contrary to the teachings of the church, including anything that challenges your beliefs, is of the devil and should be combated at all costs. Even the most casual members, when challenged from the outside, will put up walls around themselves. In fact, the church intentionally made as many people into sinners as possible by making masturbation a sin, thus making the majority of youth cling to the church and ultimately become addicted to it. Why this is addictive is beyond the scope of this post, but the point is that as soon as the devil is felt the believer will put up walls around their “testimony” and cling to belief.

But what if the source of the attack is from behind those walls?

I’m actually somewhat grateful for the religion classes that I took, for without them, the tools to destroy my own brainwashing from within may never have been planted. But of course, there are a million other ways they can be introduced; which brings me back to the arguments I once used to defend the church. These arguments generally included reconciliations for conflicts between science, which I knew to be true because of the evidence; and religion, which I…well, I believed in. Those reconciliations were effectively destroyed in my religion classes, which forced me to go back and revisit them. What it took was me being introduced to information that destroyed the basis of my faith by a source that I trusted. What’s more, the assault wasn’t direct, it simply introduced me to ideas that led me to conclusions whose origin was behind the defenses. When defending beliefs, most people will drop their trump cards early on (real life doesn’t work like the movies, sorry kids) which means their early arguments are the ones that you want to thoroughly destroy… and you want to do it indirectly. Once they see that the argument is invalid the rest will come from their own mind.

No direct assault on the believer from the outside will conquer their bondage until it is destroyed from within. If you have a loved one who is trapped in a cult like Mormonism, don’t directly challenge their beliefs. Give them the tools to do it themselves.

This is a follow-up post to the brainwashing test. Critiquing oneself is very difficult as a byproduct of human nature and identifying oneself as being brainwashed even moreso. I have another brainwashing test here for you.

Cult mind control usually has a motivation behind it, and by extension, it will have an authority figure. What’s surprising to me is just how many ways the mind can be manipulated, up to and including rewiring and reworking of internal chemistry. When I ask a Mormon why they believe, especially if they’ve been presented with contrary evidence for their belief, they will usually fall back on how the church makes them feel. When I was very young I would have accepted this as pretty strong evidence, but today my knowledge has increased to a point where I can easily destroy such a claim by simply putting it in a different context:

Your honor, I know the accused is guilty of murder because I felt a burning in my bosom when I prayed about it.

Recently, I had the “feelings in my heart” argument used against me. I easily destroyed the argument by pointing out all of the other Christians, Muslims, Hindus and others that confirm their own beliefs with the exact same emotional feelings. But where do these feelings come from? Like the above example, let’s put this in a different context. Imagine you visit your doctor suffering from back pains. Your doctor prescribes you some medication that he says will cure your pain, along with instructions on how to take this medication. Your pain goes away after taking the medication, and you feel better.

The medicine that doctor gave you was a placebo; that is to say it was just a sugar pill, your own mind did the real work. The placebo effect is very real and quite well documented, so the pill actually did indirectly cause you to overcome your back pains, but this happened not because he gave you a real medicine. It happened because of the power of suggestion from an authority figure, in this case a doctor. Reality is that if you trust your doctor, and most people do, he can tell you that those pills will have whatever effect he desires and they will do just that. For some individuals, a placebo can even induce vomiting.

Now let’s return to the context of the Mormon faith. Imagine the person issuing the placebo is a man you believe speaks for God and his words are absolute truth. He tells you that if x happens you will feel y. I can say from experience that, if you are in fact subject to cult mind control as I once was, you will distinctly feel y and it will likely firm your trust in the authority figure.

I see no problem with doctors using this technique for the wellbeing of patients, and besides, chances are the medication they are prescribing will actually have the effect they claim. But if you are told to expect certain feelings in any other context — religious especially — you can almost guarantee that mind control tactics are being used. Whether or not you are okay with that is up to you.

One thing has certainly fascinated me since figuring out that the church isn’t true is the scriptures. I just can’t get over the fact that I once believed that they were true (due in part to child indoctrination) but every time I turn around I am once again shocked at how obvious their lack of divinity is. I certainly don’t feel ashamed, I know how brainwashing works now, but I do feel a sense of fascination and wonder.

The scripture that has been on my mind today is 2 Nephi 29 verses 3 and 6. From the title of this post, you can already guess what scripture this is. Ignoring the obvious anachronism of mentioning the bible hundreds of years before the concept was invented, what I find striking about this verse now is that Mormons really think the way that verse 6 calls foolish. I remember the first time I learned that there were other translations, when I saw the New International Version in a library. My initial thought as a TBM at the time (I was young, this was before the real serious cognitive dissonance started) was that the idea of a different bible other than the King James Version is ludicrous. Why would I need a different bible? Isn’t this like taking an already imperfect text and making it worse by translating it yet again?

What I didn’t realize then was that more modern versions of the bible were translated by scholars that know the source language and culture, and they used manuscripts far older than those used in the KJV. They also took the time to use multiple manuscripts, took archaeology and beliefs of the original authors into account, and in some of the translations even went through a peer review process. The KJV has none of this, or at the very least not with our modern understanding. One classic example is the mention of steel in the KJV. One look at the Wikipedia page on steel and it’s immediately obvious that what you could call “steel” before 1400C.E. is really just a Copper and Iron alloy. Far too brittle to make a bow out of . Mormons love to point out that steel is mentioned in the bible as a defense for this, and it is actually mentioned in the KJV, but ancient Hebrew only had a single generic word for “metal” which the KJV translators figured must’ve been referring to steel in this case. Modern archaeology tells us that this was in fact Copper or Brass, and whenever the word appears in modern translations context (as well as known examples among artifacts that date around the correct time period of the authorship — not the story itself) is used to determine which of the two is being referred to.

That’s obviously an overly simplified example, and I could write a book on the verses copied word for word from the KJV bible that have known mistranslations in them, but that’s not really the point I’m making. We know that the KJV bible is not as accurate to the original source as newer translations, and despite the belief that the bible is the word of God “as far as it is translated correctly” (verses with these aforementioned errors appearing in the BoM notwithstanding) members of the [lds] church are utterly turned off by the idea of using a more accurate version. Indeed, it could be said that they say “a Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible.”

For this new year I have decided that I want to start reading the bible with the same level of intensity that I have studied the Book of Mormon. I read the BoM twice during my “enlightenment.” The first read-through made me determine that the church isn’t true, the second just fascinated me because reading it with the context of it being fiction is a completely different experience than if you’re a believer. Describing that experience is obviously far beyond the scope of this post. Far more than that, I’m constantly finding out from atheism communities about gems in the bible that I had no idea were there:

“There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses” — Ezekiel 23:20 (NIV)

I’ve taken the time to ask some scholars which version I should read for the most accurate, objective take on it. (I love the internet!) The response was to read multiple versions side-by-side in a multi-column format, and this version specifically was recommended. It has four versions in a four-column format. (two columns on each page, laid out in a two-page spread format) These are: The New International Version, the King James Version, NASB Updated version and Amplified version. Between the four very little actually gets lost in translation, supposedly. I plan on starting in a few months, probably late spring. My hope is to have such a thorough understanding of the bible that no critic of mine — my mother chief among them — can rightfully say that they know the bible better than I do.

But there is a deeper motivation behind this. Mormonism isn’t the only religion that worries me.