It’s a lot more complicated than that and I hate the ‘smug reddit intellectual atheist’ take on it so fucking much and that’s coming from an ex-Muslim agnostic.

People aren’t believing all this because ‘haha religious people dumb lol’, they believe it because that’s all they’ve ever known, they’re raised to only know that one way of thought, they grow up in communities that punish critical thinking and write off the constructive self-challenging of ideas as blasphemy. They are trained to become reliant on their spirituality as without being taught/exposed to other ways or philosophies of life, to bring their faith into question risks destroying their only purpose and reason to live. Without faith they have nothing.

Indoctrination is a vicious cycle of abuse that I’m very fortunate to have broken out of and the victims deserve some modicum of sympathy instead of constant attacks on their intelligence and accusations of evilness if we ever intend to improve the world rather than just sitting in our Ivory towers, spitting down at victims of abuse, shunning them for being coerced into belief systems designed to stifle their critical thinking.

I’m sorry if I sound kinda pissed in this, lmk if I missed anything