Ah yes - I'm well aware of the indoctrination processes of religion, and I'd say that the Catholic church does it better than most.
Two of my kids attended a private Catholic school for a couple of years – we weren’t Catholics but we wanted a private school education for our children, and the Catholic school was the only private school in town. It was unbelievable how that school drummed Catholicism into those little kids from grade 1 onwards, including a weekly session over which the priest presided at the Catholic church next door to the school. Those little kids were much too young to even understand most of the Catholic stuff they were being taught, but I guess it was all part of the ‘get ‘em while they’re young’ indoctrination process.
My wife tells me that when she was being raised a Catholic in Ireland, from an early age the children were steered into various religious rites and ceremonies which they were simply too young to understand.
Another interesting snippet of information from her is the method of recruiting young men and women to train as nuns and priests. From childhood the children were told that God chooses certain ‘special’ people to join the priesthood or convent so they can dedicate their lives to working for God and the church.
The kids were told to listen for God.....if he was ‘talking’ to them it could mean they were one his chosen ones for the special work of the convent or priesthood. The pressure on the kids really cranked up in secondary school. My wife attended a private Catholic girls boarding school from the age of 13, and almost from day one the nuns would regularly take each girl aside individually and ask her if she’d had the call from God yet.
My wife told them that any time she thought she heard God calling her, she turned her radio up loud to drown him out!
The nuns were mortified and told her ‘Oh no, don’t do that – you wouldn’t want to miss God’s call, would you’?
Naturally when kids are indoctrinated from early childhood with the belief that God is talking to them through their thoughts and prayers, they come to believe it, much the same as primitive people believed their gods were talking to them through the wind or thunder or whatever.
The long and short of it was that the nuns so successfully implanted in the girls minds that God was talking to them and calling them to convent life, that some of them actually believed it and joined up.
My wife’s brother copped the same treatment from the priests when he attended a private boys school.....they were forever trying to steer the boys towards the priesthood by implanting the idea in their minds that they were one of the chosen ones who God was calling.
It was inevitable that some of them ended up believing it and becoming priests.
