Do you ever get the feeling that you have been indoctrinated?

If you answer “yes,” you are correct. You have been indoctrinated.

If you answer “no,” then you have been successfully indoctrinated.

The interesting thing about this is as a child you don’t seem to get much of a choice in the matter. But as an adult you do. However, it can take years to realize that you have been indoctrinated, and even if you realize it, you may misunderstand unto what you were trained like a dog to like and dislike.

The power of indoctrination looms large over every decision. There is a strong chance that you will come to believe you were indoctrinated by something other than what has actually indoctrinated you. This is the most well-done type of indoctrination. This is the type that plants a deep-rooted worldview that is difficult to cut out, like an oak stump, because the mantras and slogans and ideas are sown when you are young. Once you have done the care and feeding of certain ideas over a lifetime, starting over with a new doctrine may feel far more difficult than just remaining under the shade of whatever oak you watered, even if you sense it’s not quite right.

One thing is certain: when there are multiple doctrines doing battle, you will have confusion, and whatever indoctrination took full root will at some point choke out the other one. You will know which indoctrination won when the crisis points and moments of decision arrive.

There is a wrestling match happening in your head. Thoughts and ideas are elbowing for space in your mind, and it happens throughout your life. Much of the indoctrination programming of our world goes to great effort to convince you that there is only one kind of knowledge, that of the material world and the laws of nature. The aim is to deny that there is a knowledge that is born into you, a spiritual knowledge that transcends human knowledge or the laws of nature. This argument about the spiritual realm is one of the main battles of indoctrination that each individual faces, in a larger war for the hearts and minds of all people. To deny or accept that there is knowledge that goes beyond the intellect, that there is a knowledge that can sense and experience a higher power at work in the world - this is a critical fortress for all sides to claim, as much of the remaining arguments rest upon winning this fundamental battle.

So I grew up thinking that I had been indoctrinated into a Christian mindset and worldview. I was convinced that this was the case. Upon further review, this was not the case. In fact, I didn’t realize for some fifteen years that I was so successfully indoctrinated that my programming led me to believe that I was indoctrinated by a different set of beliefs. This is like the movie Inception, where dreams and sub-dreams plant seeds to convince the sleeping person of an idea. This is depth level 3 on the dream-bubble-up theory of the movie. In the movie, ideas are planted deep in the subconscious mind, so that you assume ideas came from you, but they didn’t. This is what makes the movie interesting. If thoughts do not come from ourselves, then where do they come from? Inception is playing around with the idea of where thoughts come from. Do they come from us? Or do we receive them? Thoughts come from somewhere, and I am going to argue that they come from outside, through the ears and the eyes.

Consider that whatever noun I say will conjure a thought of that item or idea in your mind. If I just say “beach ball” or “umbrella” you will briefly think of that object. When I say “Beach Ball,” you say “Umbrella.”

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Thoughts of beach ball and umbrella in this case did not come from you, but came from sound or sight, prompted by me. You can read the words of hear them, but in either case the thought arrived in your mind from somewhere else. Maybe the combination of beach ball and umbrella brought forth some image of a beach, since they tend to go together. Or maybe it brought out some other scene from your variety of life experiences where beach balls and umbrellas made a connection. Maybe it caused terror for you if some clown carried both of these things, like Stephen King’s IT and the red balloon. Whatever the case, the thought came from outside of you and combined with past thoughts that also came from outside of you, mixing a cocktail of memories and thoughts. This same idea is a billion dollar industry, as billboards for Coors Light and Personal Injury Attorneys rely upon this imagery and perception to trigger your thinking about the desire for a beer or lawyering-up after a fender bender.

We spend a lifetime of receiving images and sounds, starting from the moment we enter the world. Thoughts are driven into our minds through the senses, but some thoughts we imagine as starting from within our own head. But perhaps we don’t create thoughts on our own. Perhaps we receive them - all of them. This is something I had not considered until I started peeling the onion on my belief system. Once I started doing a post-mortem autopsy of my spiritual death, I began to realize that the thoughts I carried and adhered to were things that I didn’t come up with on my own.

There are thoughts of tangible or visible things which we can explain through sensory perception, like the beach ball. But then there are things that are not tangible, like to go up or to go down, to go left or to go right, to be or not to be, which go into a different space that we can’t see or hear. These things also have mutually exclusive options, as we cannot go both down and up or both left and right. We must choose.

We cannot take a shot of whiskey and also decline the offer. We must choose to drink or not to drink. The thought to go down or to go up may be presented to us by situations, such as an escalator. The presentation of an escalator prompts the thought, “Which way?” and a decision must happen to take action. The decision to take action is a critical point of inflection as to your worldview, because for these thoughts that become questions, where you can do one thing but not another, you must decide that there is either free will as the driving force or that your actions are pre-determined and unavoidable. Thoughts, wherever they may come from, result in the need to choose or take action.

“The devil made me do it” is often mocked as old-time religious nonsense. If you agree that it’s religious nonsense from the dark ages, this is in itself an interesting thought, because if you find the devil to be absurd, you may already know which side has won the indoctrination battle. If you don’t believe in the soul or spirits, then of course you don’t believe in the devil or spirits guiding you to make decisions. If souls don’t exist, then by definition thoughts must come from the material world, from your brain itself, which interacts with the senses.

If no mysterious spirit is at play in the world, then we are reduced to the laws that govern nature. This worldview means truncating or slicing all possibility of the transcendent or divine from being the generator of thoughts. No angelic or demonic guides can be said to be helping make decisions. You are then the only thing responsible because you generate your own thoughts and make decisions without any nudge or assistance from outside. The cheese stands alone, so to speak.

These are two opposing worldviews: one that denies spirits and one that believes in spirits. For those acknowledging a soul and spirits, thoughts are received and decisions may be guided, but the final choice must be selected in order to take action. For those denying a soul and spirits, thoughts are generated and decisions are unavoidable because of genetics and/or circumstances. Free will must become a casualty of pure materialism. There is also an extreme spiritual worldview that can kill free will, where all outcomes are God’s will and no human choice is needed, to the point that even the slightest decision is pre-determined by God’s will.

A purely material human with no soul would perform actions and decisions because he was “born this way.” But a purely material human would then be a robot. In this worldview, all decisions are not so much decisions as pre-determined results based on biology and physics. If all is scientifically explained, then outcomes cannot be altered, and then you get the luxury of justification for any action that happens where you can say, “Not my fault. I was born this way.” Take for example, if you spent last night scrolling through porn websites before bed, it was not a choice but just the way you are. It was bound to happen.

But few would go that far. On the other side there is the spiritual person who declares that all outcomes were God’s will with no human input at all, to the point that selecting Parmesan Garlic or Asian Zing sauce for chicken wings becomes a manifestation of God’s will. This is a kind of predestined spiritual robot with no actual choice in matters.

We have a mushy middle where we deny the soul for the most part, but still want to cling to free-will, especially when someone commits a crime. The odd thing is that if you believe in free-will but reject the idea of “the devil made me do it” then you still have to explain decisions where people choose to do evil instead of good. The irony of believing that you did something because you were “born this way” is the exact opposite of saying “the devil made me do it.” In both cases, it’s not your fault personally, but something beyond you.

The usual villain for those holding this view of free-will without spirits is that the choice to do evil happened because of circumstances or other people. In other words, something exterior to the person caused the bad act. In all cases, evil must be explained, and explained away, because it’s here in the world and not going away, at least not yet. The problem with “Born this way” is that there is no fixing the problem, while at least with the argument, “The devil made me do it” there is a way to battle that problem.

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