The “born this way” argument doesn’t help you to resolve anything but just affirms your problem. If your “nature” is to drink or look at dirty websites, then that makes you helpless in combating it. If there is no stopping or altering this behavior because you were born a certain way, then you either accept the problem as final or pursue a science-based solution, like pharmaceuticals or a technique, to deal with the issue.

What you will not try, if this is your worldview, is prayer or divine assistance. Why not? Because prayer appeals to magical nonsense that you don’t believe in, and to engage in such an act would be admitting that a spiritual realm may exist, which is for gullible simpletons. I know this feeling well.

The denial of the spirit or soul actually blocks you from accessing a treasure of knowledge that the mind and heart are capable of reaching, but not if you don’t believe it.

If we come to believe in the soul, or in something beyond ourselves, we open up a new possibility, and we can access something that hardly makes sense. In that worldview, you can have both free-will and rational thought and faith in mysteries, because in that worldview you are allowed the full range of mind, body, and soul. It’s like a buy-one-get-two-free offer. If you allow belief in the soul or God, you automatically receive the other. If you allow an eternal soul, it can commune with a God who knows all outcomes. But the key twist here is that while God knows all the outcomes, we do not. We still have to make decisions here.

This is an incredibly weird thing about human beings. To believe or not to believe makes a world of difference in how you live, and this is why the battleground for indoctrination spends so much time on this spiritual space, denying it or confirming it.

The whole reason the various religions and “varieties of religious experience” exist is because we can access a kind of knowledge that science cannot explain, and never will explain. Spirits cannot be put into beakers or centrifuges or equations, so scientific papers about spirits cannot be submitted to journals for peer review without the submitting author sounding like a lunatic to other scientists. Any undergraduate student knows that science cannot co-mingle with any kind of mysticism.

But mysticism can co-mingle with science. You can study the brain all you want and still retain mysticism, because science will help explain the physical processes and properties of what happens in the neurons during thought, but will never explain where thoughts come from, or what truly happens in prayer. No matter how many CAT Scans are done or electrodes placed on the forehead, this spirit world is impenetrable by nature, because it is not part of nature. Supernatural means beyond nature.

Thus, whether thoughts are generated or received is answered by which side of this fence you sit upon. If spirits do not exist, then you internally create your thoughts. If spirits do exist, then your thoughts can be created externally. For the most part, the idea of thoughts being created in you can be proven, while the idea of yourself creating thoughts cannot be proven. Suggestion is a simple way to illustrate this.

The power of suggestion is well-known by parents guiding children, or teachers guiding students, or salespeople working leads. One example of this is a salesperson planting a high price in your thoughts and then offering a discount shortly thereafter. Planting the high price first in the mind makes the second price after the discount believe you are getting a good deal, even though the salesperson was targeting the discount price the whole time. Another example is the loss leader, where a free item, say a box of delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, is offered to get you to spend much more on a whole shopping cart full of other items. In both cases, the idea of saving money is planted in your brain, which brings about the action of commerce. Whether this planting of thoughts is done by a salesperson or by an advertisement doesn’t really matter, because you receive these thought from external sources, via the portal of the ears or the eyes, and the decision is made in your head and heart on whether to buy or ignore the thought.

This same power of suggestion happens continually in our day, in every waking hour, as you cannot drive down a highway without a bombardment of messaging and offerings from road signs, from billboards, from businesses, from your radio, from bumper stickers, and even from other drivers. Driving from home to work will result in hundreds of planted thoughts which you either choose to allow or reject. This sorting is so common that we do it unconsciously and in rapid succession. But we do not conjure the idea of a billboard. We receive an image through sight, and that image enters our mind. Then we have to determine what to do with the image, and quickly decide: What does a personal injury attorney have to do with me? Do I need a Coors Light? Do I like the candidate on that bumper sticker? Did that person just cut me off?

Some images turn into sticky thoughts while others are discarded, and some that we think are discarded come back later, which is what the Coors Light company and attorneys are counting on. They are planting seeds for when the time is right, when thirst arrives or that fender bender happens. Planting “thought seeds” is the entire point of advertising so that when desire or need is perceived, you load the image from storage for re-processing.

What’s interesting about all of this is that you don’t create these images, they are created in you by external inputs. The thought of a lawyer or a beer is just like any other thought, and just like advertisers and salespeople, ideologies and religions use the same power of suggestion to attract believers by telling and selling messages that mostly come through the ears and eyes. Jesus even speaks of a mustard seed as a metaphor for planting faith in minds, which is quite a different thought than planting seeds to sell beer or acquire clients, because the mustard seed grows into something glorious. The beer will get you drunk and the lawyer may get you rich. Faith, on the other hand, will likely make you sober and it certainly won’t make you rich, yet it somehow appeals to billions of us. (Quick reminder here: I loathe the Prosperity Gospel.)

This concept of where your thoughts come from is fundamental to understanding how your “personal” set of beliefs came into formation, as the formation did not come from yourself but from various influences, like teachers, parents, writers, coaches, actors, celebrities, pastors, preachers, siblings, friends, salespeople, admirers, heroes, and advertisers. Then there is the greatest source of modern thought planting: shows, books, billboards, ads, commercials, songs, podcasts, news, blogs, videos, and video games.

All the things that come through screens present thoughts and at a far more rapid rate than say, looking at a tree, although a tree may provide much deeper and more meaningful thoughts. Examining even a single blade of grass may take you to far broader and deeper thoughts than anything on your phone, because the grass is simple, true, and real.

The thoughts you hold are not as “personal” as you think, but is rather a confluence of thoughts received from your experiences, and from sounds poured into your ears, and from images painted before your eyes. These can be from natural sources in the world or from artificial sources on screens. Obviously, smell, touch, and taste factor in as well, but all of these feed thoughts to our minds. We don’t create the thoughts ourselves.

What we think of as thoughts generated from within are actually received from outside. We filter and interpret them, but we don’t generate thoughts ourselves. This is where you can get to the high-minded places of the idea of Platonic forms or meditation or transcendentalism or the Holy Spirit or bad spirits. Since this could be a rabbit-hole that can never be fully explored, I’m going to steer away from it and focus on the idea that thoughts are either received or generated, and I am of the belief that they are received.

Although our conscience somehow knows right and wrong, we do begin life as a mostly blank slate, like an empty apartment, where outside influences move a lot of furniture and knick-knacks into the space between our ears. Eventually, every few years or so, we have to clean house because it starts looking like an episode of Hoarders. Confusion reigns when conflicting doctrines and thoughts co-exist, to the point of it being a fire hazard. When you reach this point, you have to throw out certain “junk” thoughts and what you decide is junk are the thoughts that you were indoctrinated to dislike. They are the thoughts that go against what you were successfully indoctrinated into accepting. However, there are times along the path of life where you will look at the furniture you kept in the apartment and realize that you kept the wrong things, and that is when a potential flip of accepted doctrines can happen.

This is one of the key elements that separates the various doctrines, and I use the word doctrine because to be indoctrinated there must be specific doctrines that are taught to you. For some doctrines, you must accept that thoughts are generated from within, and that there are no such thing as spirits. To believe these doctrines, you have to deny all things spiritual. This is a requirement, but moving all of the spiritual furniture out of the apartment is very difficult to do, if not impossible, so the doctrines that require spiritual denial must go to great efforts in order to stifle it. Some of this furniture is permanent, or can’t fit through the doorway, so it has to stay in the apartment. It can only be removed if the apartment is destroyed. Because of this, indoctrination processes require covering this spiritual furniture up by burying it under piles of dirty laundry or using stacks of books to make it less obvious.

My post-high school set of beliefs aligned incredibly well to the tenets of the Humanist Manifesto. This was the set of beliefs adopted by many people involved in education strategy of the 20th century, most notably, John Dewey, the philosopher who spent a lifetime writing about how to do a takedown of religion through the education system and replace it with secular humanism. “In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.” (from Atheism for Dummies)

To understand that I was indeed indoctrinated was a difficult thing to realize and even admit. But then that’s the idea of indoctrination; the intention is to perform a total eclipse of the mind so that you don’t realize that it’s happening. While I was under the impression that I grew up with faith, I was actively being conditioned to recoil at all things religious and see God as something oppressive that I needed to shake off. The soul itself was excused from my worldview. Since ghosts were not real, neither was the soul. This conclusion was arrived at by design. The system was guiding me to this end.

This isn’t even hidden from us, although if the voting public actually knew about it, they would have objected and never voted for such a scheme. Those who fought against it were mocked and set aside as crackpots. But the plan was exactly to kill off God from public and private life, and as far back as the 1930s this was openly mentioned as part of the plan. Charles Francis Potter said, “Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.” (from Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), p. 128.)

The deck was stacked, and the funny thing is that many of us who were indoctrinated toward humanism, now point back at religion and that one hour a week we spent learning about Jesus as the malicious indoctrination program.

In other words, this is very well-done indoctrination because we blame what did not successfully indoctrinate us as the thing that indoctrinated us. It’s so rich in irony I can hardly stand it. But until the scales fall from you eyes, you can’t see this. The bait-and-switch is performed on children and parents in an underhanded way, so that neither parent nor child realizes it has happened, and you blame the lamb as the lion. We blame the Church for an indoctrination that never even happened.

This is also why so many fallen away Catholics have absolutely no idea what Catholicism even is, let alone teaches. But you will hear people blaming the Church for all of their adult maladies and mental issues. Cradle Catholics have long been considered clueless by converts to the faith, and we are. I was living proof. Most of us just get through Baptism, Reconciliation, First Communion, and Confirmation, and know next to nothing, especially in terms of doctrine, and head for the exits.

That is not successful indoctrination. It’s the opposite.

How you live your life is how you are indoctrinated. You can find out easily. Just compare whether you are living your life more closely to the Ten Commandments or to the Fifteen Principles of the Humanist Manifesto. I would be willing to bet that if you are an American living today, and you honestly examine your conscience, you cannot get through the first three commandments. However, I bet you can nod blindly along through all of the Humanist principles because that is the dogma you actually live by. That is how we live, as we have been indoctrinated to live.

The greatest bait and switch is how we came to blame the Church and parents for indoctrinating us when most fallen away Catholics had no concept of anything the Church stood for or against, but we were quick to name our “Catholic Guilt” as the cause of our depression and self-hatred, even though it was manufactured. Anyone that uses the phrase “Catholic Guilt” is guilty of never taking time to read the Catechism to realize that this is a concept that never had existed for two thousand years, but is rather the idea of a campaign to shudder the church as the enemy of the state. I challenge anyone to read the Catechism and find that idea. The label of Catholic Guilt is a lazy way to anoint oneself as a victim, and it is a direct outcome of brainwashing by the media and the public school system, not of the Church itself. Today, as always, the biggest threat to worldly power is Jesus Christ, as it was then, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, until He comes again.

Now when I hear someone mention how they hate organized religion, I nod along because I was once programmed that way, in that same headspace of humanist indoctrination. The fact that I had any knowledge of the Bible is actually quite amazing given I was growing up in a Christian-in-name-only nation and taking part in the humanist public school curriculum of the 1980s and 1990s. The reality is that aside from my occasional experience of witnessing a devout person in active prayer at church, I had never lived a single day in a truly Christian culture. Nor had most Americans, as we had been nudged along a path to atheism, through sports and news and money and self-worship, while keeping God on our lips with no understanding of the word.

We were craftily spun around to face away from God but taught to keep saying the word God. This explains the intense confusion in people today. We are trying to reconcile two worldviews that cannot be reconciled, ever. This is like fire and water trying to repeatedly burn and douse the same material over and over. You either have to pick one or the other, because to try and balance both is insane. What we do then, to maintain sanity, is to choose whatever suits our wants and desires at the time, and only turn to God when he will seem to satisfy our needs. Even then we pray for our will to be done, not God’s will to be done.

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