this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Yes. Decades of thinking every other thought you had was actually from divine inspiration. People come to see their lives as a story of redemption, salvation, and power as a child of the living God. It has consequences.
A friend of mine got depressed and ended his life when he fell out of the church and no longer has that guiding sense of purpose to keep him moving forward.
It is an efficient technology
I'm really glad that I had an understanding of my inner voice pretty early and they couldn't get me with the "word of God" shit. They just kept trying to tell 8 year old me that the voices in my head were God speaking to me and I was like "no, that's just my thoughts, I'm in control of those"
If you can convince someone of that, and bifrucate their internal monologue in a way that they have a version of thought that's controlled by you, then you've won. It's really hard for people to recover from that.