Church History In Plain Language (5th edition)

Another source is the 2015 documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad. I just searched for it on my Roku. You can view it for free on the Roku Channel, tubi, and pluto, through subscription on another channel (Gravitas, I think), or by renting it on a few other services. Search for it on your own streaming device.From that Wikipedia link provided above:

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Synopsis
As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton. The documentary aims to show how the media and the nation changed, which leads to questions about who owns the airwaves, what rights listeners and watchers have, and what responsibility the government has to keep the airwaves fair, accurate, and accountable.

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Content
Senko's father, Frank, was stated by her as originally being a "nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat" who began changing into a far-right Republican in the 1980s. On her father's lengthy commute to his place of employment, he listened to conservative talk radio, which Senko believes started the change in her father's personality. In particular, he listened to Rush Limbaugh and watched Fox News. Towards the end of his life, Frank's views mostly changed back to being somewhere in the middle due to his wife exposing him to liberal media. He died in January 2016 at the age of 93.

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One of the people in the documentary who had also been brainwashed was a truck driver who had nothing else to listen to the long hauls than talk radio. His recovery started when he discovered NPR.Part of the effectiveness of that brainwashing derives from isolating the victim from other perspectives and/or reality, AKA "placing them in a bubble". FOX and talk radio do that in part by not even mentioning facts that the rest of the world see unfolding in real time, or else by discrediting other sources in the minds of their victims. Basically, how cults work their brainwashing magic on their followers.The creation of those bubbles is made worse by social media, which uses AI to profile users in order to filter and push specific content to individuals. That is covered in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.Also refer (yet again) to now-retired psychology professor Bob Altemeyer's 2006 book, The Authoritarians. A characteristic of right-wing authoritarians (high RWAs -- everybody is on his RWA scale but rate differently) is that they classify the world into their own in-group and the out-group of all others, isolating themselves from other groups taking on a them-vs-us mentality that can verge on xenophobia. They tend to feel threatened by "the others", leading them to react with almost constant fear and hatred. Their brains even tend to be physically different from those of low RWAs with larger (and hence more active) amygdalas, which process emotional responses of fear, anxiety, and aggression. High RWAs have a high tendency to follow any authoritarian leader whom they might see as protecting them from their constantly perceived threats from "others". Thus high RWAs are particularly vulnerable to getting locked inside a right-wing conspiracy-theory bubble. Also to extreme religious groups.Altemeyer's studies in right-wing authoritarianism spanned decades. He would test all his incoming freshman students as well as their parents (voluntarily) and then conduct follow-on studies on them for several years. Being isolated from individuals from the "outside group" allows them to accept the stereotypes promoted by their own in-group and thus to fear them. But as they meet and get to know members of the "outside group" (such as happens when you leave your small home town and go to college), encountering diversity normally lowers their RWA rating. How sadly true. For example, the majority of one political party, the GOP, has been brainwashed to support a leadership intent on establishing autocratic rule even if it destroys America.

Yes, of course! And far better than most believers ever could. Because a believer would just repeat the fairy tales he had been raised on instead of digging into the actual history and investigating the external sources that the Bible had drawn on (eg, the Babylonian creation and flood myths, the Code of Hammurabi). Instead of seeking information and the truth, he would have a vested interest in supporting his fairy tales, just as creationists and Trump lemmings do.For example, whom would you trust to give you a factual history of the founding of Mormonism? A non-Mormon scholar? Or a believing Mormon who would insist on the literal truth of the golden plates and Joseph Smith's ability to translate them through mystical means?And whom would you trust to give you a factual account of the founding and operation of Scientology? An outsider who has investigated them for decades?
Or a true believer who has gotten clear and been given access to the briefcase with the central myth (which is complete and utter bullshit craziness)?Of course, an atheist examining the Bible could be trying to disprove it. But even then an atheist would do so using actual facts, so even if you do not accept the disproof you will still benefit from learning actual facts. In contrast, reading a believer's apologetics based on fairy tales would still leave you starved of actual facts. That makes absolutely no sense at all. If you actually study a subject, then you will have familiarity with that subject regardless of whether you believe in it or not. And indeed, as a non-believer you should have far more familiarity with the subject because you would have studied all aspects of the subject, including both its strengths and weaknesses, whereas a believer would only study the strengths and ignore the weaknesses (even to the point of denying that the weaknesses even exist).This also gets us into the differing goals of religious education and secular education. As I have often quoted from the California science education guidelines, the goal of education is that the student understand the subject matter and not to compel belief. In sharp contrast, the goal of religious education is indoctrination in which the student is compelled to believe (and "balanced treatment" creationist educational materials have been found to end every lesson compelling the student to make a life choice right then and there between an "unnamed Creator" and "atheistic evolution"). In my own online experience with creationists, when I have urged that they study evolution in order to learn what it really is and says, they have rejected that idea absolutely because "that would require me to believe in evolution".Also, a believer's familiarity with the Bible is through his own religious education which is characterized by reading individual verses or small groups of verses and interpreting them out of context. In contrast, a non-believer would be far more likely to read entire chapters and books of the Bible such that when he reads those same verses he would be reading and interpreting them in context. Indeed, entire denominations of Christianity depend on out-of-context interpreting (and misinterpreting) of single verses. What is that supposed to have to do with anything? How is that supposed to affect an honest scholarly work?Of course, in your fairy tales the Holy Spirit is supposed to guide you to what the Bible actually says. Haven't you ever found it odd that millions of believers have been guided by the same Holy Spirit in learning what the same Bible actually says and they all come up with different results? If that magic trick by the Holy Spirit actually worked, then there should be only one single Christian church instead of the immense splintering of Christianity into a near-infinite number of churches all disagreeing vehemently with each other. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Facts are facts. Follow the facts. Spooky claims are no substitute for following the facts.I've mentioned this one before, but it seems appropriate since Isaac Asimov's upbringing was Jewish. The 2011 movie, Mein Bester Feind ("My Best Enemy"), has as its MacGuffin an unknown sketch of Moses by Michelangelo owned by a Jewish art dealer. When his gentile best friend (later to join the SS) asked why Moses is depicted with horns, the art dealer explains that it was due to a Christian mistranslation adding, "Christians have no idea how to read the Bible." How true, how very true.