Its been a while since I visited this site after my negative Landmark experience but I can see the same old things are still going on with that vile organisation and other similar look a likeys, Here is an idea I thought would be interesting to debate. After my experience I have read many books and publications directly or indirectly linked with cult behaviour. The conclusion I have come to is while there are many reasons why individuals become brainwashed by these groups, the most frequent one is dissolution. A very specific dissolution that the faith system that has been rammed into their brains since childhood does not fulfil them or set them at peace with the world. Hence they feel the need to seek out the computer equivalent of an upgrade or plug in. I witnessed this personally with many Landmark Drones.

Taking this thought further seems to me that it comes back to the old argument that religion is the root cause of most of human society’s problems. Personally I don’t subscribe to this. I think its more down to the way the programming is administered. For the vast majority, religion isn’t a choice, you are subjected to it by your parents and community at an age where you have little experience or opportunity to question what you are being told. Of course many are able to ultimately reject the indoctrination as they grow older or adopt another faith of their choice, but a lot don’t and end up in a state of confusion and dissolution. Landmark, Scientology etc have evolved to a large extent to take advantage of these individuals. I would be interested to hear others thoughts on this.

Moving up several gears, here is another thought (and set aside practicality issues while you consider this). Would the world be a better place if it became illegal for Parents to indoctrinate their children with religion? The premise being that the vast majority of the current fundamentalism and intolerance systemic to almost all mass based faiths would be drastically reduced, if not eliminated.

The key is indoctrination, which comes in many forms: religious, political(Marxism, Nazism), commericially oriented that tells us what to eat, drink, wear and think.

However to do what you want, would require a governmental apparatus that can at any time come in and tell parents what to teach and not teach their children. It would be Stalin's Russia all over again. You'd create a bigger evil to solve a smaller one.

And mind you in the last century more people were killed in secular wars than were killed all the religious wars over the last two millenia.

Making it illegal would be difficult. But we could start by encouraging free thinking. The one thing that all religions don't want you to do is eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, aka the tree of knowledge. Religion does not want you to question anything but have blind faith instead. Believe what I tell you or you'll burn in hell (I'm telling you). As soon as people can think for themselves and allow themselves to think freely, they'll see the stupidity of their religion. Please read carefully, the stupidity of their religion. It is not stupid to belief and I don't say religious people are stupid. I say their religion is stupid and any religious person willing to take a hard look at their religion with an open mind comes to the same conclusion. Please fit a pair of each animal on a boat and see how big that boat needs to be. Tell the emperor penguins on the south pole to make a move to the middle east, nice and warm. Tell the kangaroos to swim across the ocean together with the koala's to get on board a boat before they drown. And all the other millions of species across the globe. Just an example.

The government surely can encourage free thinking, questioning, but that would cut in their own fingers at the same time. Do they really want people that think about their policy? About their idea's? I doubt it...