I've been doing a bit of work with the JW Recovery board lately, and wanted to brush up on some stuff. Found this article, I thought was very good at explaining how fundamentalism hijacks people's brains.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201810/how-religious-fundamentalism-hijacks-the-brainTo start - t gives the definition of religious fundamentalism, which is important because everyone seems to have their own opinion on what religious fundamentalism is, what is seen as moderate by one person can be seen as fundamentalism to another:
In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person’s life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual.
It compares fundamentalism to mental parasites:
It is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease, because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system. But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as mental parasites. A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival. Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence.
Ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another. For example, an ideology—such as a religion—that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others......
......Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or “cultural software,” that is running on the brain’s hardware.
Like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated—or passed from one person or group to another—it undergoes mutations. As a consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced, which generate different types of behavior. As such, there are often good and bad variants of any given religion. For instance, there are moderate versions of Christianity and Islam that promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior. These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, i.e., the religious-practicing individual. At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity—specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions—that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own “fitness” (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as “parasitic manipulation.”
This jives with some of the new research coming out that shows religious fundamentalism can
cause mental illness, as opposed to just
attracting those already mentally ill.
This is a big step towards recognizing religious fundamentalism as dangerous and harmful to individuals and to society and hopefully provide some better tools for preventing it and helping people break free from it.
If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain. An ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self-replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus, and defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one. When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a host brain, the organism’s mind is no longer fully in control. The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival. This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive function in areas like analytic reasoning and problem-solving.
I'm still looking for and researching if there are any new ways to break through that fundamentalist brain fog, but viewing it as a mental parasite does put it in a different light and I hope people smarter than me (like Steven Hassan maybe?) can come up with some better ways of inoculating society against dangerous cults/religions.