"the religious are sheep"

A sibling of the idea that Christians aren't smart (the third blog entry!) is the idea that people with religious belief systems are "sheep" who somehow lost the ability to think for themselves: under specific conditions they just don't question what they hear. This is how, according to the rest of the diatribe, they can be uncritically duped by "irrational but seductive lies", even to the point of martyrdom. The religious maxims flourish in the mind through isolation from any other knowledge.

The automatons so described obviously exist. Cults, and the top figures of those cults, exploit them. Yet not all people who have religious belief systems are "sheep". Like "Christians aren't smart", "the religious are sheep" is a bald overgeneralization, having some flaws.

• Consider the grid of four possibilities, with rows of "religious" and "secular" and columns of "sheep thinking" and "non-sheep thinking". Some of the people in the "religious" row are in the "sheep thinking" column (the cults just mentioned) and some of the people in the religious row are in the "non-sheep thinking" column (much of this blog entry will essentially cover why and how those people can exist) . "The religious are sheep" implies "non-sheep are secular", so people in the "secular" row and the "non-sheep thinking column" tend to support rather than disprove the objection. But the fourth possibility of the grid, the intersection of row "secular" and column "sheep thinking", while not strictly applicable to the objection, also has many examples. This means in statement form that "all secular people have non-sheep thinking" is false. Clearly, people can think "like sheep" about virtually anything, religious or not. That's why active parenting is so important, why trends have influence, why outsiders (any outsider relative to any group) receive scorn, why oppression often operates through media control and "loyalty-creation exercises". The point is that while this doesn't disprove that all religious people are sheep, it does disprove that "secular" and "non-sheep thinking" are one and the same. Therefore, religiosity and sheep thinking are distinct scales of measurement.
• Sometimes people (choose to) forget that their belief systems contain foundational doctrines which cannot be challenged because those doctrines are the method to structure other knowledge, yielding its meaning. Removing the foundational doctrines would leave the person with no way to comprehend, interpret, and apply. These foundational doctrines will be in the "sheep thinking" realm; someone must have gotten them from somewhere. Granted, some people have more elaborate and explicit doctrines than others. They would doubtless argue that the doctrines are thereby more effective and honest.
• The "sheep thinking" accusation glosses over the subtle, delicate relationship between ideals and particular ideas. Belief systems in general, religious or secular, have ideals/values (of almost equal importance to the foundational doctrines of those belief systems). Part of what makes human communication tricky is the easy pitfall of mistaking the ideals of belief systems and common, everyday ideas. Someone who, under specific conditions, imbibes every idea communicated, is by definition sheep thinking. However, someone who, through sharing ideals (more or less) with the communicator, understands and checks the ideas communicated, is not sheep thinking. Also, if the communicator is reinforcing ideals, nobody is learning what he or she hasn't already consciously chosen as an ideal in the past. In these situations, the participants in the communication are jointly figuring out what ideas best match the ideals. The most drastic of conversations, a switch to a different belief system, can work by identifying similarities in ideals between belief systems. Of course, the mistaking of ideas for ideals can also be put to the sinister use of luring someone to accept an idea that seems to match an ideal when it is actually opposite and/or false.
• A telling discriminator of a belief system's dependence on sheep-thinking, and the person advocating that belief system, is if the believers are (truly) encouraged to rely on more than one source of truth. Practically speaking, a belief system should make it clear that authority over truthful information isn't the province of the Person Whose Name Is ______ (what happens when he or she is no longer able to serve that function?). Centralizing authority in one regularly-swapped official isn't too convincing, either, although one must grudgingly admit absolute dictates have the benefit (curse?) of avoiding debates. In the Christian traditions I am involved in, a balanced, self-checking approach to Biblical truth is the nominal norm: a combination of tradition, reason, and experience do and should inform one's understanding. A prescription for sheep-thinking this is not! I bring this up solely to give an example.
• The desires of independence and freedom are active in people, to varying degrees in various people with their various personalities. The religious are people, regardless of a "sheep" label. They will believe what they choose, and do what they choose. In a society privileged to have religious freedom, any religious "leader" will discover how little control he or she really has. Scolding, discipline, and correction will only be effective on believers who on some level welcome it. Requests for volunteers usually don't lead to an overcrowding of applicants. Levels of commitment and participation are on a wide range. In their deepest of hearts, in the bottom of their minds, and in their locations of privacy, the outwardly "religious" can be surprisingly unwilling to carry out what they claim to believe. Honestly, the religious can be too insincere or weak-willed to aspire to be sheep.
  
• "The religious are sheep" may be connected to the assumption that religious belief systems gain believes through filling a personal, perhaps emotional, chasm, instead of through a "rational" evaluation. This assumption has some merit, since in most cases a belief system engages entire people, not just the part known as the mind. And it shouldn't be controversial to note vulnerable, damaged people are easier to influence, nor that people who are undergoing forced life transitions are more likely to take the opportunity to jump belief systems. Nevertheless, isn't it naive and unsympathetic to expect that people would act any other way? A belief system that doesn't work for someone is likely to be left behind for another. If a large number of people, the "sheep", are rejecting a belief system or replacing it with a competitor, then might that indicate something?
• "The religious are sheep" may be connected to the assumption that religious belief systems gain believers through people imitating and inculcating each other. This assumption has some merit, considering all long-lived belief systems (religious or not) are at least partially spread in this manner. But this assumption is too much of an overgeneralization of how religious belief systems spread, and applicable to too many secular belief systems, for it to be compelling. It also conveniently overlooks the fact that belief system switches also may come about through imitation and re-inculcation. In fact, it's not hard to imagine (or observe) a family in which a grandparent's religious zeal caused the parent to be anti-religious, and the parent's anti-religious zeal caused the grandchild to indulge religious curiosity.
  
• It would be negligent not to acknowledge the Bible's recurrent metaphor of the Church as sheep, still more because the quotes are from Christ. The content and context of those verses don't support the interpretation/application that people should follow each other like sheep. Rather, the relationship between Christ and the Church is like the relationship between a shepherd and a flock, as He enumerates. Shepherds guide, protect, care, sacrifice themselves for sheep. The emphasis is on the shepherd's actions, not the sheep. Note that when preachers talk about the "flock", call themselves "pastors", and so on, the meaning is (or should be) a Christ-inspired sentimental affection for the people they serve, not a way to degrade/dehumanize them.