"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -- Carl Sagan

As Mark Twain said,

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

I think that just about sums it up.

Religion has had centuries to evolve and find those ideas that capture and bind the minds of people. It's not an easy thing to shake off. They have empirically found, by trial and error, those techniques that work. It's a hard thing to fight.

The techniques for capturing believers have been honed to perfection. The results speak for themselves, not in the millions, but in the billions. "That's one successful diner," as we would have said back in La Grande, "a lot of folks like the hash they're slinging."

I work in consumer fraud and protection. Believe me, I too know this all too well. Con artists flourish because some people are very susceptible to their chicanery.

Families of con artists tend to live in denial, like the con artists themselves.

Education and knowledge is power.

Pious fraud is just one facet of bamboozelry. There are so many scams and only so many hours in a day.

I had an Indian MD call me several weeks back begging me to speak to his wife, who spends several hundred dollars a month on psychics. He hoped I could talk her out of her "foolishness," as he called it.

They were both retired. Their children all put through medical school. Their house is paid for. Her income is hers to spend as she wishes. But I called her to see if she was really being bamboozled, or was acting as a competent person.

She was in full capacity of her faculties. She doesn't practice any religion per se. For her, speaking to psychics and well established ones, gives her great peace of mind and inner security that she's communing with her loved ones who've passed on, and she feels she's getting her money's worth.

There was no way I was going to make a judgment call that what her husband considered foolish, was.

She was getting something of value for her money, and it provided her a sense of contentment.

I let her husband know back she is fully in control of her faculties (he believed she was too.) Her beliefs in what mediums and psychics provided her was her "religion."

What is something of worth or merit to one person may not be to another.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1714597,1714627

"When you believe 'It can't happen to me,' that's when con artists or cult agents have you at their mercy because then you're not as vigilant to the little situational ploys that can get you to step across the line." - Phillip G. Zimbardo.

Nice. LDS church history in 5 sentences.