How to Design a Controlling Religion

As atheists, religions look like organizations set up to control followers and gain financial reward and power from them. If we wanted to set up a controlling religion, here's what we would do:

• Tell our followers they don't have to think for themselves, we'll make their lives easier by thinking for them.
• Tell our followers that we have all the answers and that they don't have to worry about all the difficult questions in life.
• Make up a story about what happens after death and tell our followers that we hold the key to whether they go to a nice place or a horrific one.
• Tell our followers they are sinners and that we just happen to have the cure for it: morality.
• Tell our followers they are nothing without our religion.
• Ask our followers to not worry about any contradictions in what we teach because our god has a plan for everything.
• Tell our followers to believe things with no evidence, because our god is so powerful and mysterious we couldn't possibly know what it is doing.
• Demand that our followers defend us from infidels.
• Assure our followers they are the chosen ones and it's okay to be disdainful of people who aren't part of our special club.
• Tell our followers that if anyone speaks out against anything bad we do, we are the victims.
• Tell our followers to go get more followers.
• Demand that our followers worship regularly to keep them in line. Threaten them with horrors if they don't.
• Create a world unto ourselves, with schools and social events to continue indoctrinating our followers.
• Tell our followers to be very suspicious of non-believers.
• Continuously ask our followers for money.
• Do a few positive things to take attention away from the countless non-positive things we do.
• Keep our followers subservient and under our control so they continue supporting us.
• Discourage critical thinking so that we can more easily keep our followers under control.
• Tell our followers they are special and that their god will reward them for believing.
• Tell our followers only their god knows the path to the truth.
• Make up a god for our man-made religion.
• Do this for as long as we can get away with it.

So, we've designed a controlling religion that strongly resembles many actual religions. Sadly, these are the types of things religions do and have always done. Religions are systems set up to exploit people's natural fears, doubts, and weaknesses in return for money and power. Sure, religious people have done some positive things over time, but that's because they're good people, not because they're religious.