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Rescuing People from Cults

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast.

If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'.

This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing".

"Wait a minute," you say, "the Uighurs are Muslims, not a cult." I'm sorry, but indoctrinating billions of people rather than dozens does not make it better, but much worse. No, I don't know what is going on in the camps. It is perfectly possible that I wouldn't agree with the treatment. But I do applaud the intentions. And no, I don't think that it should be only Chinese Muslims that are re-educated. The Catholics and Buddhists would benefit as well.

Reports from the camps say that people are being forcibly removed from their community, that authorities are trying to transform behaviour and beliefs, and that they promote repentance and confession. (Remind you of anything?) Isn't that exactly what our rescue attempts from a cult would look like?

Some are claiming that the authorities are trying to wipe out the Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group, but I see no evidence of that. People are being re-educated to counter years of religious indoctrination, and then returned to their community. They are not being exterminated.

No, of course we should not grant China carte blanche in their handling of minority groups, and the Chinese propensity for deceit certainly does not help. But I would urge you to consider whether we are being fed a very one-sided version of what is happening – a version that pampers to the asinine Western acceptance of child abuse in the form religious indoctrination.

People are naturally irrational. One of the glories of humanity is that we have education to counter it. Teaching irrationality to children, as all faiths must to survive, is a very common and widespread immoral affront to civilization.

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