Check out this article on religious persecution.
While the article acknowledges this, it looks exclusively at religion from a sociological perspective. It promotes that people always do various things for various sociological reasons. It ignores the simple power of ideas. People do extraordinary things based upon what they fundamentally believe about the world. Ideas are powerful, and so looking at people as solely responders to stimuli is overly simplistic. I am in control of my ideas, are you?
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How much can we really say that we're in control of our ideas, though? I know that Paul's confession in Romans 7:15 even applies to my own thought life. Even in my prayers this morning, I was ashamed and distracted by what I saw when I closed my eyes. And then in willing its absence, I became all the more distracted from my original intent when I bowed my head.
Of course, I suppose that strong ideas and scattered, tangential thoughts are not the same. I would still argue that a Christ follower's ideas are not really his at all, but those of God through him.
I suppose the real argument is that we actually have a mind at all.
If one truly adheres to philosophical naturalism (most atheists) or to relativism (most postmodernists), then one has to believe we are mere meat machines. One sees this in contemporary news (ie Time magazine). Every explanation for obesity, religious identity, etc. is some chemical reaction in the brain. Humans don't have a mind, but merely react and respond to stimuli and are never really in control in this regard.
So, I was merely trying to state that we have a mind, and its different from the brain. And while it is affected by the Fall (total depravity) and is subject to sin, we still have a mind that to some extent we can form our own independent thoughts. We aren't meat machines.
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