strawman wrote:There are lots of different ways to enslave people
an evolution of an iron cage, which will be a technically ordered, rigid, dehumanized society.[5] The iron cage is the one set of rules and laws that we are all subjected and must adhere to.[16] Bureaucracy puts us in an iron cage, which limits individual human freedom and potential
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_cage
unscrupulous leaders (government, churches, even parents) can and do turn religion into a tool by which to manipulate and control people, to keep the oppressed silent and the militant obedient. Perhaps the promise of better in the afterlife has kept, in some cases, honest people from realizing they could change the current world for the better. Perhaps the fear of undermined authority has led to the hurtful suppression of scientific knowledge, such as ideas that challenged basic tenets (e.g., the famous Gallilean story about the sun not going around the earth). And on a grand scale, we know how churches have historically abused their power through terrifying teachings, money-hungry schemes like indulgences, and even the terrible abuse of power and belief that produced the deadly Spanish Inquisition and American slave trade, among other things. Power-hungry manipulators hand us religion as not just a crutch, but as a confining cage.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/spir-crutch.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Brick_in_the_Wall
We all
maybe just another Brick in the Wall
with the Wall
being defined as a bureaucracy
to which we belong.
Most of us cannot get along
well enough as an individual
and hence we sacrifice some individuality
to conform to a bureaucracy.
The Rational and Soulless Iron Cage
of Max Weber
may indeed never ever
release us since complex societies
breed complex bureaucracies.
The bureaucracy
of Weber's Iron Cage
is Secular and Rational
but Religion can also be a Golden Cage
that prevents our mostly rational
minds
from endeavoring to find
its own identity
away from religious group identity.