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The goal of all these mechanisms is of course to make as much money and followers as possible for the group, and therefore to maintain a high retention rate. To accomplish this, you must first entrap people on the slope of the gradient, cut their way back with memetic, linguistic and affective isolation, and push them up the gradient.
I hope this brief overview has been instructive. There is, of course, a whole lot more that could be said about either example that I have presented, but these are the basic processes that are important to understand religion. As I mentioned, these are extreme cases, and many of these processes are not present in any given belief system. Older religions, like christianity or paganism, or even New Age religions, do not include most of them (they do, however, appeal to the psyche, have some form of gradient, and use word loading). More vehement cults, ersatz-religions or religions like Islam, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, include many, if not most, of these processes.
I hope this brief overview has been instructive. There is, of course, a whole lot more that could be said about either example that I have presented, but these are the basic processes that are important to understand religion. As I mentioned, these are extreme cases, and many of these processes are not present in any given belief system. Older religions, like christianity or paganism, or even New Age religions, do not include most of them (they do, however, appeal to the psyche, have some form of gradient, and use word loading). More vehement cults, ersatz-religions or religions like Islam, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, include many, if not most, of these processes.
