I will play devil's advocate here and stir all of SMP up. While there are definitely group transference problems in ideology and the execution of ideology can be flawed, its only through organization that major tasks like building the pyramids can be accomplished. Ideology can be just as ennobling as it is debasing.
Just as a side note: capitalism was an outgrowth of the Puritans and their Protestant work ethic
Hypnotism is a form of occultism and Christians are told to spurn it. I don't know how other religions regard it. Though I do agree Hitler was hypnotic. He was an unscrupulous rhetorician. If you think Hitler wasn't influenced by occultism then take a look at who he dedicated Mein Kampf to: Dietrich Eckhardt.
Humans have this little Janus head thing going on at all times. We are born of 2 fathers. Remember Charlie Sheen's character in Platoon. In the ebb and flow of circumstances and the conflicts they generate we lose track of that little fact. Individualism can be our salvation or it could be our curse depending on our motivations.
I choose not to stereotype religious people as a bunch of blind fools because I think people make choices based on how they weigh the evidence and how they will act on it. Their choices are not necessarily any less enlightened than those of non-religious people.
I ran across a forward by John Banville to Nabokov's <u>Laughter in the Dark</u> the other day. Banville said Nabokov acknowledged there was a pattern in everything. He found it incredibly detailed everywheres he looked and so he tried to make his works as detailed as a reflection of the world, but at the same time Nabokov had a hard time finding God present. It was like someone came in and built and incredibly complex beautiful world then discarded it. (Nabokov had this huge hobby, a real passion, where he collected and studied butterflies from boyhood which he learned from his aristocratic father in Imperial Russia.)
A religious person sees the same thing as Nabokov we just say God didn't discard us. Maybe God likes mystery because the element of beauty and interest are in its mystery.
Here's a link to a religious man at his finest:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4906502.stm