When you surrender your right to free thought, by joining a group that proscribes it, whether religous or civil, you get more or less what you pay for: comfort, stability, predictability, control, order and a tacit web of dampers and constraints. Any contract that includes explicit or implicit trammels on your freedom to think, to say what you see, know what you know, and speak to whom you choose is a contract with death. Of course, there's a little Faustus in us all, and buying a bedcover from the devil is an understandable temptation. But one best pursued knowingly and with wide-open eyes.

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