This kind of thinking always has horrified me. Maybe God created some people to be thoughtless robots, but I've never felt that applied to me. If you ponder the tale of the Garden of Eden, that is the first attempt to warn people against seeking knowledge. Knowledge brings power and it also brings responsibility and it also brings loss of innocence. Once seen, cannot be unseen. There are many places in the Bible that warn against knowing too much and claim God doesn't want us to know too much. I think the truth that underlies the dogma is that knowledge can be a dangerous thing, both to the person that gains it and the people that don't want them to have it. It changes you.

Now, presumably if God wanted us ignorant and naked as he created Adam and Eve, he would have
A). Not provided the means for Edenites to gain knowledge (the snake and the tree).
B). Not provided the first temptation to gain that knowledge by telling them "don't do it".
C). Learned from what happened with Adam and Eve, removed the tree and the snake, created more ignorantly naked people and closed off Eden to the rest of the world. And had his utopia of childlike, obedient robots - which would have bored him to death sooner rather than later.

The fact that God did none of those things rather shows me that we were meant to learn and evolve. As it should be, if we are "created in God's image". What I can't agree with is that God would create curious beings as much like himself as possible, set them up to fail, punish them for doing what he had created them to do, and bitch about it for the rest of eternity. That seems insane. Or maybe like a child playing with toy soldiers.

What seems a lot more plausible is that a bunch of sneaky men, trying to control other people, wrote down a bunch of bullshit that they attributed to a deity and convinced the gullible that it was God's word and God's will and bad things would happen if you didn't do everything in the book, even when it contradicted itself. And of course one of their cornerstones would be "stay stupid and let us interpret this complicated thing to you, because we are better than you and know the mind of God". Along with another cornerstone "we will wage Holy War against anybody that doesn't follow this book until everybody that calls us on our bullshit is dead/shouted down/neutralized/forced to go live somewhere else".

Yes, there are members of the Clergy Project who have talked about what church people did/said to them when they taught about some of the things they learned while at a seminary.

Reminds me of this church sign message [i.pinimg.com] .