If you can have a being born into a prison and then shape its beliefs from birth, not only will that being not question the prison, they will start calling it "home".
Imagine you could somehow observe another planet from far away. On that planet, you see beings born into actual cages with bars. They cannot leave them, cannot fully control them, suffer inside them, age inside them, and eventually die inside them. Their entire existence is limited by these cages.
But then you notice something even stranger.
Despite being trapped, these beings spend their whole lives worshipping and praying to the very creator of their cages, the being that put them there in the first place. You see that these beings thank God for their suffering, defend him no matter what happens, and even call the cage a "gift" or their "home".
You would probably look at that and think: how mentally challenged could these people be? They are so incredibly brainwashed by whatever religion these people have, that they do not even question the system they were born into or the intentions of their God.
This is what happens when you are born into a prison with your memory wiped. You will be under the impression that this is what life is supposed to be like, this is what reality is, and that there is nothing outside of it worth questioning or even imagining, just like a fish who is born inside a lake and lives its entire existence completely immersed in it, never seeing anything beyond it, never imagining that there could be land, sky, or anything outside the water, and therefore assuming the lake is all there is and all there ever could be.
But now look at our situation.
Only in the extremely rare occasion when someone has an NDE do they get to experience what actual freedom looks like. So many people who've had NDEs say that they do not want to come back to their bodies and that they feel truly free without one. They fly, they are happy, they experience no pain, no suffering. They are no longer limited by the 5 senses of the physical body.
Our essence/souls/consciousness whatever you want to call it, is literally trapped inside biological containers. We are born into bodies that feel pain, hunger, fear, sickness, exhaustion, aging, death, etc. Like any other being here, we are forced to survive inside a world based on consumption and predation. What a benevolent creation. God is so so worthy of being praised /s. Yet most people never question the creator of such a system. In fact, they put themselves on their knees and worship it.
Religion plays a massive role in reinforcing this mindset from childhood. People are taught that suffering is meaningful, obedience is virtuous, sacrifice is noble, and that no matter how brutal reality appears, God must still be good and deserving of worship. That is what conditioning does. It trains people not only to accept the cage, but to emotionally attach themselves to the one who created it.
If you can have a being born into a prison and then shape its beliefs from birth, not only will that being not question the prison, they will start calling it "home".
Now imagine an actually free and intelligent species observing Earth from their planet. Their reaction to us would probably be the same reaction we would have toward the caged beings on that other planet. They would look at us and think: these souls are born into physical bodies with their memories wiped, they are trapped inside fragile biological cages, they are forced to kill and consume other living beings every single day just to survive, yet they still worship and pray to the very being that created that place that way, as well as their physical bodies, with all it's limits and needs. These humans must be truly mentally challenged. The cherry on top is that, with reincarnation as part of the equation, they are not escaping anything through death, they are simply reinserted back into the same environment, in different physical bodies, memory wiped once again, forced to continue the same cycle without awareness of the repetition.
I truly believe that if religions had never existed, humanity would eventually have come together and realized that something is fundamentally wrong with this place. People would look at the endless suffering, predation, death, exploitation, memory loss, and repetition built into reality itself and naturally begin questioning the system together. The result is that humanity is fragmented psychologically and spiritually instead of united in questioning the nature of reality itself. Rather than collectively investigating what this place actually is, people spend their lives defending the particular religious beliefs of the area they were born into. And because of that division, if escape from this system is possible at all, it will probably only happen individually through awareness and discernment, not through humanity suddenly uniting under one shared understanding.