I understand people in the religion can be motivated by bettering the world, the mask and facade I am mentioning is the reason the religion was created in the first place, to control people. I understand people join them for various reasons.
Whenever you start talking about "pulling back the mask" on anything, you're entering into serious "I'm the only thinking person among all these sheeple" conspiracy territory. In virtually all cases, it is closer to "I ripped the face off so I could inject my own biases into this, now I'm convincing other people who are in exactly the right frame of mind to swallow all my arguments without question."
To use an example, you see enormous numbers of people repeating the religious claims from The Da Vinci Code as fact, but a little research will show that virtually every verifiable claim Brown makes is false, and the claims that are not verifiable are not supported by much of anything. Yet people believed him wholeheartedly because they had exactly the right level of skepticism toward the Catholic Church at the time to buy into it.
All I meant by this is that religion is yet another tool for gaining power. I’m not saying everyone in a religion is stupid, I’m saying that religions aren’t as pure as some would like you to believe. I used to think Christianity was actually about helping people, then I took an intro to Western Civ class and learned its origins, and that it has been and is still used by popes and clergy to keep and gain power, sometimes by telling the followers that reality is a lie. The “mask” I’m referring to is simply the claim that religions have no ulterior motive. I don’t want anyone to believe someone without question, no matter how much they say they are good intentioned. I want people to think critically, to ask questions, to research, to experiment, to discover. I’m not saying “listen to me, follow me without question” I’m saying “I used to think religions were about helping people, I eventually learned this was not the case” While it might help some, its main purpose is control/indoctrination. If people never learn to question anything, they will be more easily indoctrinated with anything. Religion seems to be a common example, but it is certainly not the only one.
"Intro to" history or sociology classes generally provide nothing more than the most sweeping overview and are generally not worth much except as a "we're getting everybody on the same page for the class that will actually teach you something." primer. To make matters worse, these are usually assigned to either novice instructors or to the tenured old assholes that have an agenda to push, because the more capable teachers don't want to waste their time. From everything you've said, what you've been taught is on the level of the "PEARL HARBOR WAS A FALSE FLAG!" nonsense that some local professors are pushing.
I was never taught Pearl Harbor was a false flag. What I was taught, is that various leaders used various religions to get the people ready for war, that the Pope had power on par with the long, and that when Christianity had more power than the state, the pursuit of knowledge was suppressed, and that various empires fell due to civil war as well as conquerings from the outside
You misunderstand me. I'm saying that what you have been taught is about as historically accurate as "Pearl Harbor was a false flag" not that you'd actually been taught that. To be more explicit since you've provided details:
What I was taught, is that various leaders used various religions to get the people ready for war,
This happened, but rarely. Much more often, religion was used as a shallow justification for wars fought for other reasons. For example, the 30 Years War is often cited as a Catholic Vs. Prostestant holy war, but this is true only on a surface level. The Protestant-Catholic fight had already been settled in the HRE by the establishment of
Cuius regio, eius religio in 1555, declaring that the official religion of a holding was determined by the religion of the landholder. There was some conflict caused by the fact that newer branches of Protestantism such as Calvinism and the Anabaptists were not included, but it stabilized things quite well. A much more important factor in the war was struggles for dominance between the two branches of the Hapsburg dynasty, complicated a little later by the Vasa dynasty of Sweden on the "Protestant" side (who was supported by Catholic France in order to strengthen the relative power of the House of Bourbon - this paid off well enough that the throne of Spain passed from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons). Or, in other words, it was as much a Hapsburg-Hapsburg-Vasa war that Bourbon won as it was a religious conflict.
that the Pope had power on par with the long,
Rarely true. Even in those times where the pope did have real power, he was often heavily influenced by one or more "lesser" kings, most famously Philip II of Spain.
and that when Christianity had more power than the state, the pursuit of knowledge was suppressed
Total myth. Most of the great scientific discoveries of the Middle and Renaissance era were made by clergy or "natural philosophers" working directly under the auspices of the Church. Persons such as Galileo are often pushed as "science martyrs", but there is almost invariably far more to the story than this simplistic statement suggests. The primary charge against Galileo was, for example, not simply promoting heliocentric-ism (after vehemently denouncing it when his rival Kepler proposed it) but for promoting it as fact
without sufficient evidence - at the time, it was assumed that orbits (regardless of what body they were going around) were circular, and observational data fit a circular orbit around the Earth much better than they did a circular orbit around the sun. It wasn't until Kepler's notion of
elliptical orbits was accepted that solar orbits began to fit with the data. When Thomas Aquinas - who, among many other scientific accomplishments, postulated a crude version of the theory of evolution - was up for canonization, the Church waived the protest that he had no attributed miracles by declaring that
his scientific research was miracle enough.
The modern "anti-science" push in Christianity didn't really get firm ground until the 19th century - and developed primarily because prominent atheists of the era had a tendency to hold up every new "discovery" (most of which have since been proven to be bunk, like spontaneous generation and the luminous aether) as proof that all religion was false.
Of equal importance, there was no time when "the state" existed as a concept when Christianity was more powerful. The concept of statehood is a very modern one, not cropping up until the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Prior to that, you had broad cultural identities, but most people didn't particularly care that they lived in Saxony instead of Bavaria unless one lord or the other was far more intrusive.
, and that various empires fell due to civil war as well as conquerings from the outside
This was a normal part of the life cycle of nations for centuries, and may still be today.
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