Everyone is entitled to whatever they want to believe in. It's up to ourselves to choose what we want to believe in and what we don't want to believe in. I think the mind is a large.. censoring system; it filters out alot of unwanted memories and information and stores only what we want to know. The truth is, we are only denying ourselves. We filter out all the information that doesn't interest us, concern us, or worse, hurts us. But we must learn as people to accept everything that happens.
I think the media, religion, and things like that, only serve to act as a primary filtering system. They filter out information THEY don't want us to know about, and we take the information they give us, and filter it a step further. It really is up to the person to decide what we do and dont' want to know.
"The media bombards you with tons of crap." - That's true. The media does bombard us with tons of crap - maybe in your view. To some other people, they entirely believe in the media to tell them what they need to know. Again, it's all in the mindset and what you do and don't want to believe in!
Personally, I believe that if you throw away/ignore all the bounds made to you by the public (eg; You will go to hell if you don't go to church every Sunday), the life you live will be one that YOU shape, not the media, nor religion.
