Religion is the ultimate control structure.

Much like the State, it abhors competent dissent because it cannot control what it cannot convince. It requires you to believe the fiction in order to keep you under its spell.

Like the metaphysical claims that religions are built upon, "The State" doesn't actually exist, as a thing, either. Its human agents and its physical artifacts in society do exist. It maintains its dominance and control over you by making sure its illusions are perpetuated by its agents and its social structures (and their guns and cages).

The biggest threats to the State or to imaginary religions are:

1. You just ignore them, starving them of new resources, new agents and new minds to occupy, until they slowly shrivel up and are forgotten to history (how many states and religions have gone this way?)

2. You pull off their ghost-sheet to reveal that there is nothing there; the emperor has no clothes - or rather the emperor _is only clothes_. Their concern here is that the currently-convinced will see this and become unconvinced, leading back to # 1 above.

Understand that these two control structures work nearly identically to each other and you will be much less confused the next time you are in the unfortunate position of "arguing" with a Statist or a Christian. They have a moral obligation to their master (who, conveniently enough, is also the source of their definition of morals lol) to persuade you and bring you under control.