The Power of Suggestion & The Power of Self Deception

I was planning on discussing in this post the idea or reality of "the power of suggestion", but somewhere along the lines of my research I came across a very enlightening Psych wedsite that I think a lot of people would find very interesting and very familiar. http://www.willwilliams.co.uk/?page_id=68

First "the power of suggestion":
I find this topic like many other things I learn about in life to be very intersesting yet confusing in the sense that I question alot of its content. The power of suggestion is inevidable and starts to occur at birth. It's the fact that we are given our opinions and ideas. For instence my parents never took my sister or I to church or even discussed religion when we were growing up. After they got a divorce my step mother started to introduce religion into our family and we started going to a bapitist church, my grandparents were also religious and went to a methidost church regularly. So I started to learn about god and the bible and now I consider myslef to be methodist. Even though I attend a baptist church, I feel that the way they preach is a little to heavy or intense for my liking. Now had my step mom never entered the picture I would probably not have found my religion, but I did by the power of suggestion. All of the opinions and beleifs we have stem from the way we are brought up and what is introduced to us. My mother would always comment on how baptists are "bible thumpers" and what not, which got me to look at the way they preach in a certain way and I ended up agreeing with her in a sense, and that is why I prefer the methodist religion. We are given insight into different ways of thinking every day and that is where our way of beleif eventually stems from. You see I do think that if I had grown up going to a catholic church my whole life and my parents both agreed with and felt strongly about the religion my beleifes would be totally different then they are today. So in essance our beleifs, the way we think, our opinions and ideas are all just a roll of the dice, it's all a game of chance.

Second "the power of self deception":
http://www.willwilliams.co.uk/?page_id=68
Within this website I found a link that talked specifically about the power of self deception. After reading it I felt very ordinary and very figured out. I think what hit home the most is the "how we see ourselves" paragraph. The site describes this much better then I can, but I want to make one key point. It's hard to think about, but just hte fact that we all think we are different really does make us all the same. Everyone thinks that they are special and different in someway which just makes them another person that wants to be special and different. We all think highly of ourselves in some aspect and that's what makes it so easy to generalize human behavior. Think about it.