"But a person can't understand the beauty and necessity of the temple ceremony without experiencing it. What do you say to that?"

I say that another way to view your assertion is that no one could possibly be expected to go through the mental gymnastics necessary to retroactively turn a degrading experience into an uplifting one without having gone through it under the watchful, coercive eye of a closed community. If you have no other option but to assimilate and rationalize the experience, then you will. That doesn't mean the exercise is good for you, only that it was forced upon you.

Another way to describe what I'm talking about would be "brainwashing."

The fact is, someone looking on from the outside is far more likely to be objective about what he's seeing than someone peering out from the inside. By the time you're that deep in it, you have barely the glimmer of an ability to be objective about it.