Debunking Scientism - Tricks New Atheists Play (Part 6)

[Moral Orel]

This whole thing started because an atheist told @2PhiloVoid that he was only Christian because he grew up in a Christian country. It was pretty explicit.

I have no argument with the statistics until they're weaponized. They were weaponized immediately here.

I assume you're talking about NV's post, and he never said Philo was only a Christian because he grew up in a Christian country, he simply said that it's ridiculous to think that he wasn't influenced by it. No where did he say "You're only Christian because you were born in America" at all.

Are you denying that religious indoctrination for children is a powerful influence, or are you denying that those stats are evidence of how powerful that influence is?

 

[Silmarien]

I assume you're talking about NV's post, and he never said Philo was only a Christian because he grew up in a Christian country, he simply said that it's ridiculous to think that he wasn't influenced by it. No where did he say "You're only Christian because you were born in America" at all.

That was heavily implied by the claim that Philo would have almost certainly been Muslim if born in Saudi Arabia. Given that this post comes from a person who insists that all theists are almost without exception intellectually dishonest, I'm not sure why you would expect anyone to take it any differently. Posts don't exist in a vacuum, and NV's least of all.

Are you denying that religious indoctrination for children is a powerful influence, or are you denying that those stats are evidence of how powerful that influence is?

No, I'm denying that having parents that claim to be Christian automatically entails indoctrination. If you guys think that going to Sunday School and reading biblical stories once a week counts in an otherwise secular setting, then we've set so low a bar that we might as well say that people get indoctrinated into paganism by reading mythology.

 

[Moral Orel]

That was heavily implied by the claim that Philo would have almost certainly been Muslim if born in Saudi Arabia. Given that this post comes from a person who insists that all theists are almost without exception intellectually dishonest, I'm not sure why you would expect anyone to take it any differently. Posts don't exist in a vacuum, and NV's least of all.

You should take it differently because NV isn't one to "imply" anything.

No, I'm denying that having parents that claim to be Christian automatically entails indoctrination. If you guys think that going to Sunday School and reading biblical stories once a week counts in an otherwise secular setting, then we've set so low a bar that we might as well say that people get indoctrinated into paganism by reading mythology.

If that's all that you think is happening typically, then why do you think the statistics correlate so strongly on geographic and familial lines? Maybe there's a bit more to having Christian parents than just reading stories once a week even if they aren't super Jesusy.

 

[DogmaHunter]

What are your thoughts on Martin Luther’s conceptualization of faith? Are you familiar with it?

Nope. Can you summarize it for me?
I'll happily admit that I expect yet another apologetic that plays with words and/or tries to "define" things into existance of some sort.

Surprise me!

Thanks for clarifying by the way.

My pleasure.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I assume you're talking about NV's post, and he never said Philo was only a Christian because he grew up in a Christian country, he simply said that it's ridiculous to think that he wasn't influenced by it. No where did he say "You're only Christian because you were born in America" at all.

Are you denying that religious indoctrination for children is a powerful influence, or are you denying that those stats are evidence of how powerful that influence is?

I'm not going to speak for @Silmarien, but I'm denying that the power of the influence of religious indoctrination upon children isn't mediated in many various ways by the political and social structure(S) that are found within any given society. So, I'm prone to say that the more pluralistic or open or free the society, the less likely that a child will remain with the original, simplistic religious beliefs that were formed in childhood. But, you guys just love to ignore social and religious complexity, don't you? Have you ever tak'n a Sociology course, or a Sociology of Education course, by chance?

Or do you just take Law and Logic and call it a day?

 

[DogmaHunter]

I'd think you kind'a need to, really.

I don't see why, since my point here is not about why people leave religion, but about why the majority of religious people tend stick with the religion they grew up with.....

Hardly.

Myeah, I'm not buying it.

If you are really going to stand there and tell me that citizens of SA being christian is common and not the exception, then I can not really take you seriously.

....the thing is, there is what you 'think' he will do........................and then there is what he actually does. Sometimes, reality bites, and it bites hard.

So you really are saying that it is impossible to say what the most likely religion is of a citizen of Saudi Arabia? Really? Seriously?

You're such a literalist ... gee.

Alternatively to rolling your eyes, you might also just explain what you meant by it.

You're sure about that?

Yes.

In what way precisely do you mean that no two people "independently come up with" the same religion?

As in, when the Conquistadores arrived in the America's, nobody knew about Jesus.
And before anyone met Vikings, nobody, except Vikings, new about Thor and Whalhalla.

Are we still talking about pedagogical issues pertaining to the inculcation of children, OR are you now looking at the other instance wherein some random person comes to think, "Eureka, I've discovered the Divine!" and just happens to differ from that of another person on the other side of the globe?

I'm not sure how you can misunderstand what I just said.
The only way people know about Jesus, is when christians tell people about Jesus.
Populations who have never come into contact with christians, don't know about Jesus.
The same goes for any other deity and religion.

If the religious lores were as real as, say, gravity (like the religious like to claim), I would expect tribes around the world to come up with the same ideas, or at least similar ideas. But we don't see that at all.

Oh, you mean, evidence based beliefs about how averages win out without the actual statistical study to back it up? That KIND of evidence? Or do you really mean to imply that generalized human experience, all by itself, actually does mean something? Of course, you'd be careful to avoid answering 'yes,' because.....well.....that might let the Trojan Horse into the castle, and we wouldn't want that.

I meant what I said as I said it, in the statement you initially quoted.
Take it or leave it.

Oh, so, you're a Christian theologian now, ay? And what does the Bible say for sure about all of this?

Are you saying that one can be a christian without believing in jesus and the bible, but in the quran and bagavad ghita instead?

If you are going to ask me about specific beliefs as to what makes up a christian, I'm not going to be able to answer that, as there are currently thousands of christian denominations who can't even agree on that.

So I can only go for the lowest common denominator. And that is jesus and the bible.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I don't see why, since my point here is not about why people leave religion, but about why the majority of religious people tend stick with the religion they grew up with.....




Myeah, I'm not buying it.

If you are really going to stand there and tell me that citizens of SA being christian is common and not the exception, then I can not really take you seriously.



So you really are saying that it is impossible to say what the most likely religion is of a citizen of Saudi Arabia? Really? Seriously?



Alternatively to rolling your eyes, you might also just explain what you meant by it.



Yes.



As in, when the Conquistadores arrived in the America's, nobody knew about Jesus.
And before anyone met Vikings, nobody, except Vikings, new about Thor and Whalhalla.




I'm not sure how you can misunderstand what I just said.
The only way people know about Jesus, is when christians tell people about Jesus.
Populations who have never come into contact with christians, don't know about Jesus.
The same goes for any other deity and religion.

If the religious lores were as real as, say, gravity (like the religious like to claim), I would expect tribes around the world to come up with the same ideas, or at least similar ideas. But we don't see that at all.



I meant what I said as I said it, in the statement you initially quoted.
Take it or leave it.



Are you saying that one can be a christian without believing in jesus and the bible, but in the quran and bagavad ghita instead?

If you are going to ask me about specific beliefs as to what makes up a christian, I'm not going to be able to answer that, as there are currently thousands of christian denominations who can't even agree on that.

So I can only go for the lowest common denominator. And that is jesus and the bible.

....man, you're just running all over the place, aren't you? I thought we were specifically focusing on, and only on, the issue of children either retaining or not retaining the religious beliefs they were taught. What issue is it you want to focus on? I have to ask because in true atheistic form, when you guys are cornered, you resort to either hopping from lily pad to lily pad OR just plain snowing everyone.

As I told another guy here on CF not so long ago, "pick your poison and stick with it"! Also, it would help if you'd actually buttress your asserted claims with evidence. ....oh but silly me, I forgot! You've already admitted that actual statistical evidence can't be had. Well, it's not my problem that for issues of Social important you (arbitrarily) choose to require only quantitative studies rather than qualitative studies. But, to each his own, I suppose.

 

[KCfromNC]

Imagine for a moment you’re someone like Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Carl Sagan and you’ve literally placed all that you are into the scientific enterprise and one day someone like Ray Comfort is on Fox News and says, “Childhood indoctrination in the scientific method is the driving force behind belief in the scientific method.”

I doubt your first response would be, “Gee! That’s not offensive at all!”

Not that I'm some legendary scientist or anything, but it wouldn't offend me in the least because I have good reasons to know they're just making stuff up.

Is there similar evidence to show that there's not a strong correlation between the religion one was exposed to as a child and one's beliefs in adulthood?

 

[DogmaHunter]

Well, Dogma has now doubled down and what we thought he was implying turned out to be precisely what he was implying.

I don't know what posts you have been reading, but it sure weren't mine.
I've always talked about likely and probability.

At no point have I expressed certainties.

My point has always been that the statistics don't apply to individual cases.

The thing about statistics and individuals, is that they allow for probability.

If the statistics show that 8 out of 10 stick to the religion of their parents, then if you meet a random religious individual, then 8 chances out of 10, he's following the religion of his parents.

Do you disagree with that?

And you would be guessing wrong even with yourself, seeing as how you are neither Christian nor Muslim. So perhaps this is not the sort of approach you should be pushing.

I'm by definition already the exception to the rule, since my parents don't share the same religion. Also, it seems you've missed the part where I also explicitly qualified that if it concerns a religious person. It is true I didn't qualify that every time I had to repeat it.

But I did certainly mention it. I also said that I think that more often then not, if someone abbandons the religion of their upbringing, chances are bigger that they'll abbandon religion altogether instead of converting to some other foreign religion. Especially in the secular west.

However, if I would have been religious, surely most likely I would have been muslim or christian - not a hindu or scientologist or whatever.

And to top it off, my example actually also confirms my general point here... because I was never indoctrinated into a religion.

My point is that religious belief is more often then not a learned behaviour starting in very early childhood. Nobody learned me a religion. Specifically because my parents didn't share a religion. Baptising me wouldn't have been fair towards my dad and his family. Circumsizing me wouldn't have been fair towards my mom and her family. So they did neither.

This is also why they put me in a secular public school instead of a christian or islamic school.

I was never instructed a religion. If I was, chances would be big that I'ld be religious. And that religion would have most likely been the one spoonfed to me during childhood.


I can't believe that you folks are arguing this point.
I really can't.

I don't know that it's true. I have no idea why my own family's nominal Christianity, combined with random Eastern beliefs, determined that my own beliefs would be Christian. If you were arguing that someone who was brought up in a strict religious household would be likely to end up that religion, I would agree with you, but you are going much further than that. You are tossing the whole post-Christian crowd into your statistics because our parents loosely identified as Christian, even if they barely practiced it and did not teach it.

/facepalm

Obviously my point is not about parents that don't indoctrinate their kids into a religion they barely believe in themselves..........................

For crying out loud...

People don't learn religious beliefs by osmosis simply because their parents happen to identify with a particular religion.

I identify with judeo-christian culture, because I grew up in judeo-christian culture.
That doesn't make me a christian believer.

If my parents would have baptised me, send me to sunday school, made me read the bible and dragged me to mass every sunday from the day I was born onwards, it would be a different story - as you agree to.

So what are you objecting to, really?

If you randomly decided to embrace Christianity at some point, it would obviously not be because your mother was Christian, so you need to fix your position to account for that type of situation

Nothing I said excludes people from changing, abbandoning or joining a religion at some point in their lives, regardless of what their parents believe.

My point is about what the majority does.

Otherwise you're simply wrong. You're assuming a correlation between religion of the parent and the actual intentional transmission of that religion that you should know from experience doesn't always apply.

No. I'm assuming a correlation between someone's religious beliefs and the religion they were indoctrinated into from birth onwards.

My point has nothing to do with people who were not indoctrinated into a religion.

Eventhough I could also make a case about how those people who weren't indoctrinated and end up in one religion or another anyway, did so under influence of their immediate environment (friends or family or whatever).

People who convert to a religion purely by reading about it, while knowing nobody who practicing that religion... I don't think you'll meet them often.

If you developed your method here to be more flexible to various circumstances, I would probably agree with the conclusion, but right now it is simplistic to the point of being obviously fallacious.

Either I'm not making myself clear (which I doubt, but it could be), or the lot of you are just skimming over my post and adding things between the lines or whatever.

I'm talking about rather specific circumstances. And that is those people that are indoctrinated into a religion from birth onwards.

Obviously, parents that barely believe themselves, don't go to church and perhaps don't even own any bibles or whatever, are not the subject of discussion here.

This is literally ethnic profiling. How can you not see that this is ethnic profiling?

Perhaps, but it doesn't bother me at all. Because it's correct.

A Morrocon who is religious and living in Antwerp, is most likely a muslim.
A native Belgian who is religious and living in Antwerp, is most likely a christian catholic.

It's just how it is. It's culture. And it is past on from one generation to the next.

There's a district in Antwerp called Borgerhout. It's nicknamed Borgerroco, because many of Morrocon descend live there. There are quite a few mosques there. The amount of mosques concentrated in that distinct, is no surprise to me at all. Apparantly, it is to you?

Honestly, I would assume secular

Secular, is not a religion.
It's a political construct where government and religion stay out of eachother's business.
I'm a secularist and an atheist.
Brahim, a morrocon living accross the street of me, is a secular muslim.
The pastor of our village, a catholic, is a secular christian.

unless someone is wearing religious symbols or actually says or does something to give away their religion. I would not be surprised if the answer were Muslim or Oriental Orthodox, but I don't really go around trying to guess what religion people are because of their names. That's bizarre in the extreme.

I don't spend my time guessing people's religions.
I'm just saying, if you have to guess, and assuming the person in question is religious, then I say that more often then not, you can guess correctly purely based on their cultural background.

And I'm still baffled that you people are arguing that point.

A religious person of Morrocan descend with the name Mohammed who has muslim parents, and you're telling me you can't guess what his religion most likely is?

Be serious.

 

[DogmaHunter]

A necessary condition of being a Christian (or an adherent of any religion), is that you cannot have evidence or good reasons for your religious beliefs.

Ok. I wouldn't necessarily formulate it like that, but sure.

Now the only reason you’ve given for thinking that that is a necessary condition is that religion is defined that way. That faith is defined as believing something for which there is no evidence.

If actual sufficient evidence was present, faith wouldn't be required, is what I'm saying.

Seen in this light, the argument from the fact that most people retain the religious beliefs of their parents is superfluous.

I don't see why.
Regardless of how religion and faith is defined, it's nothing short of fact that most people tend to stick to the religion they were indoctrinated in from birth onwards.

That's just how it is. Even if you can find me a religion that has bulletproof evidence and which doesn't rely on faith at all (but I'ld argue that in such a case, we wouldn't call it a religion).

If you start off defining religion and faith in such a way that prohibits there being good reasons and evidence for them, then it necessarily follows that those who do abandon the religious beliefs they were taught for other religious beliefs (something you have acknowledged does happen), do so for reasons other than there being good reasons and evidence to do so.[/quroe]

Sure, people who do abbondon the religion they were indoctrinated in from birth onwards in favour of another religion, do so for a whole range of reasons. And indeed, I submit that none of those reasons are actually valid reasons (in terms of: valid reasons to accept the claims of that religion as accurate and reflective of actual reality).

So really, I would, along with zippy2006, 2PhioVoid, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Martin Luther, and the plethora of others who view faith differently than you do, challenge you to think of faith differently, in the biblical sense, not in the sense so often portrayed by internet popularizers.

In the "biblical sense" ey?

faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen

Sounds pretty much the same as how I think of it....

 

[DogmaHunter]

But it is a textbook genetic fallacy.

Best to agree on legitimate objections or things that are real like evil and suffering then agreeing on claims that can't possibly be true like the statements above.

Secondly faith is being use equivocally above. It is used differently in scripture (that is NOT as a way of knowing anything but rather TRUST)

so dogmahunter gives us 2 informal fallacies for the price of one.

Apparantly, you missed the post where I disagree with his representation of my stance.
But it's not the first time you are selective in your reading of my positions.
So I'm not surprised.

 

[DogmaHunter]

The faith vs. reason debate persists because I think so many are taught exactly what DogmaHunter thinks is true, that faith and evidence are antithetical to one another.

You are welcome, and motivated, to explain how they aren't.

 

[DogmaHunter]

When applied to individuals? How could it be anything but offensive?

There is a huge double standard here, given how often the atheists on this site insist upon being considered as individuals instead of simply being stereotyped and categorized. The sheer entitlement involved in demanding that type of respect while refusing to grant it in return is a little bit shocking.

How is it "offensive" or "shocking" to say that when 2 practicing christians have a child, baptise it and indoctrinate it into the christian faith, chances are rather big that that child will grow up to be and stay a praciticing christian?

When applied to individuals, yes. The statistics are irrelevant at best, offensive at worst. If you're talking to someone who was born in poverty and remained poor (or any other combination), you should actually listen to what they have to say instead of lecturing them on what the statistics are. They may reflect the general trend, but they also might not.

We shouldn't go around telling people that their fates are determined by statistical analysis, because it's not true. Statistics have no causal power, and what actually goes on in any individual's life is far more complicated than a numbers game.

You continue to add things that I never said.

I merely said, in many words, that the majority of people tend to stick to the religion they were indoctrinated into since childhood.

We can observe all around us, everywhere on the planet, that this is indeed the case.
There's a reason why 80% of US citizens are christians and why +80% of citizens in iran are muslim. And it's not because children of religious parents have any kind of free choice in which religion they get to be indoctrinated into...........................

 

[DogmaHunter]

Neither is the ability to speak Spanish. Who cares? Secularism involves a worldview, just like religion, and worldviews are inherited.

But I'm talking about beliefs.
As in: to accept as true/accurate.

And their secularism arose ex nihilo no more than atheistic secularists.

More importantly, secularism is not the subject of my point.
Religious beliefs are.

If religion is purely deterministic, and everything else is not, then one's religion is neither rational nor free. That antecedent has been looming unspoken in this thread, but everyone knows it's there (presumably even @Nicholas Deka by this point). The interesting thing is that you won't even speak it. It seems like you're almost hoping that people will make the false inference (influenced -> determined), because that's what's needed for your strong conclusion, i.e. the undermining of religion.

(I suppose one could settle for a weaker conclusion, but I've never known you to do that. )

It's like you people really don't understand the difference between "likely" and "is".
Between "probable" and "certain".

No, religion is not "purely deterministic".
It is rather largely determined by indoctrination during upbringing.

Do you really not understand the difference?
The evidence in this thread would suggest that you don't.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Imagine for a moment you’re someone like Richard Dawkins or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Carl Sagan and you’ve literally placed all that you are into the scientific enterprise and one day someone like Ray Comfort is on Fox News and says, “Childhood indoctrination in the scientific method is the driving force behind belief in the scientific method.”

I would laugh and point out that the driving force behind the scientific method, is the demonstrable fact that it works.

Furthermore, the scientific method, is not a claim of reality.
It's just a method to answer questions about reality.

I doubt your first response would be, “Gee! That’s not offensive at all!”

I wouldn't feel offended.

You would have an uproar so great from the scientific community that scientists would be knocking down the door of every radio and news station in an attempt to make it known how misguided and ignorant Ray Comfort was for saying what he did.

I seriously doubt that.
In fact, I even doubt that any working scientist would even care what Comfort has to say about science.

If you were poor and living under a bridge or having to stay in a homeless shelter and someone walked up to you and said that most people who are born poor are going to stay poor and that’s a statistic you can’t argue with, you might not be offended, but you definitely wouldn’t be overjoyed to hear that.

Honestly, I don't think you would be telling them something that they didn't already know......................

You don’t understand why someone here might take offense to what you’ve said because you aren’t putting yourself in the shoes of the one on the receiving end of what you’re saying.

Let's just cut this short here.
If I offended anyone with simply stating facts, then that doesn't bother me at all.

I didn't mean offense. Perhaps the fact that you feel offended is your problem and not mine?

 

[DogmaHunter]

This whole thing started because an atheist told @2PhiloVoid that he was only Christian because he grew up in a Christian country. It was pretty explicit.

I have no argument with the statistics until they're weaponized. They were weaponized immediately here.

I hope you aren't talking about me.

Here was my first post on the matter:

Nevertheless, in the vast vast majority of cases, you can pretty accuratly predict someone's religion (if they are religious) purely by knowledge of their present / past geographic whereabouts.

This is the case because typically, religion is acquired from the age of pretty much 0. And that religion is determined by the parents. And the parents usually follow the religion that is dominant in that geographic location.

Tell me the religion of your parents, and I'll tell you what your religion is.
And I dare say that more then 9 times out of 10, I'ld be correct.

​

 

[DogmaHunter]

That was heavily implied by the claim that Philo would have almost certainly been Muslim if born in Saudi Arabia.

You disagree with that?
So, you would go ahead and say that if you are born in a country where >99% of the population is muslim, it's not almost certain that you'ld grow up to be a muslim yourself???

For real?

Posts don't exist in a vacuum, and NV's least of all.

You know what else doesn't exist in a vaccuum?
Children. They are raised by their parents and inherit quite a few of their customs and beliefs, as well as from their immediate environment.

And for crying out loud, yes, if you are born and raised in a country where > 99% of the population follows religion X....chances are rather enormous that you too, would be a follower of religion X.

 

[DogmaHunter]

I'm not going to speak for @Silmarien, but I'm denying that the power of the influence of religious indoctrination upon children isn't mediated in many various ways by the political and social structure(S) that are found within any given society. So, I'm prone to say that the more pluralistic or open or free the society, the less likely that a child will remain with the original, simplistic religious beliefs that were formed in childhood. But, you guys just love to ignore social and religious complexity, don't you? Have you ever tak'n a Sociology course, or a Sociology of Education course, by chance?

Please point out where I have ever said anything either implicitly or explicitly, that denies any external factors influencing a person's religious beliefs throughout their lives?

I'll go a head and assume that "you guys", includes me.

 

[Silmarien]

But I did certainly mention it. I also said that I think that more often then not, if someone abbandons the religion of their upbringing, chances are bigger that they'll abbandon religion altogether instead of converting to some other foreign religion. Especially in the secular west.

Not necessarily. You will find that a lot of people who abandoned Christianity end up in some sort of New Age or pagan paradigm. There are a lot of new pseudo-religious phenomena going on these days, a fair amount of deism, and so forth and so on. Your bizarrely simplistic approach ignores the modern religious landscape entirely, since the collapse of Christianity in the West sometimes means, "Bring out the scented candles and the tarot cards."

And to top it off, my example actually also confirms my general point here... because I was never indoctrinated into a religion.

My point is that religious belief is more often then not a learned behaviour starting in very early childhood. Nobody learned me a religion. Specifically because my parents didn't share a religion. Baptising me wouldn't have been fair towards my dad and his family. Circumsizing me wouldn't have been fair towards my mom and her family. So they did neither.

This is also why they put me in a secular public school instead of a christian or islamic school.

I was never instructed a religion. If I was, chances would be big that I'ld be religious. And that religion would have most likely been the one spoonfed to me during childhood.

That's nice. Neither was the post-Christian crowd in general. So what if I went to Sunday School if my family knew nothing about their own religion and fed me mythology on the side? People don't get indoctrinated simply by being exposed to a religion, so you're wrong to conflate religious parents with religious indoctrination.

Even a genuinely religious family could probably avoid indoctrination for a more balanced religious upbringing if they wanted.

Obviously my point is not about parents that don't indoctrinate their kids into a religion they barely believe in themselves..........................

For crying out loud...

No, your point seems to be that any level of religious exposure is indoctrination. Which is absurd.

Either I'm not making myself clear (which I doubt, but it could be), or the lot of you are just skimming over my post and adding things between the lines or whatever.

I'm talking about rather specific circumstances. And that is those people that are indoctrinated into a religion from birth onwards.

Obviously, parents that barely believe themselves, don't go to church and perhaps don't even own any bibles or whatever, are not the subject of discussion here.

This is the problem, actually. You're contrasting two extremes--actual indoctrination and completely unchurched--and cutting out the entire spectrum that lies between them. It's as if Mainline Protestantism and Reform Judaism simply didn't exist. It's very common for people with these types of backgrounds to leave them, and it's not uncommon for them to go exploring world religion afterwards.

No. I'm assuming a correlation between someone's religious beliefs and the religion they were indoctrinated into from birth onwards.

My point has nothing to do with people who were not indoctrinated into a religion.

Eventhough I could also make a case about how those people who weren't indoctrinated and end up in one religion or another anyway, did so under influence of their immediate environment (friends or family or whatever).

People who convert to a religion purely by reading about it, while knowing nobody who practicing that religion... I don't think you'll meet them often.

That becomes more difficult in a global society. At this point, some of us actually do have more personal contact with Asian religions than with Christianity.

Secular, is not a religion.
It's a political construct where government and religion stay out of eachother's business.

Secular means a bunch of different things. I use the word to refer to the non-religious.

I hope you aren't talking about me.

No, I was talking about NV.

You disagree with that?
So, you would go ahead and say that if you are born in a country where >99% of the population is muslim, it's not almost certain that you'ld grow up to be a muslim yourself???

For real?

It's more likely that I wouldn't have, honestly. I have a pretty intense non-conformist streak and was never very susceptible to religious indoctrination, even as a child. If specifically in a Sufi community, I would have likely ended up Muslim, since I've always appreciated mysticism, but outside of that, I'd probably have grown up thinking everyone was crazy.

 

[Silmarien]

You should take it differently because NV isn't one to "imply" anything.

If that's all that you think is happening typically, then why do you think the statistics correlate so strongly on geographic and familial lines? Maybe there's a bit more to having Christian parents than just reading stories once a week even if they aren't super Jesusy.

I don't think the statistics would show that people in these situations remain Christian at all. There is a bit of a missing generation problem specifically because a decent percentage of people who grew up in these environments have abandoned the church. There are reasons why Evangelicalism is growing and Mainline Protestantism collapsing, and I think the intensity of religious upbringing is one of them.

I would be very interested on the statistics concerning people who leave and then return to religion, but that's an entirely different phenomenon. We can't get lumped in with people who never left their religions in the first place.