You do realise that almost always someone adopts the religion of either their parents or their commumity? Eventhough you misunderstood my point I do think believing in god is rarely a choose. And on top of that Christianity is a fear-based religion.
Yes. I probably did misunderstand your point. Hmm, we disagree on this one. Maybe because of your social backgrouds, and company we keep. Most of the religious people that I know have been thought from your. But most of them are also some of the smartest people that I know. It seems to me odd that they would not naturally have questioned their faith.
I guess there are alot of people out there as well, who do not question their faith and accept it because it has always been part of their lives.
Maybe you could argue that because children are taught to believe in god it is not their irrationality but the children's inborn characteristic to believe anything their parents tell them without questioning.
Belief in fairies is generally the product of a persons irrationality. But even these people take this belief from someone else. It is not their original idea.
You actually suggest that questioning things is inborn. Maybe it is partly. But it is not active in children. Imagine a child has to question and thus test out every advice their parents give them.
Children naturally don't question their parents. If they do they will get hurt and have a risk of dying. Children that question their parents are less 'fit' in a Darwinistic sense.
I do think that people are born with the potentional, and only the potentional, to be reasonable, skeptical critical thinkers. But this has to be learned and trained.
I think this is a very interesting thing to discuss. Here is a little hypothesis.
Childern are born with a great potential to learn. They have to be. That's the basic way the brain is wired. Because of this, they naturally ask questions about everything. Remember the "why is the sky blue" type of question? It's a natural curiosity of the world, stemming from innocences and a desire to understand.
You are right about parents. Parents or elders supervising a child must be a genetically favourable thing.
Somehow along the way, we grow up. In this, other things become more important. We slowly stop questioning, because to some questions we get answers, to others, we just accept things as they are and to yet other questions, we know that there are no answers to.
Religion represents an answer in some form (I would say less an answer and more a negation of the question). It addresses this intense desire to be curious in a rather odd fashion by giving comfort to some of the bigger questions that we, as a race consider important, and with that stops the need for questioning this. In a sense it fills a gap.
When we can't make sense of things (can't get answers to questions that we want), religion seems to offer some sort of alternative that no other instituation (certainly not science) can. A lot of people can't accept that things just are. They need to know that in the end there is justice. In the end, there is a reason for them being here. In accepting religion, they can stop questioning these things.
The other reason religion works is because there is a critical mass of people believing in this concept. People are afraid of looking silly, and if there are enough people truely believing that the flying speghetti monster says that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42, it is then not a silly concept. Hence, the mass psycology thing.
These are rough ideas, so if you see any flaws or have something else to contribute, please add.