This is so if viewed from a particular external, non-Christian perspective that assumes religiousness is necessarily learned / adopted / acquired, and not inherent.
Well we have some evidence to say that it is, such as how your religion so greatly depends on where you live, or where you were raised. Also, the positive correlation between higher education and agnosticism/atheism would imply that religion is a condition of ignorance. The fact that almost every religion attempts to explain how life began, as well as how it will end, speaks to that point.
But (at least some) Christians (and others) see no difference between "values from within" and "values given from God."
According to (some) theists, morality, alog with religiousness, is innate, and it is so because God made it so.
Well, I believe morality is innate as well, but I don't think moral
issues are innate. For example, I can watch a woman getting beaten by two others and feel empathy. This empathy causes me to (hopefully) step in and prevent any further damage from being done.
However, if I'm lead to believe the woman is a witch who will kill my family if she is not stopped, I will tend to have a different reaction to the scene, because empathy is no longer the relevant instinct, but rather the desire to protect my family. This instinct could cause me to allow the beatings to occur, or even cause me to help the attackers. Perhaps if I'm a very empathetic person, I might seek a different solution--banishment for the witch, for example--but in the end what is "truly good" is unknown to me because of my ignorance.
It is is not clear that this is actually how people come to be religious.
What you sketch out above is certainly a frequent religiological / anthropological / culturological assumption about how it comes that people become religious.
This is interesting, because I did not make any claim as to how people become religious in that post. I was discussing the differences between theists and non-theists as it pertains to their morality. Completely different subject. I'm curious, what about my post lead you to write this?
But it is an assumption that is difficult to support (it is not possible to test it), and religious people themselves do not subscribe to it.
Well, again, I don't know where you got that I was making a claim about how religious people come to be religious. That wasn't what we were talking about. I do that
in this post, but not before.
But anyway, citing that religious people do not subscribe to a certain theory is irrelevant. They do not subscribe to the idea that there is no god, either. Clearly what they subscribe to has no bearing on the conversation.
That seems to assume that religious people first blindly accept someone or something as an authority, and then just go along without questioning.
Many do accept a religious authority without question. And those who don't tend to find themselves on the outside looking in. The Abrahamic texts specifically condemn questioning of authority, and leave no room for doubters in the promised afterlife.
Consider how many people believe the world is thousands of years old, rather than billions. Consider how many people believe there will be 72 virgins waiting for them if they give their life to jihad. No inquiry will bring you to these conclusions.
On the whole, I think that atheists tend to operate out of grossly misleading assumptions about how a person becomes religious - theistic.
Those atheists take for granted that God doesn't exist, and that therefore, a religiological / anthropological / culturological explanation of a how a person becomes religious, suffices completely.
You've got it completely backwards. Atheists come to the conclusion that the gods of human religion are false
because of inquiry. Theists are, by and large, born into their faiths, and were indoctrinated before they were old enough to know better.
They are the ones who take their reality for granted, not atheists.
