Correlation does not automatically imply causation.
Well, I mean, maybe not in a general sense, but in this case it most certainly does. You can guess what someone's religion is based on where they are from with a startling amount of accuracy.
Look at this map of religious distribution in the world.
http://www.wadsworth.com/religion_d/special_features/popups/maps/matthews_world/content/map_01.html
If we ignore what that higher education is in, and if we ignore any religiously relevant criteria for measuring religiosity.
There's nothing to indicate what subjects a person is educated in has any bearing on the findings, and they take into account several definitions of "religious." And I actually was wrong about the correlation between atheism and higher education. The relevant study concludes that higher education tends to make people
skeptical of their faith, and more liberal in terms of their spirituality (ie not adherent to any one set of tenets) but not necessarily less religious in terms of believing in a higher power. It just gets a lot less specific the higher the education level.
There
is a correlation, however, between high IQ and low religiosity. In other words, the smarter the person, the less likely they are to be religious.
What's wrong with trying to protect your family, and considering this more important than the life of strangers?
The point is that the woman isn't really a witch, it's just superstition. By participating in her murder or exile, I'm not doing what is truly good, but this is only because I don't know any better. In other words, my ignorance prevents me from doing the right thing.
The phenomenon of people currently being religious, and the phenomenon of how people have become religious in the first place, are closely related.
So you hold that an externalist analysis of
conscious entities, an analysis that ignores the conscioussness of those entities, is perfectly adequate?
Do you believe that an
etic account is perfectly sufficient, and that the emic one can be ignored?
I'm simply saying that if you ask a religious person how they came to their faith, they'll have some long, lovely story about finding Jesus or Buddha or whatever, but if you were to actually look at their situation, they were almost always raised by parents of the same faith, attended religious services as children, performed religious rituals as adolescents, and been a part of religious ceremonies as adults. In other words, they came to their faith by being born into that particular household, and if they had been born to the Hindu couple next door, they'd be Hindu instead.
And how do you suppose I do that? Here, I'll pose an equally ridiculous option: Prove that they do.
And yet there is an ongoing struggle within all major organized religions to recognize and avoid those people who are "wolves in sheep's clothing" - people who are active members of religious organizations, who openly profess belief and who even generally act in accordance with the religious norms, but who nevertheless have caustic doubts, question the authority and cause discord among members.
The Hindu term for such people is "dharma-dvaji."
This rebuttal only makes sense if I had said that no one questions religious authority. But I didn't. I said the majority don't.
I also said that the people who
do question often find themselves on the outside looking in, in terms of their church (or temple, or whatever) or community, and you do a fine job elaborating on that for me.
That is the general impression one gets from mainstream versions of Abrahamic religions.
The texts, however, have quite a bit more to say on the matter.
Really? Like what?
So?
Inquiry won't bring you 72 virgins either.
I don't know what that is even supposed to mean. The point is that you cannot question your faith and come to the conclusion that it is correct.
So what kind of inquiry could possibly lead a person to conclude that "the gods of human religion are false"?
The parochial nature of any faith is a big indicator. The "whole world" always seems to be a very small patch of land in the religions of antiquity, and the morals contained within any guiding text centers around the way of life in the very particular areas from which they originate, and do not translate well across the ages.
The Abrahamic religions claim to be the absolute truth and the word of their god, yet we find better morals in modern society, thousands of years removed, and find their explanations for natural events pitifully lacking. Education renders the infallible quite fallible.
The fact that the Quran is essentially a plagiarism of the New Testament, which in itself is a sort of plagiarism of the Old Testament, and the genesis (pardon the term) for stories in all three can be found in earlier religions of the region, is another huge red flag.
I am sure this is what it looks like to you, from the outside.
Apparently you have not participated in many intra-faith discussions on various issues, especially those of faith and ethics, nor have you read much about those.
There is a vast amount of Christian (and other) self-help and self-cultivation literature and other venues for discussing various problems of faith and ethics.
Have you ever practiced the
Jesuit spiritual exercises or participated in the group sessions of those?
Or read a book like
this, or
this or
this?
You're talking about an infinitesimally small minority. These are exceptions to the rule.
