Why Aren’t Atheist Parents Raising Atheist Children?

It could stand to be broken down a little more yet. My understanding is that Buddhists, Quakers and Unitarian Universalist groups all include atheists along with other faith based outlooks.

It also bears pointing out that many Atheists “convert” to a religion for love.  They meet someone who is a Catholic or Jew and they go through the motions to convert so they can marry.  Does that mean they actually believe?  I doubt it. 

And as you point out Atheists don’t indoctrinate their children to believe specific things.  They allow them freedom of thought.  Many of those numbers who still identify as affiliated with a particular religious group may not be practicing nor believing.  But there’s so much pressure and fear tangled up in disassociating with the group they just continue to identify as whatever their childhood group is.  As far as I’m concerned this really means nothing.

I suppose it’s just a bias on my part, but I can’t believe that the total numbers for bona fide atheists are so low.  Between the rallies, conventions, youtube channels, millions of books sold, etc…. it seems like there’s something the data isn’t telling us. Maybe it’s the way the surveys are worded, or maybe we’re really just that small on the map and it’s just easy to forget that in the age of the interwebs. Either way it’s just odd… 1.6%? Really? 

Phil Zuckerman in one of his books quotes from an American woman he interviewed who experienced culture shock when she visited Estonia. Apparently Estonia has turned into a “Jesus who?” society like something from science fiction. Many Estonians don’t know how to pronounce Jesus’ name in their language, and they consider the Jesus story some obscure, alien myth. Yet Estonians seem to function just fine without Jesus in their lives, and they enjoy democratic government and living standards similar to those in other European countries. I don’t see how the children who grow up in this environment will become religious if they lack exposure to religious beliefs and practices.

The fact that we have enough atheists around, including ones from multigenerational godless families, to allow demographic generalizations about us will discredit the Fantasy Atheist (FA) model promoted by generations of theologians. According to theologians, the FA grows up as a traditional theist — “Everyone believes in god as the default state because god has imprinted that knowledge on our hearts,” or words to that effect — yet one morning this individual perversely decides to have a meaningless life from then on by disavowing this knowledge. For the rest of his days the FA then struggles with angst, nihilism, despair, the abyss, purposelessness and so forth, apparently like a teenager going through a Goth phase or something. Yet despite this chronic dysthymic state, the FA also somehow manages to engage in swinging, promiscuous sex, though I don’t see how to reconcile the two claims about the consequences of becoming an FA. 

Yet we can see that real atheists don’t behave that way at all. So theologians counter that we’ve just compartmentalized our atheism while running on the fumes of our former theism to stay emotionally and morally functional. After all, nobody could practically live as an atheist because of the allegedly horrible results.

So how do theologians explain the existence and good condition of atheists who grew up that way, and who therefore have no tradition of theism to draw upon? 

C Peterson, makes a good point about people still identifying with a religious group while really not believing anymore. But I wanted to note another potential flaw in the data, and that is some of theses “atheist may not have really been atheist to start with.

Now before I hear “No true scotsman” 20 times, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m instead referring to something I have come across quit a lot talking to born again Christians. Many of them have a tendency to overplay their “pre” born again life as way more “depraved” than it really was. I have personally talked to several people (and you can read many, many examples of this on web blogs and testimonials too) who will tell you they where drunken, womanizing, drug addicted Atheist prior to their conversion. Yet when they tell you specifics, it turns out they would get real drunk a few times on the weekend, smoked a joint once a week in college, got a blow job twice after a party, and just didn’t go to church for 5 years. 

There seems to be a sort of contest in a large part of the many hard right christian sects to “out born again” the others. It’s like there piety depends on how far they convince others they have come, and to do that they seem to completely over blow how “low” they where in the first place. And how can they get much owe (n their minds) than begin an Atheist? Also you need to remember that for many of the hard right fundamentalist, liberal non-born again churches are “Atheist” to them.

I’m an atheist who sent my son to Presbyterian pre-school and Catholic school in first grade. I let him go to Sunday school with his friends. I didn’t express my beliefs to him until he was a pre-teen, and explained I wanted him to make his own choices. He’s 28 now, and an atheist.

So you are saying “No true Atheist” embraces angst, nihilism, despair, the abyss, purposelessness, swinging promiscuous sex, perversion, Goth or Vandalism, meaninglessness, and ignorance.

Playing with the similar data over in the GSS for the “Nones” (which include atheists, agnostics, and nothing-in-particulars), it looks like the conversions occur roughly proportional to the level in the population during the formative 16-25 year age — possibly due to marriage, possibly because one’s peer group is about as influential as one’s parents for belief development. Which means, if the current demographic trends to irreligion continue, then the problem will tend to diminish.

Another piece of data comes from Hunsberger and Altemeyer’s “Atheists” study, somewhat confirming Hemant’s guess about tendencies in child-rearing practices. When asked about they raised their children, in the sample one in two modestly active believers said they tried raising their children to have the same beliefs, as did two in three regular churchgoers and sixteen in seventeen fundamentalists. In contrast, about one in four non-churchgoing believers, one in seven atheists, and about one in thirteen agnostics said they tried. A thirty percent retention rate starts to look relatively good, if you consider less than half that number even tried.

I find interesting all of the justifications for why children raised in an atheist family only 30% of the time stay that way as adults. These grasps at reasons other tan the obvious are from people that rely only on evidence and rationality for their beliefs. The only thing these numbers show is that as adults 70% of these children find that atheism is something they no longer think is true. I find that wonderful and not so surprising at all.

I wonder if anyone has conducted a study showing a correlation between the acceptance of the LGBT community and the rise of non believers here and in Europe. It appears that as homosexuality has become more widely accepted and tolerated, by the general society, that there also has been a direct proportional increase of nonbelievers. Though the inverse may also be in play here considering the theistic communities (at least here in the US) harsh campaign against the LGBT communities desire to acquire civil rights.

“Kurt Cameron”

You spelled “idiot” wrong, but hey, everyone makes mistakes once in a while :p

 Well now you’ve met one.

For the rest of his days the FA then struggles with angst, nihilism,
despair, the abyss, purposelessness and so forth, apparently like a
teenager going through a Goth phase or something. Yet despite this
chronic dysthymic state, the FA also somehow manages to engage in
swinging, promiscuous sex, though I don’t see how to reconcile the two
claims about the consequences of becoming an FA.

Drugs of course.

Depends on how you define ‘troll’.  If you mean “person who the majority of the forum disagrees with” then sure.

If you mean “person who makes comments to just to get a reaction and start a fight” then, no, I don’t agree.  I mostly disagree with Rwlawoffice, but he’s not trying to start fights for the sake of starting fights.  The real trolls we get tend to be ‘drive by’, and never stay long.

I was raised in an “atheist” household but not to be skeptical. My grandfather, a vocal and opinionated atheist, had a lot of influence on the set-up, but we were mostly secular. All I knew about atheism was that we (my parents) didn’t go to church, we had an aversion to “bible-thumpers” and “holy rollers,” and basically (but not deeply) absorbed the message straight from my grandfather that it was a money-making racket. I had neither analyzed this or thought a lot about it until I was on my own. Aside from Christianity, my mind was free to roam to become attracted to other magical faiths. Was I anti-Christian? I guess so. But I didn’t live in a world where I had to be protected from it. I leaned more into the adolescent attraction to paganism/pantheism/wicca – nothing too deeply, nothing I joined or “became” – and probably that alternative medicine bullshit.

As far as I can tell, my sister is still into the new-age/Western Buddhish stuff at least a little. I thought if I stayed a little longer on the phone with my brother a few weeks ago, he might have something to say about conspiracies, although I think he identifies as an atheist. We’re not raised to be atheists. That’s not to say I wasn’t an atheist then, but I’m not the same uh, “worldview” as I was raised in. I reasoned that out for myself later on. I might not have, and been flaky.

I think we shelter ourselves off here from the community of atheism. How many hundreds or thousands of people are talking about it on the internet all the time? That’s not a lot. Not every atheist is a strong, vocal, and/or reasoned atheist. I wasn’t raised to be skeptical. I was raised to respect authority and keep my mouth shut and listen, by someone who is probably an atheist. I feel like we marginalize other atheists from the conversation or expect them all to be intelligent, well-spoken, emotionally stable. Not all of them are bothered by religion, they just don’t believe any of it. It’s not rational to expect, out of all the atheists, that they’re all like “us” and have the values to pass along to children all the skepticism they need to make up their own mind the way we expect them to. It just seems like there are a lot of atheists now, on the internet, talking almost exclusively about it that we generate an illusion of what an atheist must be like.

It’s hard to believe anyone is that obtuse except on purpose; he’s like an intellectualized version of DG. Reading comprehension failure, dodging the point, etc. I’ve seen Christians (or other religious people) able to carry on a discussion without resorting to either.

“It also bears pointing out that many Atheists ‘convert’ to a religion for love.  They meet someone who is a Catholic or Jew and they go through the motions to convert so they can marry.  Does that mean they actually believe?  I doubt it.”

I grew up as an agnostic. I converted to being a Lutheran when I got married. Now that my husband is gone, I’ve slowly gone back to my unbelieving ways and become an atheist. I really was a believer, or at least thought I was, but I will admit it was pretty easy for me to lose my belief, and now I wonder what the heck I was thinking. But yes, I think conversion for love probably accounts for a large number of those who convert– there are more theists in the world than atheists, so we are statistically more likely to wind up marrying theists, and societal pressures mean that we’re more likely to convert to theism than theists are to convert to atheism.

You described my spouse to a ‘t’ here. He was not raised with any particular belief set, although if you asked his elder family they’d say they were christian. They just wouldn’t be able to tell you what kind, nor remember the last time any of them had been to church or read the bible, they just know they are supposed to say christian and haven’t ime bothered to examine their beliefs to figure out if that’s true or not. Neither of his parents are religious in any sense, or at least they are not outwardly religious toward their children. One could definitely say he grew up in an irreligious environment.

My spouse was one of those spiritual but not religious people when we met. I was (timidly) self described as an atheist, because I’d been raised fundamentalist and had significantly more occasion to overtly question what I’d been taught than he did. If you asked him now, he’d claim the label of atheist, because now he knows what it means and realizes it applies to him even though he isn’t the in your face kind.  Before he just had not thought about it and probably would have clicked off one of the “other world religion” or “non-denominational”  boxes rather than claim his atheism. 

to me atheism is not about complication like religion, it is about simplification, I am aware of (I embrace) my lack of knowledge and thus I am increasingly becoming ignorant of things I don’t know. As time has progressed I have found that I am more irreligious if not apathetic about religion. So knowing more about religion (less ignorant) would be counter productive for me.

Maybe its because the children of atheists don’t have hyper-religous parents to push them towards atheism.

Oh, and the Pew data showed that a small fraction who identify as atheists believe in God. Thus, “Everybody who self-identifies as an atheist actually is an atheist” is also inaccurate.

More accurately, there’s a genetic contribution (~50%) toward authoritarianism; and a high-RWA attitude appears one of the major factors predisposing someone from a highly irreligious upbringing to later become highly religious.

Seriously, I think we can consider the number of self-identified atheists who believe in a god to be in the noise. “Everybody” is accurate within the margin of uncertainty. And it really doesn’t matter if the Census asks about religion… my point is unchanged.

My wife and I are raising our little girl with the idea that we will expose her to as many safe religions as possible. I am an atheist and my wife is Presbyterian. We both agree that education is everything. We also have discussed that she will be supported no matter which way her philosophy takes her. Teaching your child to listen to what they are being told and question it respectfully is not only a key to helping them be a better person but also a more educated one as well. I do have to say that us paying attention to numbers like this not only puts us in a position the religious groups want us in but makes us look like them as well. I just want to see people thinking about what they are told. If they read the bible and still think it is the true word of some god, at least they read it and thought about it.

 Sounds to me like this person gained their nihilistic views him/herself. Don’t be a dick.

I hope you’d at least agree that someone raised in a Baptist home becoming Lutheran isn’t the same as a becoming an atheist.

In the same sense, someone raised in an atheist home becoming an agnostic or ‘secular unaffiliated’ isn’t viewed as a big loss for the team.

Having said that, I obviously disagree with the “needs to be addressed”.  And I’m probably hypocritical in that I wouldn’t have noticed an atheist saying we need to “address” the numbers in some way.

I guess if you feel a church is not presenting itself truthfully and accurately, then sure, that needs to be addressed.  But none of should want our numbers to grow for the sake of our numbers growing, or ‘winning’.  Our numbers should grow (or shrink) based on what people decide on their own.

Of course that’s not an attitude more religious will take, since for you souls are at stake.  But atheists don’t think anyone is going to go to hell for attending church.  They’ll just miss out on- oh, wait.  It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting here arguing online.  Sigh.

You can’t become “increasingly ignorant” unless you have alzheimers. Just by reading my comment you are reducing your ignorance.

How exactly are they defining “raised as atheists?” I see potential for a lot of confusion there. Does it mean a person who had a secular upbringing? A person who was raised by atheist parents? Or a person who was raised to identify as an atheist?

On the one hand, I could be considered to have been raised as an atheist. I grew up in a totally secular home and had no god-concept in my head until I was around 7. I was only exposed to it through outside influences, such as television and books. No one told me that gods were real, and I never started believing in them.

On the other hand, my parents are not atheists. They have quite a few supernatural beliefs of their own. And they never whispered a word about critical thinking or skepticism. There was no conscious effort to raise me as an atheist, and my atheism was of the default kind during my earliest years, before I had sufficient opportunity/intellect to critically examine the claims of various religions.

I can easily see how someone raised the way I was could flip in the other direction and start believing in gods. They might claim to have been “raised atheist” (as Christian converts are fond of doing), even though there might not have been any education or even direct exposure to the concept of atheism during their childhood.

I’m not sure how much useful data can be derived from this study without knowing more about the participants’ childhoods.

I think for me, a combination of luck, the internet, and my irrepressible curiosity and perhaps innate skepticism (or being fooled enough times that I just hated looking stupid, falling for things anymore, that I taught myself to be). One thing I sort of remember is, as you say, around 6 or 7, realizing other kids had something called a “religion” and going to church and CCD; I was pretty much older than that when I understood just exactly what people believed, that they really believed all that nonsense I’d heard about in the meantime. As for the other strange beliefs I tried out, I do think I got a pretty poor science education in public school and probably a little too little power or autonomy for a teen/young adult that I wished to be magical (fwiw, I think it’s a common phase at that age for similar reasons). That’s an embarrassing episode of my life, but I’m glad, I think it helped me sift through the less obtrusive junk on my own, and come out the other side a more critical thinker in general.

I think there must have been some innate skepticism on my part, too. I clearly remember setting traps for the Tooth Fairy when I was 6 years old. I liked the idea of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny too much to try to catch them, but I think on some level I was always disbelieving. I recall one Christmas exclaiming “Santa, if you are real, thanks for the presents!”

And perhaps there was an element of simply assuming that all other people were just like me. Even after I learned what religion was, it took me several more years to realize that other people actually believed it and took it seriously. Maybe it was a certain naïveté that allowed me to remain such a convinced atheist. I didn’t understand that atheism truly was the minority position.  

It’s strange because I wasn’t like a lot of other people who come to atheism through science. I never had much of an interest in science, and I was a very obedient, quiet, rule-following “good girl.” I didn’t tend to question authority. Yet I seemed to be impervious to conversion. I just always thought the religious people were crazy, long before I could articulate why.

I didn’t mean to be nitpicky; of course there are exceptions to every formulation. What I mean is, I don’t even see grounds to endorse the “most” formulation. It’s kinda like scientists and bias; scientists may perhaps be better than the average person at noticing and controlling for their own biases, but they aren’t as good at it as they think they are. Likewise, atheism can arise due to skepticism and a commitment toward evidence-based belief formation, but people who become atheists this way often overestimate (grossly) just how freethinking they are, especially when it comes to their kids’ belief development. Oftentimes, the method itself becomes a psychological trap; because a parent arrived at a conclusion using what they believe to be a superior decision-making strategy, they are less likely to accept a denial of the conclusion of that process, especially when it comes from their own children.

This is not to say that any other segment of the population one cares to point to is any better on this metric; it is more a simple feature of being a human parent. I think that people’s intuitions about how they would handle particular milestones with their children’s development in light of their own values, ends up being generally quite a bit different than when they actually reach that milestone. Parents have biological urges which push towards irrational levels of protectiveness and those instincts tend to be quite powerful; often more powerful than a parent’s general social and ethical held values. There are, of course, parents who can overcome that instinct and accept their children’s decisions about religion, metaphysics, ethics, and other matters even when they markedly differ from their own, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

And then there’s the likely fact that most atheists are not skeptics or freethinkers, that their atheism is a form of apatheism; I’d expect to find no correlation whatsoever between holding an apatheist-generated atheism and any commitment towards supporting childhood exploration of ideas and acceptance of the conclusions that the child makes (whereas at least I’d be willing to concede that one might find a weak correlation in the case of skeptical atheists). These atheists tend to be invisible in a community like this because they don’t seek out communities that have to do with atheism (ironically, because they don’t care).

Perhaps you’re right.  For myself, I don’t particularly mind if my children decide they love Jesus.  I know there are particular flavors of Christianity I wouldn’t want my child to cling onto because I know they are particularly harmful.  Flavors which subscribe to inerrancy and having to submit to certain doctrines which demean women. It is a parent’s job to steer their children.  I’m not just going to p0p them out and expect them to teach themselves.  Yes, I’d offer them what I can from my own life experience.  That is much different than telling them what they must believe, never allowing them to be exposed to dissenting opinions, and not allowing them to formulate their own.

Indoctrination is exactly what the definition says it is:

indoctrinate:

— vb
1. to teach (a person or group of people) systematically to accept doctrines, esp uncritically

It is not wrong to share your beliefs and opinions with your children.  It is wrong to drill into them your beliefs as though they are fact and teach that any other is wrong.  I don’t know any Atheists who do this.  I don’t think any of us would say we don’t have biases. I think what we’d say is that most of us wouldn’t militantly insist on a particular belief from our child. I stand by that.

Having said that, if they did choose that there wouldn’t be a darned thing I could do about it and it wouldn’t make me disown them. 

I think we may just need to agree to disagree about this.

I agree with everything you just wrote, except that I have had the experience of knowing atheists who attempt to compel and/or indoctrinate. One of the regulars over where I normally hang out has recounted how her grandfather financially blackmailed her family into raising her in a secular manner, for just one example.

I personally don’t understand the instinct to disown or attaint children for their private belief decisions, but then there are conversations like this. It’s not an isolated thing.

 I will be the first to admit that Christians should not attempt to spread the Gospel in a way that is rude or intrusive.  In my opinion, it is a wonderful message, there is no need to corrupt it with bad behavior.

 Why is it so obvious for me to see, but you can’t see it. You think you know for sure, better than anyone does, that you have been called and they haven’t, and it’s up to you to save them, not the other way around. You believe something you’ve only heard about from other people, and can’t prove any of it. Why should anyone waste their time on this endeavor? Because (a) god for some reason can’t reach anyone without a human interference, (b) has endowed every single Christian with the purpose of accumulating more people to be saved and to have similar purpose, and finally (c) to make money for the church.

You’re a pawn who hears voices like a crazy person. Nobody should take you seriously, and it’s your ego that wants to believe you’re not just a pawn, but saved, that it’s real and not just a scheme. Furthermore, there wouldn’t have to be anything called an “atheist” if not for you nutjobs circulating your crazy and trying to make your crazy club bigger and richer. Nothing happens after you die.

Yikes.  Maybe it’s just because I can’t think of anything my kid could do to make me not love/care for them.  Even if they murdered someone I can’t see myself hating/disowning them.  I’d tell them they were wrong.  I’d understand that there are consequences that go along with murder and there’d be nothing I could do about it.  But shun/disown?  Ayee!

recounted how her grandfather financially blackmailed her family into raising her in a secular manner

That’s me. I just find it weird that when you put it like that, financial blackmail is a running theme. I also find it weird that people (who are atheists, gathering in forums like this and others) seem to automatically assume a lot of things about atheists, like they aren’t authoritarian. Religion has a lot of problems, but hardly a monopoly on the ugliest of human behaviors. My grandfather was an intelligent, ball-busting man with a weird sense of humor. I didn’t hate him but I was intimidated by him. He also disowned his own family and I never met them; they were Catholic immigrants and lived through the Great Depression. So I don’t really blame him for being that way, and I’m essentially glad in retrospect that I didn’t have to have a religion, and I knew that from an early age. I disagreed with him once. ONCE. I had to work out this ‘god’ stuff for myself by first considering whether it was true, and it pissed him off, but he didn’t disown me.

Ego is not the same as selfish.  Spending time to try to share the gospel is not an act of selfishness IMO.  But knowing one can’t be wrong is ego.

 Sure you can. You can stop reading the newspaper and caring what other people are talking about, for one example. “Reading brianmacker’s comment” is not an exercise in reducing ignorance unless “what brianmacker thinks” is how to become educated or knowledgeable. It arguably adds one point but doesn’t affect the subtraction of other points, if one is decided to chase the freedom of not knowing or caring anymore about stuff they used to care to learn about. I mean, I get it, totally. I love knowing stuff, but try to keep a balance on how important it is to me practically to know things I would go back and not know if I could. Like your comment.

Would you say “lying” is bad behavior? Uh… gloating?

Why is religion spread by word of mouth? You don’t have a product to demonstrate, you’ve been recruited by appeals to your ego to get more people to church, your ego that says you get to live forever if you keep doing that, the ego that fears disappearing forever. Why isn’t Christianity evident? All these people buzzing about their magical invisible friend has so amazingly never produced evidence for any of it. But they have been chosen and graced and commissioned to tell their neighbors, co-workers, guy sitting next to him on a bus, atheists on an atheist blog, like a salesman sees a mark.

I don’t accept what you call evidence to be evidence, and that you consider it evidence does tell me more than you think I know about you. 

Yet, you did reduce your ignorance by reading my comment even thought the point of the comment went right over your head. That’s whether you care or not. At the very least you now know my opinion which reduced your ignorance. Failing to read the newspaper doesn’t automatically increase your ignorance. You still know what you already knew. I’ve stopped reading about all sorts of things that I used to read about but that doesn’t increase my ignorance on those subjects. Just because I haven’t cracked open a book on population genetics in 30 years doesn’t mean I’ve become increasingly ignorant.

I can understand with your attitude and failure to be able to reason (and thus follow such a simple comment) that you wouldn’t like it. Laughably your snide comment concedes what you dispute when you write the last two sentences. If you didn’t learn something from the comment there wouldn’t be anything for you to “go back and not know”.

My comment was true although if you want to nitpick I could have listed other things that could make someone ignorant like strokes, and brain tumors.

I could choose one of two things – to engage you in this discussion, even though it isn’t very important or productive, or I could ignore it and you. I’m not going to ignore you this time, but probably next time. Maybe I should have the first time. How much do you or this discussion matter to me, or whether you think you can teach me anything, or I waste effort making this matter more than it does, even if I go away learning less than I would have if we didn’t discuss for a while, but possibly stupider for having bothered.

I don’t know what he meant by it, but to me, becoming increasingly ignorant would be to decrease engagement, stop filling the voids with pretending to know any more than we started with, assessing how much good it does to engage or how nice it is to leave the world to keep spinning and not have to care what happens. Do I care if “brianmacker” thinks I’m an idiot? How is this convo making either one of us decreasingly ignorant? They’re just words, and you sort of pretend this will stick with me, I can’t unlearn what I’ve seen. I can so unlearn it, might take a few months at the most, but I’ll forget having this conversation and I won’t have a tumor. Better to just ignore this kind of nonsense in the first place, but that’s my fault.

I had an Indian neighbor who taught voice.  She invited us to a recital for a student (not hers) in which she did the singing.  It was a huge event with with hundreds of people.  Great Indian food and music, and deities everywhere.  What I thought was interesting was that in the program the student thanked her parents, and teachers, and Jesus.  I had no idea where Hindu ended and Christian began.  And no idea how that person would answer the questions “What is your religion”.

It reminded me of an old Pagan friend from Scotland, who had a Book of Shadows dating back many generations of his family.  He said that when Christianity came to the British Isles, his family embraced it as more to celebrate.  They didn’t get rid of Samhain and Yule, they just added Christmas and Easter.

I get it. You are a rebel who doesn’t want to know nor care about the meanings of words. You seem to believe that when you use improper meanings of words that makes one profound or something. Yeah, my two sentence comment really took an enormous chunk out of my life and good thing you are here to get me back on track. Of course, because you don’t own your words you are now going to come back and claim some other deeper meaning.

I know there’s an insult there and I appreciate the ambiguity as to target. I’m as apathetic as you are in clarifying that.

No, I’m not trying to insult anyone here.  I’m just saying people in general  can increase their ignorance even when reading.  I’m not following the discussion in detail.  Too apathetic.

I was thinking more alongthe lines of a creationist reading AiG.

Religions are made by faulty humans, who then justify their faults, but that doesn’t mean religion causes people to be faulty. He was raised in a huge Catholic family and apparently never got his way. I don’t know when he stopped being Catholic wrt my mom’s upbringing, but she is the same. I don’t have any kids, but I’m kind of both ways. I like to think I would be a fair parent, open communicator, but in practice, I’m hard on myself and everyone else. Alternately, I’m extremely soft on myself too, which causes other problems. I’m still a product of that environment.

I might add that not both of my parents are authoritarian; my dad doesn’t care for organized religion, it just seems whatever he thinks is personal to him and not really evident, and I don’t remember my other grandparents being religious in any outstanding way. My other grandfather prayed once over Easter dinner and I got kicked under the table for snickering, I had to be no older than 7. That’s the only time.

 I totally get that.  I was basically correcting myself and saying that it seems to me that maybe religion can but doesn’t necessarily cause certain behaviors.  I know some people who have become authoritarian against their nature because the Bible told them so.  And I know some people who were attracted to religion because it told them it was okay to be authoritarian.  In other words, they were already that way, religion just affirmed them for it. 

So like if a virgin reads some hard core porn then that increases their virginity.

Buddhism is not a self-proclaimed religion. “Buddha” isn’t, nor ever was, considered to be “God”, rather a teacher, and Buddhism; a way of life.

No shit. Its like trying to stick a barn in a golfball hole!!!