Alisa, first, let me thank you for clarifying that you are not heading down the road of wanting to force your worldview on other people. I reacted strongly to that prospect because history shows when such arguments have been made in the past without forceful repudiations then sometimes people act on them with horrifying results. There's a cliche that, for evil to triumph, good (wo)men need only do nothing. I think there's truth to that.
Alisa said:
I will not respond directly to that except to say that the correlation between religion of the parent and religion of the child is close to 100%.
Alisa said:
I am saying that the empirical evidence shows us that the overwhelming majority of people do NOT choose against the faith of their parents.
Ok. Let's look at these claims and ideas directly.
First up. What is your source for this 'close to 100%' statistic?
Regardless of where you got it from, for this to be a scientifically defensible statistic it needs to be testable and repeatable by other observers.
I am an observer and I know a bunch of people in New Zealand and in the USA. At a rough guess I'd say I'm either well acquainted with now, or in the past, well over a hundred people or more. If I had to put a number on the relationship between the worldview of parents and children, I'd guess in my small sample that it would be somewhere around 60%, maybe 70% maximum. I personally know christians with atheist parents, christians with christian parents, atheists with christian parents, atheists with atheist parents, and a few other examples of differing worldviews (vitalist, buddhists etc).
Now obviously this isn't a scientific poll, but I can count, and the observations I've made in my lifetime just do not jive with your statistic. So I'm fairly sceptical of it. Either I've lived in a bubble of exceptional people my whole life, or the statistic just isn't universally true.
Alisa said:
Because if I had been born to practicing christian parents, I have no doubt that I would be agreeing with you rather than arguing with you today.
Don't sell yourself short. I personally know many kids raised by Christian parents who turned out to be athesists. Given the corelation between higher education and atheism that you mentioned earlier, I have no doubt that if you had higher education then you'd have had multiple opportunities to be subtly re-educated, or not, to the satisfaction of your own intellect and depending also on your ability to discern and evaluate the underlying philosophy being taught to you there.
Alisa said:
This tells us that our "choice" of faith is not really a choice, it is just chance.
No it doesn't. It just means that some choices are 'harder' to make than others, depending on your environment. I think that's true about many decisions we make in our lives. But the capacity to choose is still there if you care enough about the issue to examine the basis for your beliefs.
Alisa said:
When I consider it is only by twist of fate that I do or don't believe in (insert the name of any god here), it is clear to me that none of them can be "true" or "real".
Or that their are as many conceptions of what God is as there are believers and none of us have probably got it completely right. That doesn't mean there is no actual true God, or that faith in such is wrong, just that we should all recognize that our perceptions are strongly influenced by our culture, religious influences, and our own unique experiences. That is why taking a dogmatic approach to enforcing one's belief system on others is just plain arrogant and wrong in my opinion.
I'm not saying you're interpretation is wrong, just that there are other ways of viewing the same data. You opinion here is a reasonable interpetation, but it is not the only possible logical interpretation of that set of observations.
Alisa said:
My question is, what is the tangible benefit of such a choice?
You and my father would get along great! He likes to blame religion for all the world's ills too.
I actually thought I had laid out a fairly substantial list of benefits in response to that question. If you want more than that, then think of the number of religious charitites that exist, past and present, to help the poor and ill who are either ignored or reviled by wider society. And although the crusades were generally evil, they did bring back to western europe treatises on medicine, science, and philosophy that had either been lost after the fall of Rome, or had since developed in the Arab world, which later formed much of the basis for the renaissance. Likewise, monasteries kept the written word and literacy alive in the dark ages when few kings could even read and write (Charlemaigne was a notable exception).
I could go on, but I don't really see the need. There is good in religion and faith. Anyone involved in religion would agree with that, and I'd be willing to bet that quite a few atheists would concede it without raising a sweat also. That there is also the potential for bad to occur when religion is subverted by people is not the point.
I could ask you the same thing. What are the tangible benfits of atheism over a religious worldview like mine? The very things that you likely would promote as 'strengths' of your worldview are probably the very things I think of as the weaknesses of it. I'm sorry you keep blaming religion for the world's ills primarily because I think you are taking aim at the wrong target: which, to my mind, ought to be humanity's hubris and and intolerance for people with differing views, and the mindless folly of the masses who follow people with strong views and bad attitudes.
Personally, I think the atheist worldview lends itself better to such leaders simply because they don't think they're answerable to a supreme being, and you folks don't even have to fake the appearance of it. But that's just an opinion.
