Reply #127: No offense taken...

[Fumesucker]

I've been online since the days of 300 baud acoustic modems and polished my chops on usenet political newsgroups, I'm remarkably hard to offend. :)

In my post where I mentioned raising a child in a total absence of religion I didn't mean that the child would be cut off from society, but rather a child being raised in society a bit more extreme atheist than say Denmark, where basically there would be no discussion of religion at all (and hence no need for the term "atheist" or the meme it delineates).

In such a scenario I think that the vast majority of children would grow up to be essentially atheists, that's pretty much what happens in similar societies today.

Take a child from say Pakistan or Saudi Arabia where the society is even more drenched with theism than our own and raise them in Denmark and I'd be willing to wager they would turn out atheist. Run the experiment in the other direction and I'd also be willing to wager that the little Danish kid raised in Saudi would become a follower of Islam. Most of us have no clue just how programmed we are by the society around us, fish do not notice the water in which they swim.

I find it interesting that the Bible stories you seem to be most attracted to are the ones the most vociferous, in your face theists in the US almost completely ignore, in my experience fundagelicals rarely quote the red words.

People have a desire to understand the things around them, in some it is far stronger than in others but just about everyone has it. IMO, religion is simply the explanations that pre-scientific cultures came up with to explain the inexplicable. Of course there is more to it, social control, group bonding and the other things you mention are a part of the mix but it was originally the desire to understand that drove the establishment of religion.