Religion

friends, parents, whats the difference?

 

I'd imagine I would still be pretty much the same.

But probably have a waayyyyy cooler childhood.

 

I'm calling bullshit on this. I don't think you realize how strong the connection between upbringing and personality is. Every decision you make early in life is molded by your surroundings and the people you have around most when you are young is your parents. What they say, what they argue about, what they watch on TV all of those things become a part of who you are and what you think when you're young. You might challenge those beliefs later when you know more about the subjects that they were talking about but that doesn't change the fact that those things are part of your memory and part of your personality. If your family was religious then that is what you knew when you were younger. Obviously you weren't going to grow up an atheist if you had no knowledge that there was such people when you were growing up, nor a Buddhist, Hindu, Deist, Jewish, Muslim, etc.

 

Nature vs nurture: it really is a debate on its own

 

In which nurture has won out in the predominant amount of cases dealing with growth and personality. There is no genetic precursors tied to personality. The only thing nature has going for it is twin studies but those cases are so rare and the data collected comes with so many extraneous variables as to consider them not credible. No one is genetically prone to anger, happiness, etc without there being some sickness involved that makes the genes abnormal. The lack of emotions is called being a psychopath and is a brain disorder. People are as they are because what they observe what they hear, what they smell, etc. How a person takes in the stimuli of the world around them and how they process that information determines how a person acts. You will never see a person brought up in a third world country in some poor village acting haughty and conceited because that is just how that person is.

That isn't to say "nature" (and I never liked that term, it means DNA and genetics not really nature because nature implies someone's surroundings which is what nurture is about) doesn't play a role. Obviously if you are a 6' 5'' person then you are more likely to be a basketball player or at least be good at basketball then a horse jockey. If you have great eye sight you might be genetically predisposed to do a job that involves such talent like being a jet pilot. I'm not denying the act genetics plays on that but it is not what molds a personality. That same 6 foot 5 inch person has no genetic preconditions to be Catholic or to decide if they are a Republican or Democrat or even what clothes they like to wear. They decided those things because their surroundings dictated to them while they were growing up what is better and what they should choose.

Unless you can show me the evidence of a "religion gene" the whole nature vs nature is a ridiculous thing to even bring up.

 

liink

 

Congratulations, you managed to find a site that both way over simplified the issue while at the same time not actually disagreeing (and in fact reaffirming what I said if you actually read the page) with anything I said.

Let me counter your link with another

No single gene determines a particular behavior. Behaviors are complex traits involving multiple genes that are affected by a variety of other factors. This fact often gets overlooked in media reports hyping scientific breakthroughs on gene function, and, unfortunately, this can be very misleading to the public

Scientists will claim "I found the gay gene" because that will make them lots of money to say that. The truth is far from it. While I believe being gay is a hormonal and biological occurrence and not just choice (choice still does actually play a role because a person can counter their hormones if they focus on it enough) it is hardly a "gene" or DNA written to produce a gay person. Estrogen is what makes women more woman like and testosterone makes men more like men. If the levels of testosterone to estrogen get thrown off due to whatever biological reason then that effects how a person behaves.

The same cannot be said for religion. There is no biochemical reason why someone chooses a religion. An atheist is not formed because a lack of some hormone or a religious person because of an excess of one. Like I said, nature vs nurture (while an important debate in other fields of discussion) has nothing to do with this discussion and is why I can reasonably state grunthunter's claim of (he would have become Christian anyway) is bullshit. He even said his surroundings would have still played a part because he talked about the influence of his friends (which I doubt actually would play any more significant an influence then a commercial he had to see over and over again on his decisions while growing up but still).

 

Providing links should be purely for supplemental reading in this thread to get a point across. It's a discussion -- having some site or author speak for you is pretty weak in my opinion. I tried to make fun of the link-dropping in my previous post but I guess it was too subtle which made me think I had to post this.

Since this is a religion/belief thread, if you're not able to express how you feel in your own words, I don't feel like you belong here. You should first express why you disagree, agree or believe in what you believe, then provide links to articles, facts, or what have you IF necessary. You're contributing towards nothing more than frustration to others if you don't.

Anyways, I'm done ranting about that; onto something more relevant:

I agree with Pac, religion is not a matter of nature. The article ERICO provided discusses the nature of behavior. Even in a debate of nature vs nurture, how is religion a behavior?

Sure, religion can affect your behavior (to sin vs not to sin), which is why some think it was used to control a group of people originally. It is the easiest way to control people.

Many children often ask their parents "where do we come from?" or other similar questions. If religion were inherent and natural, I don't think we would have so many different kinds of religion. We would have one solidified religion.

Serious question time:

Since Christianity is more recent than other religions like Norse Mythology or Greek Paganism/Polytheism or even more tribal religions which require sacrificial rituals, does that invalidate your position as a Christian who believes religion is natural. Why would your God intelligently design humans to have genes which they could use to believe in something other than himself, his angels, Satan, the bible and whatever else? That's not freedom, that's trickery if you ask me.

I apologize for the lack of clarity in advance, I have a headache and my thoughts are rather scattered at the moment.

 

WAT.

I'm not defending religion at all in this context.

 

For the record this is not to the merit of religion, but Pac and furry are wrong. This topic is not entirely nurture, as nothing is. Pac you can't just say that because a trait hasn't be characterized in a gene, that it has to have been imposed by the parents. Personality is defined by far different scenarios and usually the views of parents are more likely to polarize than to attract the views of their kin. You just can't extend your viewpoint to be the only one.

And i think a genetic or more likely neurotic relationship to religion is certainly not out of the question. Given it's timescale and it's correlation toward our more.. eccentric traits, i would say it's certainly a possibility. You can gtfo if you think you can just refute unknown possibilities like you know something.

 

Again Marty you managed to "read" what I said without actually reading what I said. I said it is a person's surroundings that shape one's personality or like I said any external stimuli whether it be from sight, sound, touch, or smell and how the brain interprets those signals that produce a personality. Where parents come into it is a simple matter of quantity of time exposed to the same stimuli. I'm sure you've heard of the experiments in classical conditioning by Pavlov or behavioral conditioning by BF Skinner. Those are very powerful influencers of behavior and if it happens long enough, personality. While you are growing up you are exposed to your parents beliefs much more often then other ones. Early on you don't have any other frame of reference to make decisions on.

You're thinking of when people are all ready old enough to question what they know and the classic pyschological construct of wanting to rebel against a parents' wishes in the case of adolescents. While that all is true it doesn't remove those thoughts and tendencies from a person's being because they want to rebel. In those cases the person has been exposed to new stimuli in which they can come to different conclusions on and only until years after that begins to happen that a new personality trend can start. (The case where a previously unreligious person becomes religious or vice versa). But to claim that even if someone's parents weren't of a certain religion that they would have picked it anyway is so pyschologically unlikely as to say bullshit to the idea of it. I didn't even discuss the hind sight bias intrinsic to such a statement as well.

And to furry, that was the first link I've dropped in this entire discussion and the only reason why I dropped it was to directly show why erico's was crap. Also showing you have factual evidence to back what your discussing up is not a sign of a weak argument. Talking out of your ass is

 

@Pac, tbh I don't understand your position, imo you've contradicted yourself several times in about 10 paragraphs. I think the point of a debate is to be clear, not to be wordy, for the sake of a clean-cut discussion. I know I told you this before, but eh, I've read your stuff three times and I think I'm misinterpreting it.

I agree, I believe that's the first time I've done that, my bad. Just kinda tired

 

Please don't accuse me of not reading your posts after I purposely said, "I've read your stuff three times."

Tensions a raisin'

That's all you had to say... and I agree with you.

Also, your, "genes have nothing to do with personality" statement doesn't make sense to me and I think it's another debate not worth having because it will detract from the current one (which was my original point, which I thought was a "nature vs nurture" debate, but apparently not..).

Simply throwing a link at someone is weak. People should put it in context because having sources can make your argument a lot stronger. I think you get the idea.

 

It's nice to know that you would do anything your friends would.

 

You were bang on up until this point, where you feel flat on your face. Adolescence/teenage years is (as even you accounted for, earlier placing it as your minimum point) precisely the point where such a rejection is most likely to begin. 8 year olds are indeed unlikely to reject the religion of their parents, as going along with the perception of the world your parents nurture within you goes so deep as to be a survival trait. But the mid-late teen years are precisely the point when the mind starts questioning, the time when so many people brought up as religious start to reject this aspect of their lives as their capacity, even drive, for independent thought goes through the roof. I actually find it odd how you specifically excluded religious rejection as a form of teenage rebellion, I find it one of the most poignant examples in precisely this trend, often forming the basis for the point of deviation between parental and child world views. Does this somewhat discount the intellectual basis for this rejection, placing it as reaction rather than decision on their part? In some cases perhaps, but the trend in objective terms is still just as true.

I'd like to be able to cite the reverse in as certain terms, but frankly it isn't true. There are plenty of cases where religion is embraced at the teenage years in an otherwise atheistic family environment, and there are plenty of cases where it's a form of active backlash in the same sense as above. However, in my experience (and, I would wager, at large in western civilisation), this is much less common than a teenage rejection of religion. I find that, more often than not, people who find religion later in life do so as the result of a personal epiphany, which can come at this time, but doesn't as often as the reverse is true.

 

And I've got to stop you there. "So many people", no, far from so many people. Teenagers might change their mind on political view points (usually because a conservative older parent who pays taxes has no bearing on a young person who starts learning about the liberal view point) or about specific issues their parents think or about not wanting to do what their parents do for a career but not religion. First of all your viewpoint is extremely biased toward western civilization. Are you telling me there are millions of Chinese people rejecting their religion as soon as they turn 13 even though their culture is about family togetherness? Are you telling me kids in African tribes are suddenly deciding whatever their beliefs are don't matter? Its one thing to one day decide you won't be nearly as religious as your parents if you don't like going to church or something and another matter entirely to renounce your religion. Even in western civilizations changing one's religion is a major decision in one's life. So, as I said until a study or poll has been done stating significant numbers, and by significant I don't mean a few thousand people out of a population of millions, that have changed their religious views as their parent or guardian the claim is hogwash.

Where is this "often" coming from. Where do you live where this has formed your view? California? I excluded it because saying people often change their religious views is such a ridiculous statement that basically screams some sort of bias toward yourself having had those thoughts. As I said, deciding you don't want to go to church anymore is a far stretch from renouncing one's religion. As far as the other way around goes that's even a further stretch. You tell me how many adolescents pick up a bible when they never had to before and decided...this is right for me. Sure later in life or even starting from early twenties a person might decide religion is worth having (especially if some event happens that makes them turn to it) but I'd bet the numbers are miniscule for adolescents deciding to pick up a religion if their parents were completely secular.

I would love to see these "plenty of cases". That claim seems entirely opinion based and far from factually supported. It tells me something about your viewpoints on religion if you're able to so trivialize such a decision. As I said "rebelling" against your parents beliefs in politics, career paths, etc are common things, not religion. If not simply because the claim seems extremely defined to western civilization and even to subset of that to the USA and not "religion" as a global viewpoint.

 

Ok, I phrased that badly. I wasn't saying that the majority of people brought up religious reject it, but meant that, of the people who were raised religious but reject it, so many of them do so at this point in their lives. Sorry, but how many people do you know who were raised religious then suddenly rejected it at like 35? No, most people who change their stance do so, in my experience, at the key time when they start (often forcefully) thinking for themselves.

No, it's not biased, it's self consciously focused on western civilisation. There are very distinct ways in which western ideas of childhood are a prerequisite of this discussion, i.e. social convention of a child of say 15-18 being able to make this decision at all. In a different social context where this isn't the case, the discussion is basically moot. I'm not saying it's a universal social convention even in western civilisation, far from it, but I'd say that western culture contains the foremost examples of this.

Well that's obviously not the case or religion would be declining at a staggering rate. Again, I'm talking about, of those who do give up religion, what proportion of them do so at this point in their lives (ie. responding to that point of your post in particular).

I live in the UK. And yeah, frankly I should have taken more account of not only the nature of the US, but its diversity in this sense. Frankly, at one end of its spectrum its by far the strongest example of fundamentalist christian society, you really don't see Bible Bashers in the UK in quite the same way or force that is reasonably common in large areas of the US. Still, that hardly changes the point, as (again) I was never talking about how likely someone is to reject their religion, but, if they DO, the likelihood of them doing so in the adolescent to early 20s age range.

As for the reverse, I specifically addressed that and said that it's not a two way street in this sense, that going from atheism/agnosticism to religion is generally the result of a significant event leading to personal epiphany.

Sorry, I'd love to see the wealth of watertight case studies in which your assertion of adolescence being a very unlikely time to change your religion compared to other times in life. You obviously have them up your sleeve otherwise you wouldn't be talking like that, right?

You assumed it being confined to the US within western civilisation, so it may "seem" so to you, but that doesn't mean it's what I meant.

For the last time, I am in no way speaking to the likelihood of rejection religion per se, but talking about the idea that, if someone does, this is a likely point in their life for it to happen. As accounted for by your acknowledgement of it being a likely time to change your political or social views, adolescence is basically the time where disagreeing with your parents on such fundamental issues becomes a possibility. Even if those who reject their religious upbringing aren't suddenly waking up on their 13th birthday and thinking "screw this," it's going to be at the very least the inception of such doubt.

Even if rejection of religious upbringing is overall less common than a rejection of political or social parental standards, when it comes to the time at which either happens, I don't see how you can be so ready to accept adolescence as the time when doubts in one sense start to develop and eventually manifest, but think the same process for religious rejection is just preposterous. Are you honestly telling me that you know of plenty of cases of people getting to 25+ and then rejecting their religious upbringing? If so where the hell do you live that a social context can have such a profound counteractive effect on the basic way in which the human mind develops through adolescence?