If you persist in your ridiculous contention that Jesus did not mean what he said about prayer, then you might as well say he was speaking figuratively about everything else – heaven, hell, the whole bit.
And we both know that if you could find such an obviously false promise in the Quran, you would consider it proof that Muhammad was a false prophet.
Apropos of not much, but for amusement… on Saturday my (nearly 10-year old) son came into our bedroom with a flyer / tract-type item that the JW’s had just left with him. He wanted to know what it was. My wife told him that some people went door-to-door trying to get people to join their religion. I told him (straight-faced as I took the flyer) that we were loyal Thor-worshippers and that wasn’t going to change. He wandered off (apparently happy with that answer). I guess if during his rebellious teenage years my non-religious son becomes a born again Asatru I’ll know what happened. 
Well, I’ll admit that I was skeptical when I first heard “childhood indoctrination” advanced as an explanation for religious beliefs. But now that an anonymous internet user has posted anecdotal evidence, the statement is surely beyond doubt.
I can’t recall anything you’ve posted that entitles you to smug condescension.
But fine, please share YOUR explanation for the observed fact that people raised in regions where 90% of the population professes X as their faith, have about a 90% probability of also professing X when they are adults.
Obviously, passive societal indoctrination is not North Korean style brain washing, and can be overcome by any number of things, parental training and innate intellectual independence being two that come to mind. That’s why atheists and Jews, among others, still exist in the US.
But there is simply no reason why anyone would consider the disgusting idea of eating flesh and drinking blood to expiate the sin of a very remote ancestor, let alone consider it the natural alternative to atheism, other than being raised in a society that considers such perversions to be normal.
We have some friends whose son last year was a third-grader and a Cub Scout. In a scout meeting, the Den Leader was teaching a lesson about duty to God or some such subject, and this kid happily informed the Den Leader that his favorite god was Poseidon.
That’s a really good choice if he’s planning to become a Sea-Scout.
In due consideration of our country’s impending financial crisis, I’ve decided to forgo entitlements and just say whatever I choose.
Well now, it was you who brought the topic of childhood indoctrination into this thread by accusing three particular individuals of being under its sway. The burden of proof is on you to prove the point with some better than anecdotal evidence and calling everyone who disagrees with you “a raving racist”. There have been academic studies on the question of whether childhood indoctrination explains people’s adult religious choices. How many such studies can you cite as confirmation of your claims?
As for your demands that I explain religious trends in foreign countries, I’d be interested in hearing your explanations instead. For instance, in China sixty years ago there were only about a million Christians. Then came the reign of Chairman Mao, in which all religious believers risked death, imprisonment, or torture if they didn’t become atheists; today the government’s persecution is more mild but still ongoing. Today there are around one hundred million Christians in China. Where did they all come from? Childhood indoctrination certainly doesn’t seem to explain this case.
As for countries such as the Arab world, religious trends there may be related to the fact that anyone who leaves Islam risks death.
If you knew brocks’ real name, would his anecdotal evidence be persuasive enough to change your mind?
Perhaps if he was someone I trusted.
Then why are you prepared to listen to the words of Lewis and Muggeridge per their anecdotal evidence, and not brocks’? Presumably, there was some point in your life before you had heard of the two, and thus did not trust them. Did your gained trust of them arise from a source other than anecdotal evidence?
Can’t you debate without twisting people’s words? I didn’t accuse particular individuals; I said that everyone, including myself, is indoctrinated by his environment.
No, I guess you can’t debate without twisting people’s words.
I don’t know what studies you mean, but if they deny a strong correlation between a person’s choice of religion and the religion of his parents, or the predominant religion of the region where he was raised, then I don’t see how anyone can take them seriously. But given your penchant for twisting things, I doubt that is what they say.
I already gave you my explanation, and I asked for yours. I now withdraw my request. I am no longer interested reading your posts, since I find nothing in them worth reading.
I was speaking of rates around 90%, not 10%. A 10% rate needs no explanation, since it is well under the average rate of mental illness in a sufficiently large sample.
What am I twisting? Your post #37 cannot be interpreted other than as implying that three specific individuals believe what they believe because of childhood indoctrination. In #40 your last line was “Unless you are a raving racist, who thinks that Arabs or Chinese or Indians are too stupid to see the truth, indoctrination is the only way to explain why various regions of the world are 90+% Islam or Hindu or Christian.” So you did, in fact, say that we all have to either be “raving racists” or else agree with your groundless assertions about “indoctrination”. That’s the problem with message boards: yours posts stick around even after you grow embarrassed and want to back-peddle away from what you said.
I linked to two such papers in your previous thread where you accused religious people of being crazy; you never responded to them. It’s true, as someone nitpicked, they they dealt with specific denominations rather than every denomination, but no study of reasonable size could encompass every denomination. As one summarized, believers “show no signs of deviant personality, such as neurosis, manic depression, or excessive authoritarianism. Charges of ‘indoctrination’, ‘brainwashing’, and ‘mind control’ have been so thoroughly debunked that few courts and even fewer scholars now take them seriously (James Richardson 1991).” So that blows your claim about indoctrination out of the water and cleans up your claim about mental illness in one blow.
So you imply that most or all of the Chinese Christians have mental illness. (Oh, wait, I bet I’m “twisting your words” again.) What evidence do you have to support this claim?
Yeah, it makes pretty good sense that someone who’s gotten caught making as many false claims as you have would run away from requests that you defend your claims.
Yes, I quake before the power of your intellect. I’m sure I’m not the first person who has been fed up with your constant dodging and distortions, and I’m sure that you attribute every instance of someone giving up on having intelligent debate with you as another proof of your brilliance.
You do distort, and for the worse, almost every time you paraphrase someone’s arguments, but I guess you are used to that, since your posts here have made it clear that distorting what the Bible says is the only way you can avoid seeing its gross errors and contradictions.
And I have made no claims other than those that are self-evident – that no Christian anywhere is willing or able to demonstrate that the promise Jesus made in Matt 21 is not pure BS, and that the correlation between a person’s religion and that of his parents and/or the dominant culture is almost as obvious as that of his primary language and those of his parents and/or the dominant culture.
I said GOOD DAY, sir.
I’m mixed up about it too, especially the part re: God’s plan. Some will argue that the point of prayer is to align oneself with God’s will…but then the question “why bother praying?” rises again.
Hypothetical situation: A massive hurricane is bearing down on your town. You evacuate, and then can pray or not pray for your house to be spared its destructive path. The house will or won’t survive. Whatever happens to your home, is it God’s will? Is he interfering in any way?
There are also things that intercessory prayer seems useless against: Amputations, Alzheimer’s, Down Syndrome, etc. These things don’t get better or healed or replaced.
And then there are those who think they can pray to heal one problem or another, and in the meantime the person they’re praying for is getting worse and often ends up dead because the others failed to seek medical attention for them.
The more I ponder things like this, the more mixed up I get.
I recall that when I used to go to the Baptist church, you didn’t dare question or doubt anything, because if you did, it was “the Devil working on you.”
Well, I can’t shut off the skeptical, questioning part of my brain any more than I can stop sweating, breathing, or blinking.