There are already two threads going where I’ve written a thorough debunking of Valteron’s arguments and where he has not seen fit to respond to the bulk of what I said. Perhaps the third time will be the charm. But somehow I doubt it.
You seem to believe that repeating this pitiful attempt at humor over and over again will somehow make it funny. Is that more of the famous atheist logic at work?
Your first statement here, amazingly enough is true. I do claim that my Christian beliefs are not based on simple brainwashing in their childhood or societal pressure. Moreover my claim is correct. My parents were atheists and I was an atheist throughout childhood due to brainwashing during childhood, which is the same reason that most atheists are atheists. In adulthood I’ve always lived in communities that were mostly atheist (or at least mostly secular), so I can’t have converted to Christianity due to societal pressure.
That is correct.
In most cases, they were taught to listen for signs from God related to what the Prophet Mohammed taught.
They were taught to listen for signs from God related to what Jesus taught.
I’m not sure how to do so. Followers of those religions have less concrete dogmas about the nature of the deities they believe in, so the question doesn’t translate very well.
If, as you implied earlier, religion exists only due to “brainwashing during childhood” or “societal pressure”, then there would never be any conversions. They existence of converts, even in small numbers, proves that your analysis of the situation is bullshit.
Teaching. (Repeating this over and over again is getting rather boring.)
No. The only way to learn logic and reason is from another human being. Hence every person’s individual flavor of logic and reason will depend heavily on how they are taught it. Since it’s obviously taught differently in different places, one would not expect the types of logical reasoning to be evenly distributed throughout the world. The idea is absurd.
There is a geographic breakdown of scientific ideas; to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. Take scientific question such as, “Are other galaxies moving away from the Milky Way?” Ask it to a thousand people in Japan, a thousand in Ecuador, and thousand in Saudi Arabia, and a thousand in India. I’d bet a considerable portion of my savings that you’d see a geographic breakdown of responses, probably with substantially more Japanese answering “yes” than any other nationality.
I utterly fail to grasp where the conclusion came from.
First of all, you began by stating that the majority of people in Muslim countries believe the tenets of Islam and the majority of people in Christian countries believe the tenets of Christianity. That is a truism, or what a hardcore logician would call a tautology. And a hardcore logician would happily explain to you that drawing conclusions from a tautology is meaningless.
(As a side note, there are some religions that aren’t dominant in the societies they exist in. Take Scientology, for instance. Few scientologists were born and raised as Scientologists, and certainly our society exerts heavy pressure on people to not be Scientologists by mocking and belittling them at every opportunity. Yet Scientology still exists, contradicting your conclusion.)
Further, you’d surely agree that the majority of secular thinkers arise from secular societies (or at least secular communities within non-secular societies). You’d surely agree that the percentage of people who are atheist varies widely across the globe. Hence, by your logic, whatever reason underlies atheism “operates differently on different continents and in different countries” as well. Thus, whatever logic you used to conclude that “religion is a matter of childhood indoctrination and societal pressure” must apply to atheism as well.
But what exactly is that logic?
You say that Christian belief is heavily dependent on a Christian upbringing and a Christian environment. That’s thuddingly obvious; every Christian would agree with it.
Then somehow you leap from there to concluding that Christian belief is wrong. There’s no basis for such a leap. In fact it’s an inversion of logic. The fact that Christian belief is heavily dependent on a Christian upbringing and a Christian environment shows that Christian belief is right.
Plainly any group of people seeks to pass the truth to its children. Plainly any group seeks to build a society that propogates truth. To imply that something is false because a society teaches that something to its children and pressures its members to believe that something is an abusrdity.
Or consider this. I believe that combustion occurs when oxygen reacts with a hydrocarbon, producing water and carbon dioxide and releasing energy. Now this belief surely meets your standards; it is “based on the human brain examining reality and evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions that lead to these beliefs.”
Now where did I get this statement about reality? From reality? Obviously not. As a child I witnessed many acts of combustion. But at no point did I sit on a log, looking at a campfire, and say, “wow, those hydrocarbons sure are reacting with oxygen to produce water and…” Nothing in reality said or suggested such a thing.
Unsurprisingly I learned about the chemical basis of combustion in school. Or as you would say, it was “a matter of childhood indoctrination and societal pressure”.
To me, this childhood indoctrination and societal pressure proves that the formula for combustion is true. But according to the logic in your OP, you apparently believe that this childhood indoctrination and societal pressure proves that the formula for combustion is false. You’d draw further evidence for this by observing that people in different continents and countries have different beliefs about combustion.
Sorry, but I have only facts, no opinions.
I got **Voyager **mixed up with the OP!