Because the issue is establishing that there is more to it than belief: that these beliefs are about something.
You didn’t even do more than scan my post, did you? If you had, you might have realized that I made EXACTLY THIS POINT, already.
Religious believers try to tell us that their belief in God is rational and logical. But there are different forms of belief on a divinity. There are the many gods of Hinduism, the Trinitarian God of Christians, the unitarian Allah of Muslims, etc.
Now, if people come to religion as a result of a logical thought process and NOT as a result of brainwashing by their societies when they are children, how do you explain the amazing fact that most people who believe in the Hindu Gods are people born to Hindu parents in a Hindu country, most people who believe in the Muslim God are people born to Muslim parents in a MUslim country, etc. etc.
Is it not amazing that logic would dictate different conceptions of God to you depending on where you are born and raised?
By the way, Kanicbird, in reference to your posting on another thread regarding us gays, I want to sincerely thank you for deciding that you and your loving Jesus think that it used to be OK to murder gays in the old testament but now you think it is probably not ok.
My same-sex partner of 30 years (whom I legally married under Canadian law last years) and I sincerely thank you.
Of course, since we have not the slightest intention of subscribing to your non-existent God or Jesus, I guess in your opinion we will be frying our asses in Hell for all eternity. But hey, if Christians like YOU will not be there, can the place be as bad as all that? 
People believe in God because they like to believe in God. Who am I to say no?
Go back and read my second paragraph
A separate metadata inference would be that people who are better educated are less religious. People who are under hardship are more religious. The point remains that roughly 92% of the time people believe what their parents taught them to. Certainly that does vary, but saying that the amount of weight a person gains by eating fattening food varies by the person still doesn’t mean that eating fattening food isn’t pretty much the reason why someone gains weight.
And the OP question wasn’t “Why do people cease being religious?” it was “Why is anyone religious?” Hence I didn’t try to answer the former.
I wouldn’t say that it’s more this, then my theory, I think they both apply.
I do like your location Location: Earth Prime, Pre-Crisis right out of Revelation.
Valteron What I put on that other thread was a WAG as to explain the reasoning behind the difference between actions taken in the time before Christ and after. I pointed out earlier in that thread that when we do this we usually get it wrong, as our thinking can’t understand that of God.
As for your lifestyle, I too have sinful issues that I deal with on a daily basis, I am no more worthy of God’s love and reward then you. I too am a sinner.
Sorry, but nothing in that addresses my complaint. The fallacy you committed was a temporal one. That’s the problem with macro-pseudosciences. Like economics at the macro level. Or sociology at the macro level. Or civics at the macro level. By the time sufficient data are farmed, journalized, published, and studied, they are obsolete. The same principle applies as that for which Hayek won his Nobel prize when he disassembled socialism.
Like I said, your theory does not explain why, for example, Europe is so irreligious. If 92% of people believed what their parents did, then Europe should still be a much more religious place than it is today, given that just a few generations ago, it was so religious it scared Americans.
That does not address what I said. Your demand was that God “make himself known” in order to prove his existence. But He’s made Himself known to me and others; therefore, by your logic, speciation should not exist if there is a man somewhere who hasn’t seen it happen.
Not quite. More like right out of DC comics.
If we take what you say at face value, though, we come to a totally different conclusion. If people that claim that they have been visited by “God” also claim to get different messages from the god that has visited them, doesn’t this show us that there are many gods out there, not just one?
Yes, and this is something I’ve said many times. There are as many gods as there are people. Jesus teaches that we all are gods. We all are immortal, and the essence of each of us is our spirit. The reason I’m a Christian is because I love the god that calls Himself Jesus. I want to be one with Him. I treasure Him more than anything. My joy comes from being accepted by Him and loved in return. It’s like the kid who loves the Panthers becoming friends with Steve Smith.
Do I think you’re missing something because you’re an atheist? No, because you treasure something else. My wish is that you obtain that which you pursue. I want you to be happy, whatever that means for you.
Firstly, 92% comes from a modern UK cite.
Secondly, at a rate of 92% percent staying with what they are taught, three generations can drop the total number of religious people down to 77% of what it was. Assuming it didn’t start at 100%, but say rather at 90%, we get down to 70%.
And surprise, surprise, the current number of Christians in the UK is… drum roll 72%.
But those are cultural Christians (or implicit Christians, as your site puts it). Only about half of them even believe “in a God of some sort”. It’s like calling a Jew who is an atheist “religious”.
Some highlights:
Our population is mostly irreligious, innocent and ignorant of religion, and despite some defaulting to calling themselves “Christian” (71%), the country is not Christian despite a vague 50% lingering belief in a God of some sort.
17% of the population responded that religion was one of the most significant factors in their lives.
In a large 2006 August poll of year 9 and 10 teenagers in Cornwall, only 19% said that they ‘have a religious faith’.
55% of the British public do not believe in a higher being.
Between 1998 and 2005, half a million people stopped going to church on Sunday.
Your theory may apply to culturalism, but it still does not seem to apply to matters of faith like belief in God.
You might remember that I’m the person who responds to any request to “prove” that no god exists by asking “which god?” However, the level of theological sophistication you are describing did not exist 5,000 years ago. Perhaps you could have come up with your concept of god by yourself, without millenia of theological speculation, but I rather doubt it. (No more than I could invent computer science by myself.) So, while I kind of understand why you believe in your brand of god, I doubt that you would believe in any brand of god without the history I was referring to. I also think that you might be equating your personal, individual god with the god that Jesus is somehow a part of (which is a universal god) but I’ll let the Christians address that.
I understand, but am not falling victim to, equivication. I’ve resolved conflicts in many meetings by pointing out the inconsistent use of terms by participants. That’s not what I’m doing here. You may think you’re not standing on the shoulders of giants, but I think you are.
One wonders how many supposed Christians in Britain were Christians in name only even 100 years ago. In Shakespeare’s day attendance at church was mandatory. Nonattendance was considered evidence of Catholicism, or worse. It appears there was a lot of pressure to attend church, at least at various times of revivalism. Nancy Drew books from the '50s had her church attendance clumsily inserted, I suppose so that no one could mistake her for a godless commie.
I suspect my grandfather and father would have turned up in surveys as believers, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather wasn’t., and my father, though his family was, has never really cared. So I don’t know if I would be counted among the 8% or among the 92%.
I really want to read the version of Revelation with Earth Prime in it! Does Jesus descend with a bevy of superheroes? Is Luthor the anti-Christ?
Are they? Then what was the point of all those religious wars? Economics and greed, I know, but if a definition of “god” was coherent, wouldn’t it also be universal, like a physics equation, and not subject to individual interpretation?
No, you’re begging the question by defining “god” as eternal, essential and necessary when it is not proven to be anything of the sort. In fact, the definition you’ve applied doesn’t seem to any tangible value (“There are as many gods as there are people”), which is fine because I wasn’t expecting one. I just don’t see how it can be used as a basis to imply that I’m wrong about it when what’s right about it is so elusive.
Yes, but that doesn’t validate your God’s existence. It only states that, if we assume what you say is true, then it would appear that this hypothetical concept you call God would love you by a recognisable human definition of love on which a majority would agree. If you want to prove that either the love from God or God himself is real, however, we need more than your word.
We are now at the point where we can tinker with brains chemically and magnetically to induce perceptions of god. That suggests that in reality what a great many people perceive as god is just a construct with their own minds. The response to this conclusion is typically that it is god that is doing the tinkering.
This in turn means that it will never be possible to prove the non-existence of god to many people, for regardless of what physical effect is put forth as proof, the response will be that god caused that physical effect.