Roughly speaking, the world is split into three groups: those who believe in god(s), those who don’t, and those who aren’t sure. My question is this: of the first group, what percentage of them were indoctrinated into their religion without their consent, and what percentage converted to it in later life of their own volition?
(I think we all know what sort of ratio we’ll be talking about…)
You forgot those who know. Theists, atheists, agnostics, and gnostics – four groups, not three.
I can’t answer the question in numbers of course, but in any case for the purposes I think you have in asking it, it’s the wrong question. The right question is: if everyone were raised in an agnostic milieu, how many would become theists later in life of their own volition?
People who don’t grow up in agnostic households (which I did, by the way) are certainly indoctrinated, either into a particular version of theism or into atheism. And it would strain credibility to suppose that didn’t affect their thinking on the subject. But I don’t think the indoctrination would, in most cases, “take,” were it not for the prevalence of religious experience. The social and personal drawbacks to belief in Christianity are considerable. If it were not for the reinforcement of religious experience, I’m intuitively certain that most people raised Christian would reject the religion as soon as they were old enough to ask, “What’s in it for me?” or “Why does this make any sense?” But because religious experience does happen, and because most people aren’t deep enough to question whether the context of the belief-system is really necessary to that experience or even really supported by it logically, the personal drawbacks and liabilities are overborne by that reinforcement.
Here’s what I think would happen if we could magically make it so that everyone was raised in an agnostic household.
Most people would have religious experiences.
Some people would have very profound religious experiences and create religions based on them. Those who were incapable of doing that for one reason or another, but still had religious experiences, would choose one or more of these religions to follow.
But because all of these religions would have been created in a modern context rather than an ancient one, without the existing ancient religions to use as bad examples, all of them would encourage free thought rather than being dogmatic, and people could usually be members of more than one at once.
Since atheism is in part a rebellion against the oppression of dogmatic religion, and since there would be no dogmatic religion, the number of atheists would decline.
Sounds pretty good to me! Unfortunate that this isn’t possible, but hopefully we can get to the same end result by the longer, slower road.
Most children in countries such as England and the U.S. are educated from an early age in school about such things as the teachings of Jesus, and taught to pray in assemblies regardless of their cultural backgrounds. This is because most people would agree that Christianity is a nice story to teach your kids, it gives them a good start in learning how to be a decent person, but it’s difficult to define the difference between whether people have been indoctrinated or deluded into becoming religious in later life, that is if it wasn’t already forced down their throats.