Timothy C. May wrote:
At 12:44 AM -0700 10/9/96, Dale Thorn wrote:
Why is it that 95-plus percent of all people stay with their parents' religion (more-or-less) when they grow up, instead of abandoning it, or finding one on their own? Simple. The uncountable zillions of "bytes" of information that go into your brain before you become more-or-less conscious, so controls your mind by the time you are conscious, that very few people can overcome this programming to any significant extent.
This is of course not true. Lots of statistics show that nowhere near "95%" of people stick with the religion they were raised in. In America, at least.
I don't know what part of America you're talking about. San Francisco? Most of America is still to the right of you on a map, and close to 95 percent do exactly as I say. Maybe you got your statistics from the same media outlet that was working the OJ case. There, they said that "x-percent of white people think he's guilty" (usually 70 percent or thereabouts), while I, Dale Thorn, found it to be just about 100 percent anywhere in the country (except maybe the Bay Area, where they still believe that a rotten little piece of crap called the Altair was the first personal computer).
Large numbers become nonbelievers, others become Vegans, Pagans, Buddhists, Bahaiists, Baalists, etc. This is well-documented and has been discussed for several decades.
A lot of B.S. has been discussed for several decades.
I don't know what the current correlation is, but I'd guess it's less than 50%. As the old joke goes, what's the surest way to make your kid a nonbeliever? Send him to a religious school. Nothing to do with Cypherpunks, but complete errors like this "95%" figure ought to be corrected, if anybody is still reading this thread.
These last numbers - "less than 50%", "complete errors like 95%" are splendid proofs of what I said in the first paragraph above, that most people (like yourself) are totally controlled by their programming. Unless, of course, you simply wave it all away with a magic wand. BTW, if you understood my argument, it wasn't so much about specifics of religion et al (which could be easily misinterpreted), it was about how people act entirely on their past programming, mitigated to some extent by incidental circumstances. If you're inclined to give too much weight to the incidental circumstances, remember the first thing they tell you when you join the CIA: there aren't any coincidences (of any real significance, anyway).