My view and reasons for them. Atheist and Christians welcome here. (short)

[The Grand Nudger]

^ Well, do you think you were born knowing about God?

Or do you think kids learn this stuff from their parents at a young age?

IDK. IDK how far back in our evolution that a belief in God goes so I can't really say whether it's more natural for humans to believe in a God or not. I guess it is a question of if if other animals had an advanced language system whether they would believe in God or not and I really can't answer that. This might sound foolish, but in some regards I can totally see some animals paying homage to a creator. I know I said elsewhere on this forum that animals don't have the capacity to believe in a God, but if their language systems were more robust, based on their psychology, I can't rule out that they would believe in a God.

I can help with that.  We're natural animists, cultural deists, and societal theists.  

Life is about 3.5byo.  Our genus is 1.5-2.5myo.  By 50k years ago we began expressing animistic beliefs through ritual burials and funerary goods.  Somewhere between 13-10k years ago we see evidence of deism in ritual/worship complexes and religious art.  1.7k years ago.....christianity was born.

We learn the cultural and societal specifics - but we're all born with the innate propensity to invest inanimate objects with intent and anthropomorphize them.  Predicting the behavior and internal states of other sentient creatures is an important skill for us, though constantly searching out this information has lead to vast misattribution.  

Misattribution will take us to animism.  Just talking about what we're talking about with the previous misattribution will lead us to cultural deism, and laying out the specifics of some interaction with the gods established in the step prior between members of a group in a larger culture gives us societal theism.

Beyond that point we'd be discussing the religious economy, as competing sects of belief attempt to secure a share of the available space.  If I had to place pantheism in that schema, for example...I;d suggest that it leveraged strategies from the religious economy to provide a modern animism.  Conceptualized as the sacred it's straight animist analog.  Conceptualized as the divine...it;s theism for animists.

In that sense, it can satisfy the "natural" component of the development of our belief in the sacred or divine.  Neither culture nor society are heritable traits. Understanding this helps us to answer the question of whether or not people are born with god beliefs. We aren;t. We're barely cognizant of anything when we're born. We do, however, possess the fundamental building blocks of belief before we learn to speak, and most of us are casual conceptual animists even if we don;t actually believe in animism. Every time we cuss out a wrench or fear that some object means us harm..we're expressing our ability to project.

So, I suppose it would be fun to summarize these stages of belief we find in the human mind and in the archaeological and historical record in light of the above. It begins when we say "that rail is trying to kill me!"

-The rail has a spirit. (animism)
-It;s spirit is the god of the rails. (deism)
-The god of the rails will prevent you from falling if you have faith, pray, and hold the rail. (theism)