I have been curious about this for a while. For those of you who were not raised in a religious family, did you think that gave you an advantage not having superstitious beliefs as a child? Did it help you develop critical thinking skills earlier or did you still have some supernatural beliefs?

Finally, a question for me

Yup, I was raised without religion or any superstition I have been aware of. Religion (and atheism) were just never mentioned. Instead my ability to think was encouraged, allowing me to reach my own conclusions. I have to fight a lot of things, but ingrained fallacious superstitious thinking is (hopefully) not one of them.

Y'know, after giving it some consideration, I think that atheists who were raised in religious homes might have the advantage in critical thinking. After all, they learned the hard way that large numbers of people can be full of shit.

It also can drive it home in a personal way knowing close family members are drawn into religion. For me, it made me wanna fight against it so it didn't happen to other families and children.

I was raised by parents who didn't talk about religion but by a grandmother who did.

I went to a Catholic kindergarten and attended Catechism for the first several years after secular school.

My experience leads me to strongly believe in the theory that our brains are hard-wired for emotional conviction over logical conviction.

No 5-year-old is engaging in rational, critical thinking. But at that age, I clearly recall wondering why the hell these old women in penguin suits were feeding me these incredibly ridiculous stories. I didn't take them seriously for a moment. I was simply befuddled as to why I was being told them.

I believed in God at this point - just as I believed in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy. I had been told those stories by adults and had no reason to disbelieve them. I just didn't make the connection between the obvious fantasy stories of Genesis and God. They seemed like two different things. I accepted one as truth and the other as obvious fairy tales.

I was somewhere around 12-years-old when I realized (much to my shock) that the adults around me considered the biblical stories as fact. It suddenly became obvious to me that God was as ludicrous as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

So to answer your question. I'm really not sure. I was exposed to religion early but it was largely not enforced by my parents. I think emotionally, I could never accept religion. Not because I'm smart but because I'm emotionally deposed to favor logic.

Google "The Accidental Mind" to see where I'm coming from. It is a book about the brain written by a neuroscientist who makes the case that our brain is a hodgepodge gaggle of evolution. Far from being miraculous or perfect, it is a mess that we should be greatfull works at all. Most interesting to me is the finding that we are physiologically incapable of thinking purely logically. Every thought is processed through an emotional filter.

Atheists are not necessarily smarter than theists. We are simply more emotionally driven to favor a logical world-view.

So, was my emotional predisposition to science and logic influenced by parents who didn't shove religion down my throat? I don't think so because my grandmother tried to do it and so did the penguins.

In my case, I don't think it mattered.

I was sent to church as a kid until about the age of 12 when I realised it was a silly idea, there was never any pressure at home and religion was seldom discussed. Never been a problem but in the UK religion is not the big thing that it seems to be in the US

(September 14, 2018 at 11:13 pm)Bahana Wrote: I have been curious about this for a while. For those of you who were not raised in a religious family, did you think that gave you an advantage not having superstitious beliefs as a child? Did it help you develop critical thinking skills earlier or did you still have some supernatural beliefs?

I had no problems with religion until I was 57 years old, 2007. That's when "Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed" woke me up to the passenger character of my life. Before that I used to say "I'm not religious enough to call myself an atheist." For some odd reason that seemed to make religious people okay with me. Evidently just the word "atheist" was/is a threat to them.

No, I don’t think that had much effect or advantage, other than perhaps some effect of strengthening my faith, because I know that I’m not just going along with the crowd. And I find that often when atheists refer to critical thinking; when asked, there is not really any critical thinking skills involved, they just mean not believing in things that they don’t believe in.

A disadvantage of being raised in a non-religious home is that I have no idea where believers are coming from. It's simply irrational to me to believe in an imaginary friend when you're an adult.

I didn't think about religion a lot when I was a kid. I know people in fundamentalist homes do, but for the rest, in the average home, I don't think people give it that much thought. Maybe that just reflects my experience. There were the late night talks about God, but not a lot of actually really spending a lot of time alone thinking about it.