(May 12, 2025 at 9:29 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 12, 2025 at 10:34 am)Angrboda Wrote: ...far beyond any attribution to personal choice unfettered by coercive factors.
This last part is problematic for your theory, because autonomy is one of the strongest predictors in motivational psychology. People value control so much they’ll pay more just to keep it. The difference between influence and coercion is exactly how much autonomy is preserved. I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals raised in coercive religious environments were more likely to reject religion altogether.
Social environments do have an influence, but your autonomy, free of coercion, is a far better predictor of what beliefs and behaviors you'll adopt.
None of that applies when you start indoctrination at a young age. Human children are wired to absorb information from the people in their life like sponges. By the time they're of an age when rebellion starts to become common, they've typically interalized most of the beliefs and attitudes their parents have taught them. I think that a large part of more people turning away from the religion they were brought up in, in modern times, is the difficulty of isolating children and teens from the knowledge that most people don't believe the same things they do.
A faith that is hard and brittle, like biblical fundamentalism where you're taught that the whole Bible is 100% literally true, is more likely to break whether it's imposed coercively or gently, IMHO. You only have to be convinced one part is incorrect to weaken the whole belief structure. It's hard to imagine the one provable fact an Episcopalian might encounter that could prompt them to think 'If this is true, Episcopalianism is a lie!'.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
