(May 15, 2025 at 1:43 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: It wasn't so hard to isolate people when most of them never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born, which was all of history minus a recent comparatively paper-thin slice in recent times. Most people more than a couple of hundred years ago could live their whole lives without having a 20 minute converstion with someone of a different religion or no religion. Knowledge of other religions was often limited to caricatures and stereotypes their own religion taught them. And now that that is no longer the case, we see more peole switching denominations, religions, or turning away from religion altogether than ever before. But about half of teens still follow the same religion their parents did or one that's very similar, in the USA.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...and-teens/
When I grew up in the 1960s, we lived in a medium-sized city in Indiana in which there were something like 40 Protestant churches and only one Catholic church (if I remember correctly). There were no Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or even Jehovah's Witnesses. Almost everyone I knew was a believer, and they were very nice people. It could barely occur to me back then that they were all mistaken or misled, even though I never quite understood what I was supposed to understand. So I thought it was my own fault somehow until several years later, when I was asked to repeat the Christian oath to join a new church after we moved. I couldn't bring myself to do it since I still didn't understand that Son-of-God business.
