When and where did atheism first start ?

[Angrboda]

I'll get back to you when I'm in a different mood, Losty, but a child could learn a language by listening to a tape recording of it being spoken. Indeed, many anime fans claim to have learned Japanese by this very method. And the existence of creoles and private languages is also relevant. I think you are stretching the point beyond where it will bear the weight of the argument. Val's point was that religion wasn't something we would naturally develop without intentional training in the subject. I haven't commented upon it, but she may have been wrong in that, as I just last night came across a slide I had saved from a talk given by the psychiatrist J. Anderson Thompson, Jr., that claimed that there was evidence that religion and religious concepts can develop absent any exposure to such by a child. Regardless, I was addressing Bel's complaint that the examples of language, math, and how to behave in a group made some point regarding Val's point, something that I have yet to achieve clarity on. Language does not require explicit and intentional teaching, but then, it's not clear that religion does either. What is clear is that we have evolved capacities which, even in the absence of explicit and intentional teaching, will express themselves. And specifically to your counter, that examples of language use are needed to enable the expression of linguistic skill, what you in this case are labeling as "teaching," that kind of teaching is uninformative as to whether something is natural or not. One could readily drag the line one way or the other: in one sense, most of teaching involves or depends upon teaching by example and exposure to the subject; on the other hand the expression of mathematical intuitions that in its most developed form seems to require extensive and explicit teaching would not exist at all if we didn't have a natural capacity to form useful intuitions about number, quantity, the geometry of space and so on. So in one sense, you are arguably correct that in as far as teaching by example is a form of teaching you have some slender point. However in as much as it addresses whether teaching religious concepts, language, and so on is natural, it seems to miss the mark somewhat.