If you were born into a different religion...

It depends, doesn't it? If I was born into Richard Dawkins' family then possibly not. If I was born into a family in Saudi Arabia then possibly not. There is absolutely no way to know.

"If a tree falls in a forest" and all that.

Manach wrote: »

As I mentioned in another thread on the property tax, property is not wealth per se. Also, running a fairly balanced budget means that social utilities which are run by the Church have some mode of continuous operation in comparision to Ireland's own which are subject to the Trokia's mercy.

I think your confusing heritage with property but thats a tangent so.....

I think I might be whatever I was born into, and be as bad a Muslim or Jew or Buddhist as I am a Christian. It would be something monotheist or atheist to fit me anyway.

We are humans not animals and we are educated not conditioned.

Didnt go to the Christian Brothers then?

Religion is much more than a set of beliefs; it encompasses a whole set of practices and customs as well as a bunch of individual and communal relationships. Changing your religion is comparatively rare, because it involves much more than changing your mind. And radically or fundamentally changing your religion is rarer still. (A shift between two mainstream Christian denominations, for example, is much less disruptive and challenging than a shift from Judaism to Christianity.)

The fact is that most people remain in the religious tradition in which they were raised. And this remains true even if we expand the notion of “religious tradition” to include non-religious positions like rationalism and skepticism. They may - and typically do - shift positions somewhat within their tradition, but they tend not to make fundamental changes.

If you talk to people who have changed religion in a significant way - a change of denomination, say, rather than a change of position within a denomination - about their reasons for doing so - the proportion who make the change purely because they are attracted by their new faith (I read the bible one day and I was convinced!) is quite small. I’m not denying the authenticity of their experience, but they are not typical. As well as being drawn to their new religion, there are usually one or both of two other factors present:

First, they have become dissatisfied with the tradition they were raised in - they find it too restrictive, or too simplistic, or they cannot reconcile it with their experience. Thus they are already searching for, or at least already open to, a new religious position.

Secondly, they have developed connections to a new religion through a personal relationship - usually, but not always, a romantic relationship. (And their connections to that religion often survive the end of the relationship.)

I think the question posed in the OP is basically unanswerable. If you were raised in a different religion, you wouldn’t just have a different set of beliefs, but also a different set of attitudes and practices, and a different set of relationships. Whether you’d move on from that depends to some extent on how satisfactory you found it, and it’s pointless to evaluate that from the perspective of the religious position you now have, because of course in that situation you would be evaluating it from a completely different perspective.

For example Festus’s view that Islam “ultimately is not a relgion of peace” is not necessarily a view he would hold or form if he were a Muslim. Likewise his view that, if he were a Buddhist, he would be dissatisfied with Buddhism as a result of his exploration of science is questionable; if he were a Buddhist he would be exploring science with a completely different perspective; it might present him with a completely different set of challenges.

(Not to get at Festus in particular, I hasten to add; it’s just that he contributed fairly early on in the thread. But similar points could be made about many posts.)

Fundamentally, I think, the Christian position is that the fact that I am (or anyone else is) a Christian is the mysterious outworking of the grace of God. I may be thankful for it, but I can’t claim any credit for it. And the view that in a completely different and fundamentally unknowable set of circumstances, growing up with a different set of values, I would find my way to Christianity because of my own tastes and desires and understanding and insight looks a bit presumptuous to me. I hope in that circumstance that I would respond as honestly and authentically as I could to God’s call, as I perceived it. Where that would take me, God only knows - I certainly don’t.