I don’t know about you, but I find these data and stated intentions disturbing:
Ages at which Americans say they accepted Christ and became a Christian
Another survey — by the International Bible Society — indicated that 83% of all Christians make their commitment to Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14, that is, when they are children or early youth. The Barna Research Group surveys demonstrate that American children ages 5 to 13 have a 32% probability of accepting Christ, but youth or teens aged 14 to 18 have only a 4% probability of doing so. Adults age 19 and over have just a 6% probability of becoming Christians.
This data illustrates the importance of influencing children to consider making a decision to follow Christ.
Because the 4-14 period slice of the pie is so large, many have started referring to the “4-14 Window.” Many people serving as career cross-cultural missionaries have testified that they first felt God calling them to missionary service during that 4-14 age period.
Another survey — by the International Bible Society — indicated that 83% of all Christians make their commitment to Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14, that is, when they are children or early youth. The Barna Research Group surveys demonstrate that American children ages 5 to 13 have a 32% probability of accepting Christ, but youth or teens aged 14 to 18 have only a 4% probability of doing so. Adults age 19 and over have just a 6% probability of becoming Christians.
This data illustrates the importance of influencing children to consider making a decision to follow Christ.
Because the 4-14 period slice of the pie is so large, many have started referring to the “4-14 Window.” Many people serving as career cross-cultural missionaries have testified that they first felt God calling them to missionary service during that 4-14 age period.
Yeah, I know! What kind of godsawful hack makes 3-D pie charts?
Oh, and then there’s the substance of the message. It’s not surprising: pack the kids’ heads full of garbage when they’re gullible and pliant, and they’re poisoned for life.
I wonder what similar data would look like for adoption of atheism? I suspect it’ll largely be shifted to older ages, when minds are a little more mature and capable of rational thought.
I wonder if they have a similar pie chart showing how many kids from fundie homes break away when they move out. It’s almost as if they’re semi-aware that their stories only work on the very young.
That’s the point of ID/creationism. You can’t teach the truth, they won’t believe what they’re “supposed to.”
The DI dissembles more regarding it, but Ham and ilk just say that they don’t want to lose “souls” (or their money).
If fundamentalists can’t teach lies to children unopposed, what hope do they have?
Glen Davidson
I’m tempted to go post this on a religious message board and ask how a 14 year old is capable of the deep soul searching, intense research and rational inquiry that they all claim was their reason for choosing their religion.
It’ll probably go as badly as when I ask why Italians overwhelmingly come to a ‘logical’ conclusion that Catholicism is right while Turkish overwhelmingly come to the ‘logical’ conclusion Islam is right. Flamed by people who don’t want to admit their religion was brainwashed into them by their parents.
Break their brains while they are still developing, what?
My family is very Catholic, but they weren’t big on indoctrination. Just the standard Sunday mass and CCD/PSR. My parents are religious but liberal, and not completely nuts. Big on love, not so much in the damnation department.
I don’t envy the crap some other people have to deal with.
This is why critical thinking needs to be introduced at an early age, rather than it being some optional thing that might be addressed after the age of thirteen for the lucky ones.
Seems rather obvious to me. Ages 0-4 don’t have the mental capacity to understand much less make such a decision. Those over 14, if they haven’t already been indoctrinated, are much less likely to fall for it. That leaves the “get them while they’re young” group. I would be more interested in seeing how many who “made their commitment to Jesus” before they were 15, were still committed 10 years later.
If “The Barna Research Group surveys demonstrate that American children ages 5 to 13 have a 32% probability of accepting Christ”, & “83% of all Christians make their commitment to Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14”, that suggests that less than half of Americans are christian.
Something in the figures doesn’t tally – apart from the 83% above not agreeing with the figure of 85% on the pie chart.
But i guess i’m not surprised that they can’t get the numbers right.
You can do it quite easily with Excel. As a Mac user you probably don’t know this.
I’m always disgusted by the indoctrination of children with nonsense. It’s worse when you find out that that’s the plan.
I know that it can be done, and how to do it, but as a Mac user I have some appreciation of esthetics, and can’t understand why anyone would do it.
Brainwashing children is surely one of the greatest evils that religion owns.
Technically, I became a Catholic at ten. Because of my grandfather’s anti-religious stance, they couldn’t baptize me as an infant. So, soon after his death, my grandmother started taking me to mass. I soon started attending catechism and when I was ten I got baptized and took first communion.
Because I was baptized at ten, I think it gave an impression that it was my wish instead of my grandmother’s wish. In a way I did want it. Everyone in the class was baptized except for me, one other boy and a girl who was muslim. Being Catholic was just something that you were supposed to be and do, sort of like going to school.
Obviously, I wasn’t poisoned for life, but it could have easily happened. Being a good little girl, I went to catechism even in the years when it wasn’t necessary in order to receive first communion/confirmation. I regularly attended mass, prayed… the whole deal.
And it all felt like it was my own choice. But in reality, if I hadn’t gone to church, my grandmother would have been disappointed. There was always that pressure, with the addendum that I can’t be a good girl without being religious. And if I got taught anything, it was that I always had to be a good girl.
Alternatively, you can look at this chart and hazard the hypothesis that most Evangelicals are so because they’re born to an Evangelical family, and their conversion rate is abysmal for teens and adult people outside their sect. They just can’t convert people.
Ya. Get them before they’re old enough to say no to their parents.
That pie chart looks like something from Windows 3.1
It also points out what a colossal waste of time that “John 3:16” business is.
In an interesting coincidence, 14 is the age limit in Germany until which parents can decide their children’s religion, even against their will..
Not surprised.
The perennial question is, how does religion survive even though there is no proof and much of it is based on false facts.
AFAICT, it survives due to relentless brainwashing of children, use of every mechanism for social conformity and control ever invented, and backed up by occasional murders of defectors.
And even then, it doesn’t work all that well. People seem to break their programming based on the best and brightest first.
Which means that eventually US xianity will go the way of the FLDS. Small groups of weird people living in out of the way places, oppressing their women and children, and causing social problems that no one is quite sure how to deal with.
Or, as the Jesuit maxim goes, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” It baffles me why most adults cling to the thoughts of a child (to paraphrase that misogynist huckster Paul), except that skepticism and reflection are also habits best instilled at an early age.
Matches my profile. The good part is it didn’t stick. It would be interesting to know how many in that 4-14 year range are no longer actively involved in church, and are even openly atheist, by the time they’re 30 or so. My hypothesis is that the drop out rate is large once people get through the torturous teens.
The retention rate for young people in the Southern Baptists (one of the loonier cults) is 30%. This is by their own numbers.
Even with their cooked membership numbers, they’ve lost membership for 4 years straight and their own projections have them cut in half in a few decades.
Mmmmm, pie charts!
This sounds similar to the tobacco companies who need to catch them young, though not quite as young as the fundies seem to. Smokers seem to usually get started at about 14 if the StatCan paper I read was accurate.
The chances of starting if one is over 19 is very low.
Religion & smoking–two addictions?
Re 3-D pie charts. I believe they are typically used by people who want to have flashy effects and really don’t care about actually presenting the data well–or more likely don’t realise how clueless it makes them look.
And yet most Christians who make their “commitment to Christ” between the ages of 4 and 14 will be quite sure that they have good reasons for the choice they made — reasons that are so good that they would today believe the same thing even if they had not been raised as a Christian.
It was lucky that they were, of course. It meant they discovered the truth earlier. But there was no early conditioning or indoctrination or peer pressure or family coercion involved … not really. Not for them.
That’s what other need. Especially children. Keep religion out of their lives and allow them to make up their minds when they’re older and they won’t be religious. That’s a real problem.
But when it comes to evaluating what they believe and why they believe it, they know that, even as a mature adult encountering Christianity for the first time, the good evidence and reasoning behind it would have convinced them.
I think that’s how they come to believe two opposing things:
1.) Christianity is by far the most reasonable, logical, sensible world view out there, supported by all branches of scholarship and contradicted by none.
2.) We have to make sure that our children are saturated with religious doctrine when they are very young — or else they might very well not believe in it when they grow up.
Tis, tis, are you under the impression that they don’t make Exel for Macs? Really?
So, religion is bonsai for the mind–stunt it early and it stays stunted.
Fortunately, it doesn’t always work.
Sadly, it works too often.
That was when he slipped and his Epicurean upbringing broke through for a while. :->
You know that that’s an American evangelical specialty? Other Christians aren’t expected to ever make a conscious “accepting of Christ”. They’re expected to just be Christians from their… christening onward.
…which of course isn’t how it works. To keep a bonsai a bonsai, you and your descendants need to keep stunting it throughout its life.
Oh, the 3d pie chart is easy to explain: When you are used to targeting you message at children.. the more it looks like a cartoon character the better.
Does it disturb the faithful that the are marketing to the same demigraphics the tabacco industry is after? Get them before thea mature enough to think.
A sure sign that you know you have a useless product is marketing it with glitz to kids.
I was going to mention this is how the tobacco companies stay in business, but #17 beat me to it!
I think I was 16 when I decided to leave my church, thanks to that encounter with the Sunday school teacher trying to sugarcoat the doctrine of Hell. At times, I suspect they avoided talking about Hell while I was growing up in order to avoid creating conflict between normal, everyday morality and the injustice of an eternal torture chamber in the basement. Since they hadn’t been drilling me into rote memorization of torture apologia for all those years, it really fell flat when he tried it on me at 16.
Oh, yeah. On the topic of 3D pie charts, I’m usually okay with them if viewed from a high angle, where the visual weight of the pieces is still close to their actual proportion of the pie. At low angles, it’s just excessive and possibly even deceptive.
Interestingly enough, I decided once and for all at about age 13 that I didn’t believe in any woo or religions. Perhaps I’ll write about it and submit as a testimonial, so I can spare anyone having to read my tl;dr comments on here. :)
There are good reasons and bad reasons for believing that something is true. If you believe something and have good reasons for thinking that it is true, then there is a reasonable chance that it is true. If your reasons for believing that something is true are bad reasons then it is very likely that you are deluded, that the things that you believe are not true. If you believe in a particular religion, while being fully aware that you were raised from birth to believe it by people who were also raised from birth to believe it, that may be a hint that you believe it for a bad reason. Once you become fully aware that other people believe in a different religion for exactly the same reasons that you believe yours, surely then it is obvious that you are deluded, that the things that you believe are not true.
So, religion is bonsai for the mind–stunt it early and it stays stunted.
saved.
I keep expecting Clippy to pop up. “It looks like you’re trying to brainwash children. Do you need help?”
It is apocrypha, not data, but does stand out how many of the de-conversion stories posted here involve teens. An age where one is beginning to make and be asked to make individual choices, and an age when most of us are introduced to formal science and logic.
Which I suppose makes it even more critical for the religious to keep separate schools (or resort to home-schooling), why they fear mainstream public education and try to denature it for everyone, and why college degrees are considered suspect and should only be attempted by the most devout warriors for gawd (who can take back the tools of a meaningless sheepskin to cow the yokels with, without being accidentally tainted with actual thought).
If your reasons for believing that something is true are bad reasons then it is very likely that you are deluded, that the things that you believe are not true.
actually, bad reasoning itself would be irrelevant to whether or not what that reasoning was applied to is correct or incorrect.
example:
I reason that since none of us fly off the earth; that gravity is the invisible force of a giant hand, pushing everything down onto the earth.
faulty reasoning, but it doesn’t stop gravity from existing.
of course wrt to deities, there can be nothing BUT faulty reasoning, regardless of whether that reasoning appears on the surface to be consistent with itself logically, since there are NO consistent observations to even be able to construct reason around!
I hate these crazy Google IDs!
I became a committed Christian at age 5. Yes, 5. In many ways I still regard myself as Christian, but more in a cultural sense, since I realised at age 23 that god did not actually exist, and Jesus certainly didn’t rise from the dead.
I don’t think it matters that much what age you are; in some ways, the younger, the better – in terms of being able to explain why the follies of childhood can be cast aside as an adult.
@shanemuk
Not a problem. They are experts at that.
They even send the kids to “bible colleges” to make sure they don’t learn anything as young adults but do find a suitable stunted brained mate of the same denomination.
lol
I’m skeptical that this means what it purports to. Most American Christians accepted Christianity as children because they were raised Christian. Similarly, if we were to find that atheist mostly become atheists as adults, it would likely be because most people are not raised as atheists.
OK, I agree pie charts are old school. But a 2D pie is an oxymoron. If you’re going to use one, go 3D, ’cause it’s about the pie!
However, as a Mac user, you have no concept of an open garden of software. Continue paying for programs I can easily get for free, Tentacled One.
*runs back to Fedora*
they had me brainwashed by age 8. I could even speak in tongues of angels… “t’sheker a’derum… in Jesus name…”
Religious indoctrination is a disgraceful practice.
I just wonder how many of that 85% like to tell stories about how they “used to be an atheist” before they saw the light (at the ripe old age of, say, 10).
Sometimes they get over it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe_Gortner
sort of.
I see stuff like this and I can’t help but think “Jesus Camp”.
It reminds me that the unremitting horror shown in that film is still real.
Hmm, the 4-14 part of the pie chart looks like Pacman. I spent quite a bit of time in those years playing Pacman. Coincidence?
Well yes actually but at least Pacman is more believable
otrame #24
They make software for Macs? Really? I thought that Macs were just for Mac owners to say: “I’ve got a Mac, not a Windoze box like you dirty non-Mac users.”
David M. @27: You’re right, of course. I should’ve put it: “You start the stunting early”.
But, as Raven pointed out, the religious are quite skilled at keeping things stunted….
The reason to use a 3-d pie chart is to put the wedge you care about emphasizing in the front to make it look even larger than it is.
Ah.
Wedgies.
My grandson is 12. He has always been taught to think for himself, and happens to have quite an interest in animals and biology, so his grandfather has introduced him to ideas ranging from evolution to gene theory. He also has quite an interest in Greek mythology, so his grandmother (me) has introduced him to interesting stories from many ancient cultures.
Recently, his father and step-mother have been trying to convert him to her fundi religion. He goes back to his mother and step-dad, laughingly describing their attempts to persuade him of some ideas that he has known weren’t true since he was 6, as he says. He told them that he sits quietly at church, but has no idea what the preacher talked about, since he sneaks in a book, or sits quietly thinking about something that he wants to write if his step-mother takes his book.
I think that our side of the family has successfully taught him how to think for himself, and even though he’s at that prime age that the xians like to grab them, he’s going to laugh at them.
@Ichthytic #39
Damn, you beat me to it.
That particular fallacy (belief that if the arguments one has in favour of a belief are fallacious, the belief is more likely to be false) has my favourite name amongst all logical fallacies: the fallacy fallacy (or fallacist’s fallacy).
Stardrake@25
David M. beat me to it, but as a practitioner of bonsai I have to comment. If you take a bonsai out of the pot and plant it free in the ground, without pruning and other manipulation, it will grow like any other tree of its species. In fact, we usually start with something larger than the intended bonsai, and cut it back before training it.
I think there may be a metaphor here.
Oh, and don’t get me started about bonsai as “tree torture.”
Regarding the “hook ’em while they’re young” strategy, the fact more Christians are created in the 4-14 demographic proves that it is working. This is possibly the most critical way in which religion is perpetuated.
As an antitheist, my ultimate goal is to free people from their superstitious bonds, but perhaps a better goal is to prevent the bondage in the first place.
Parents do not own their children. Parents are merely primary caregivers, charged with the wellbeing of their offspring until they turn 18.
F (#4) said that we need to introduce children to critical thinking at an earlier age, rather than waiting until 13. The truth is (with a huge psychological dataset to support it) that childrens’ brains are NOT capable of critical thinking until they reach their mid-teens (on average). They can be taught the concept of critical thinking but don’t have the ability to actually engage in it until they are 14-15 at the earliest.
This is why creating “committed Christians” younger than 15 is morally abhorrent. There is no way we should create “committed atheists” either, by the way, at any age. The point is to hold off teaching anything that can be construed as “this is what your life is for” (i.e. anything that gives an inflexible framework to a child’s existence) until they are old enough to evaluate such a claim on its evidential merits. The fact that 14-18 year olds who are not Christians have only a 4% chance of becoming so (and that adults 19+ have only a 6% chance of converting) suggests that being raised free of the pressure to join the religion of one’s parents allows teens and adults to take an unbiased, critical view of any belief system, and in doing so find Christianity wanting.
I think we need to protect children from religion in the same way we protect them from pornography. Prolonged exposure to either will have a large (but different) impact on the life of a pre-teenager, an impact that will affect their future quality of life (positively or negatively depending on the individual). Choices about both faith and sex are fundamentally both choices about values, and I don’t see any evidence that children are mentally ready to commit to either before they’re 14-15 (or even older in some cases).
The only reason religion gets a free pass on this is because it’s always been done this way in Western culture. Looking at the staggering majority Christians enjoy in the United States and realising that 85% of those Christians became so before they had reached the age of 15 highlights the damage we outspoken atheists and antitheists can do to that majority by lobbying governments for restrictions on indoctrination tactics. And we should totally take our fight in this direction.
But we also need to take this to the churches and their ministers. Is their religion so feeble that it is necessary to sell it to those who are too young to make their own choices on the issue in order to create new Christians? And are those new Christians really the kind of believers they want (i.e. those who never had a choice in the matter)? That looks pretty bad for the Christian faith if you ask me.
I’m not sure what this chart is even showing. I suspect that virtually 100% of the 0-14 ‘conversions’ grew up in a Christian household. So those numbers reflect the number of kids who just went along with their family cult. Above 15, and certainly above 30, it’s more likely that the individuals really came to their convictions on their own. You’d have to separate the people who grew up in Christian homes to those in secular homes to say anything meaningful about commitment ages.
By the same token, as to PZ’s question about atheism adoption, the percentages would look totally different for people raised in religious versus secular homes. The religious escapees would almost certainly be significantly older as a group than the secular-raised kids when they eschewed religion. In fact, I suspect that a chart of ages of acceptance of atheism for individuals raised in completely secular homes would look pretty similar to the chart above.
@#58 Chris – I’ll go one step further regarding parents and say we owe our children way more than just an upbringing to age 18 – we owe them everything. No child ever chose to be conceived and born, so if you decide to have a child you, and you alone, are responsible for ensuring that your child has a perfect life. Your children are not and should never be your servants, and as a parent you owe them the best possible education free of indoctrination. At the very least teach them not to make the mistakes we made and our parents made – like the religious shit about respecting them because a crappy old book said so. In that regard the babble is exactly 100% ass backwards.
What children say and what children think are different. I have no doubt that’s an accurate representation of when people say they accept Christ. I highly doubt that’s accurate for when they truly believe it though. Last year, a research paper by Jacqueline Woolley and colleagues from the University of Texas examined how people explain hard-to-explain phenomenon or impossible occurrences. They found that young children try to explain strange things using natural explanations more often than they use magic or god as an explanation, and that young children were less likely than adults to use magic or god as an explanation. So… there’s that.
Yes of course. Why are you even asking. This was known 2,000 years ago if not earlier.
Hitchens: Xianity lost its most convincing argument when they stopped burning people at the stake.
The xians other great tool has been the power of the noose, bullet, and stack of firewood. They learned a long time ago that if you can’t convert them, you can always kill them. They must miss it terribly.
I am certain I became an atheist around the age of 12, as a result of extreme dissatisfaction with the crap I was being told at Methodist Sunday school. I distinctly remember saying something like “Why should I believe what’s written in a 2,000 year old book?”.
So – I suppose I’m saying that in my opinion, retrospectively, I had the critical tools to make a belief-related decision at 12.
And my father was pretty atheistic but my mother was Plymouth Brethren (lol…) and I think sent me over the road to the Methodist Church for the sake of appearances.
Markr1957
That’s 1.
Probably so. Personally, I’ve always been an atheist. My parents never discussed religion with me, because it didn’t seem important. When I was about four or five a friend’s mother invited me to go to church with them. It was an Ontario-Quebec Conference Baptist church. My parents didn’t object, because they figured they had sufficiently developed my b.s. meter to deal with it. Church was, of course, boring and inane. I went twice and then bowed out. I hadn’t really had occasion to consider god until then, but it took no time at all to realize it was malarkey.
So I guess the advent of my atheism would fall into the very beginning of the zero to four years category in that pie chart. I gather most Americans are not so fortunate.
It’s depressing, and a bit angering. deliberately planning to shove religious indoctrination at children, who haven’t the rational toolkit to fight back with. They should be ashamed, but yet they’re proud. It’s detestable.
Richard Dawkins has pointed out that there are no “Christian Children”. Christianity is not hereditary. Strictly speaking, Christians cannot reproduce … they have to recruit in order to make more Christians. Looked at this way, it becomes clear why Christians are always trying to get their chosen lifestyle accepted as normal in society and taught in school. They’re trying stealth tactics these days, with creationism and so-called Intelligent Design. Any time anyone speaks these truths, they scream discrimination. They even have retraining camps in which they indoctrinate kids into their abhorrent chosen lifestyle.
Rip @ 45,
At the risk of inflaming another religious war, there is a ton of free software for the Mac. On mine I have Open Office, Office Libre, Python, Firefox, Skype, Audacity, Handbrake, Inkscape, Kindle Reader, Kobo, Scribus, Stellarium, Stanza, TrueCrypt, Calibre, Celestia, Transmission, and VLC.
I was a PC owner until Microsoft’s OS and Office upgrading scam finally drove me too crazy to continue. The problem with Macs is that Steve Jobs was obsessive about controlling the user experience — but I would rather live with that than being treated as a customer to be milked as often as damn possible. Of course, if you really want to demonstrate your superiority, you install Linux/Ubuntu. Which I did as an alternative boot on my old PC laptop. Works beautifully.
Whilst indoctrination is generally a bad thing, there are some ideas so important that we must reinforce them from an early age in our children. I’ve just told my son that I’ll disown him if I ever catch him using a 3-D pie chart for any purpose other than humour. He’s 7 weeks old and sitting on my lap as I type this, so I may need to repeat the message later.
All pies are 3-D, it makes sense a pie chart should be 3-D as well. I mean who eats 2-D pies? I am mildly surprised anyone would consider creating pie charts in non-pie dimensions.
as a Mac user I have some appreciation of esthetics
so… your sense of aesthetics was granted to you by your computer?
How did you manage to cope before that?
there is a ton of free software for the Mac
and there’s thousands of tons for the PC.
so what?
I was a PC owner until Microsoft’s OS and Office upgrading scam finally drove me too crazy to continue.
cracking the OS fixes that pronto. takes about 2 minutes, then you never have to worry about it ever again.
*shrug*
ah, computer rationalizations for fun. I guess the idiotic mac/pc notroversy will never end.
They make software for Macs? Really? I thought that Macs were just for Mac owners to say: “I’ve got a Mac, not a Windoze box like you dirty non-Mac users.”
My current favorite Mac-owner joke:
How can you tell someone owns a Mac?
…
Just wait, they’ll tell you.
I was a PC owner until Microsoft’s OS and Office upgrading scam finally drove me too crazy to continue
“I was an atheist until I saw the fires of Hell!”
I think we need to protect children from religion in the same way we protect them from pornography.
I do believe Larry Flynt once made a similar argument.
So, I only need to rip off the heads of people who try to install religion into my kids’ minds for about 10 more years before they can do it themselves?
Cool!
Well, but it’s true, I never needed to become an atheist, I always was one, but I would say that there were different kinds of atheism, from the simple, child-version of “god’s one of mummy’s swearwords” over the more mature version of “OK, so you believe in that god-guy, but really, I don’t see him doing anything” to the adult version of “there’s no fucking evidence for any of the thousands of deities to ever have existed and your holy book is plain rubbish”.
Well, I was raised as a Christian. I was confirmed at the age of 11. I was an atheist at 14. They don’t get us all!
Most modern adults that are:
not clinically delusional or insane,
not under extreme social indoctrination and pressure (that is somewhat free to live as they choose),
and
somewhat intelligent, and moderately properly educated and qualified in secular humanities and science at at least a modern high school level
do not really believe in the sky-daddy stuff.
Why do I feel qualified to say this? Because one has to just look around and I’ve been around!
Re: god stuff, if people REALLY believed what they think they believe, and/or want so much to believe, and/or need so much to socially believe, there would be a heck of a lot less medical insurance and scotch bought if you see my point.
I judge people on their actions, and people when the chips are down essentially act as ATHEISTS! Sure – professed “true believers” go to the chapel to pray but it’s the hospital chapel ;-). That observation is important.
Religion especially in the USA is a social, political, and/or cultural game people play for good or bad. Least offensively the infrastructure and social aspects of the churches or synagogues or mosques can somewhat benignly provide real bennies in a world that often can seem without other praise, acceptance, comfort and/or support to the average person. Organized religion = club; well run clubs can still have some appeal and uses for good or bad even in a modern world.
On the other hand god belief is a mind-game and social game. People just suppress the downsides of “faith” and concentrate on the upsides. It is a calculation the mind does: warm fuzzies and social points accrued outweigh the losses (rightly or wrongly anticipated) of succumbing to reason and being intellectually honest and “god forbid” declaring to self and others your lack of faith and acceptance.
People can say without much consternation “I really don’t go to church – doesn’t appeal to me” as long as they add “but I believe in a higher power (of some sort) and have faith in it”. Most people can say this with straight face because their mind played the Platonic idealistic lie effectively.
I defy so-called believers to follow their faith in their higher power as advertised unequivocally. They don’t and would never! They know only a crazy person would!
I became an atheist at age 8. Then became an agnostic around age 15. Then an apatheist around age 21. Then an anti-theist around 35. Now I’m back to being an atheist again.
I must be doing it wrong.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. :-)
Not what he said.
If anything, his sense of aesthetics is what compelled him to pay about the price of a computer for the label that says “Made in China – Designed by Apple in California”.
Please explain.
As for upgrading, I’m still on XP Service Pack 3, and I like it.
:-D
The idea that religions target the young because they are easier to fool is not news to me. But another thing that bothers me is their lack of understanding of statistics. Given that 83% or Christians become Christians between the ages of 4 and 14 does not mean that the chances of converting someone in that age range to Christianity is 83%. But I am used to the misuse and misunderstanding of statistics.
Please explain.
you mean the principle, or the details?
The principle is that in cracking the OS, you don’t have to pay for the licensing fees.
as to the details; uh, I could, but it would technically be illegal to do so… here.
are you genuinely curious? If so, I can certainly give a quick tutorial (it’s very simple and there are multiple ways to accomplish the goal).
but you’d have to shoot me an email.
oh, and depending on what you’re trying to run, there’s nothing wrong with XP. It’s stable enough, and has much lower overhead than later Windows versions.
the only problem arises with updated drivers and libraries for hardware and software, which already have dropped off the radar for XP, and are about to for Vista.
so, if you’re using an older machine, stick with XP.
If it’s time for a new machine, and you want to save bucks on licensing fees, then write me.
I worked for five summers at an evangelical Christian summer camp. During their Counselor In Training program, they told us this statistic, or something like it. I was 15 years old, and I didn’t like how they blatantly evangelized to children when they were most “receptive”/vulnerable. Fortunately for myself, I did not have any interest in spreading the gospel. But it was one of the earliest moments when I seriously doubted Christianity. Within a couple of summers, being on the “front lines of evangelism” got too manipulative and contrived for me to handle. I can attest, targeting the 4-14 window for evangelism is real; I`ve seen it in practice.
I stuck with the practices of Christianity for a bit, even when I didn’t believe anymore. However, as soon as I had children, I didn’t want to be associated with it at all. I did not want to indoctrinate adolescents, and I certainly do not want to indoctrinate my own children. When my four-year-old daughter came out of Sunday School saying “God made the whole world in just six days,” my wife and I decided that we shouldn’t take the kids to church anymore. My daughter still struggles with “believing in God,” and she was only attending church, inconsistently, until she was four (4) or so.
However, I think it works for everything. Corporations know this, so they market to children and brand them as soon as they can. Of course the fast food and toy companies do it, but other companies do it as well. I imagine my daughters will drive Fords, be Canucks and Maple Leafs fans, and use Sony gaming products because those brands are ubiquitous in their lives. For example, both of my daughters recognized Boston Pizza, Go Bananas and Famous Players long before they ever could identify the Christian cross. Sunday School, summer camps, and corporations all know that the 4-14 window is the prime era for creating multi-generational brand loyalty.