If you were born in India, you would be Hindu

Are you saying that if I were born in a garage I would be a car?

Don't misunderstand me, I do not by any means dismiss the influence of culture/family on all sorts of things, including religion. This argument though, which I came across on youtube in a response by Richard Dawkins to a question,  is really a quite pathetic attempt to dismiss by contempt rather than by a  reasoned and logical argument.  If his argument were valid then why is he not a Christian?  Well I suspect he would answer that he is a thinker (with the implication that all who are religious are not).

I have seen  this type of arrogance before from academics. One man was so sure of the impossibility of the Christians position, that he suggested to me that Christians have different brain chemistry than non- Christians. In his mind,  this explained what he thought of as our stupidity.  But even if he was right about there being a difference in brain chemistry, it would not prove that he was right and we were wrong about God.

To dismiss all religious people as unthinking idiots as this “argument” does, is to discount many of the greatest thinkers of all time. Einstein, though not a Christian certainly believed in God. It was he who said “Science without religion is lame”.   Almost certainly what lies behind what he was saying is that the existence of a creator God best explains the facts that there is something there, and that there is order.  Modern Science was born in the Christian West out of the assumption that if it was all created by an intelligent being, then it would make sense to systematically study it. And Newton and many other great Scientists were and are Christian.  Even Darwin in his later years was a Christian.

Certainly it is not fashionable to be a Christian, but truth is determined neither by fashion, nor by democratic vote.  And most people I meet in this day and age have never examined the claims of Christ and Christianity with their adult minds  (see coming post Liar, Lunatic or Lord). To come back to the title of this post (and incidentally to the second part of the Einstein quote above), I want to admit that there are many who are religious who simply follow without engaging their minds. But non-religious people are not exempt from mindlessly following the culture.  How about you? Have you examined the claims of Christ with your adult mind?