> Jon wrote:
>
> "But this question is certainly worth scientific inquiry (if anyone
> knows of a research report on such an inquiry, I'd be happy to know
> about it): what, in this man's God's country, makes a secularist? Why,
> in the end, are some people apparently immune to God-talk when so many
> of their neighbor's swallow it whole?"
>
> More importantly (to me), why is it black and white: immune or
> swallow-whole idiot? Can you not conceive of shades inbetween?
Of course, there are lots of shades in between. I was referring very sloppily to contrasting tendencies, and human psychology is made up of spectra of tendencies.
What I think I had in mind was that, given the pervasive irrationality in Americans' world-views (including everything from traditional religions to beliefs in astrology, alien abductions, crystal vibrations, and on and on), what accounts for the fact that some people seem to learn to live without such notions (or at least, taking the shades of gray you refer to into consideration, *relatively* without them)? Of course, family upbringing may account for a lot of it (my father, an engineer, was way over on the rational end of the spectrum, and my mother was fairly far over there, too), but I suspect genetics also has something to do with it. Probably there hasn't been any research on this as yet, given the great difficulty so far of linking up genetics with psycholog.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt