As people come into self-consciousness, some of them consciously look for a new religion different from their family's or (if their family is irreligious) they consciously choose to find a religion to adopt or (if their family is religious) they consciously choose to reject religion. Conscious seekers are probably a minority. For the rest, it's more a matter of custom than anything else.
> > But till children acquire critical self-consciousness,
> they basically inherit their parents' and/or their
> community's religion or lack thereof.
>
> Which is what marks them as children.
In my daily life, I use English more often than Japanese, my mother tongue. That is not a common pattern. Most people use only or mainly the language they acquire as children.
> > It's not religion as such with which Europe has a
> problem. It's a particular religion common among its
> new immigrants, and therein lies the difficulty.
>
> The difficulty lies in Islam itself (as with all Abrahamic
> iterations). Whether Islam was introduced through
> immigrants or it was a native-born ideology, I think
> people would have a problem with it. What is
> complicating is the fact that people often use legitimate
> issues with regard to Islam as a stalking horse for
> anti-immigrant sentiments.
Most religious people in Europe are of Abrahamic faith. Why should Europeans have more problems with Islam than Christianity or Judaism or any other religion? There are far more similarities among Islam, Christianity, and Judaism than there are, say, between Christianity and Shinto or between Islam and Zoroastrianism. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>