Religion has a surprisingly high correlation with poverty, according to a Gallup survey conducted in more than 100 countries. The more poverty a nation has, the higher the “religiosity” in that nation. In general, richer countries are less religious than poorer ones.
The above of course paints a different story. It's a story I'm familiar with, because I found myself asking, if you grew up in a different part of the world - on an island on the opposite side of the world - would you still believe the things you feel so strongly about now?
My experience is that people find it hard to reasonably argue they would. What you're exposed to plays just far too large a role in what you believe. If in no way else than in the limited range of concepts from which you have to choose whether to believe in or not:
We sometimes like to believe that our ideas are our own, but ideas don't come from nowhere, and beliefs even less so. They come from exposure to the ideas of others.
(one dilemma to consider for another time: On the surface this seems a bit discouraging, that our ideas are not our own, though taken one level deeper, we can see that as sentient beings we are the architects of the environments we put ourselves into and the exposure that results. Except - and this is the dilemma part - we have no control over the environments in which we've been initially placed (conditions of our birth and growing up, etc), which have a lot if not everything to say about how we go about constructing our environments later. hmm. Not sure how to approach this yet. You?)
