Are we born with or without belief in a higher power???

[Proud_Democratt]

Without any religious indoctrination, would we as humans, have a natural draw to a god?

[Bunny]

1. I think humans are naturally drawn to contemplate their place

in the grand scheme of things. Religion is a man-made format in which to do that. There are ways to do that which do not involve religion, or even the belief in an afterlife.

[adriennui]

9. although there's got to be a higher power

to create something as beautiful as that precious rabbit.

[Proud_Democratt]

2. It's my opinion that

we are born without a belief in a higher power.

[baldguy]

3. Of course we're born with a belief in a higher power.

It's called Mom and Dad.

[the other one]

4. Yin and Yang

Some rise
Some fall
Some climb
To get to Terrapin

In other words, some people are born to seek the source, others are born to live in the world.

[stellanoir]

8. beautifully put

Couldn't agree with you more.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

10. Yes, and without that continuum

we would be unbalanced. We should celebrate the balance.

[marmar]

5. Fascinating question...

I can't imagine we'd have a natural inclination to believe something we can't see, hear, taste or touch without someone telling us that it exists.

[Proud_Democratt]

19. Good point!

[SPKrazy]

46. Unless We Had An Innate Ability To Understand Such Things

that we "unlearn" as we grow older.

[TriSec]

6. Learned behavior

No child is born with the slightest concept of a 'higher power'. Just looking at my own experiences...sure, I went to Sunday School and even got first communion, but once I was old enough to really know and decide for myself...I left the church.

I only returned for confirmation so I could get married in the church to please my in-laws, a move a later regretted. I have since left the church again, this time for good. That's got more to do with the child-abuse scandal in Boston and the ensuing and ongoing coverup...but I was a marginal 'believer' in Catholic doctrine to begin with.


But anyway....

[Minnesota Libra]

7. We're born knowing about Mom and Dad hence "Higher Power" nt

[TallahasseeGrannie]

11. And there is a lot of wisdom to your post

because many of us transfer that higher power concept to our faith. But the matriarch/patriarch model we are born into is the first step.

I wonder if there is any sort of correlation between relationship with parents and belief or disbelief?

[Minnesota Libra]

14. I truly believe the "belief or disbelief" part comes in when/if...........

....parents and grandparents teach their kids to think and pick apart everything for themselves.

In my experience, I was raised by fairly religiously fundamental grandparents who believed wholeheartedly in "spare the rod and spoil the child" and they (especially my grandmother) wasn't having anything to do with the "spoiled child" part. So that "rod" was a regular part of life in my house as was that Biblical "honor your parents" and "do as your told" message.

I'm not sure exactly where I got the message (maybe my great-grandmother or maybe my grandfather) but somewhere along the line I got the message to question everything and everyone. Even as a child I found myself weighing a person's words with their actions and as an extension of that weighing the Bible's message with real life. For me - and I'm probably one of the very few - who found the "loving heavenly father" message in direct contradiction with other Bible stories such as Job. So I've gone from non-questioning acceptance of the Bible to today being very much in confusion where the Bible and real life comes in.

I also taught my children - all grown now - to read, learn, and question everything. I taught them all to read at an early age (the newspaper before kindergarten) and would purposely pretend I didn't understand what an article meant. They then got the biggest bang out of trying to explain this article to dippy mom. The end result is that to this day each one of my kids can explain their professions to a non-member of that profession so the person understands the basics. That is quite an advantage especially with my computer tech son who runs circles around anyone on a computer, my ER nurse daughter. Out of four kids only one missed out on that constantly learning message but I figure every family generation has to have at least one of those and thank goodness we only have one.

So the short and sweet of this is that there has to be a tiny bit of built in willingness to question everything but the majority of it has to be taught by parents and grand parents.

[Random_Australian]

12. Other: When born we are without knowledge of God, but it is likely

somewhere in the creation of large social heirachies that God will spring up somewhere.

Just stats, as always. It is of course possible for a baby to have a concept of God, but it is ridiculously unlikely.

As for "have a natural draw to a God" - of course, for some of us at least.

[Finder]

13. We are born with it.

Although I am an atheist, sometimes looking up at the sky or at a mountain range triggers the feeling that there is something bigger out there.

[GreenArrow]

16. exactly

Consider how the first human beings must have felt when confronting such things as the night sky.

[Proud_Democratt]

24. That's because there was no scientific explanation.

It's funny how science can explain the simplest things.

[GreenArrow]

26. of course there were scientific explanations.

Not scientific, perhaps, as we understand the term in the modern sense, but geared towards the same ends. Once human beings gained conciousness, and began asking questions, they tested and explored and codified, within their means. Science and religion are branches on the same tree, the tree of knowledge. They are both ways of ordering the world. In terms of scientific achievment, ancient civilzations in Egypt and Meso-America had highly advanced astronomical systems, which were, interestingly enough, tied together with their religious systems.

I like the way Einstein puts it. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."


It's been a long road leading from the first men and women who sat shivering in treetops gazing in awe at the night sky, to our modern world of cell phones and microwave ovens and computers, but on a dark night, in a dark, quiet place it's still possible to look up into the night sky, into a world infinitely larger than all our imaginings, and wonder why.

Consider:



"The next time you’re outdoors at night under a cloudless sky, look for the familiar "Big Dipper." Outstretch an arm toward the Dipper’s handle and pretend to hold a grain of sand between your thumb and first finger. In this region, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed just such a sand-grained size pinhole of space. The 10 day exposure captured glimmers of light four billion times fainter than the dimmest object visible to the naked eye. The light came from galaxies 8 to 10 billion light years beyond the Earth (to grasp an inkling of that unbelievable distance, recall that light travels at 186,282 miles per second and covers almost 6 trillion miles in one light year).

The image, taken in December 1995, contains over a thousand galaxies. The mind-boggling distances and the multicolored galaxies, strewn like sparkling jewels on black velvet, leave viewers agog -- "

http://home.utm.net/pan/hubble.htm

[Proud_Democratt]

27. I'm sorry...but God's existance is no mystery.

How would you describe a mystery? It's been fabled, written about, fought over, but never once been proven..due to lack of evidence.

[SPKrazy]

47. Yet, Even The Scientists Can't Agree

about everything that "science explains"

[TechBear_Seattle]

15. Can a newborn believe anything?

I say the answer to that more basic question is no. Therefore, the answer to your question must be no as well.

[GreenArrow]

17. I believe so

All that is required is for a human being to ask the questions why, where, who, and how.

[manic expression]

18. In my opinion,

Generally, humans are drawn to questions of the divine. It's natural for us to seek answers, and when we ask questions that pertain to things that are not easily observed, many of those topics fall in the realm of religion. Yes, as human beings, our natural tendency is to seek a higher truth. How else do you explain the way religion developed independently in many different regions?

On the individual question of nature vs. nurture, I think it's both. Someone might be more inclined to be religious, someone might naturally have a mindset which aligns with one religion more than others, someone might be more into the cultural aspects and not the philosophical. However, the way someone is raised does mean something, and a would-be strong atheist could end up being an apathetic follower or even pretty pious due to their upbringing. I would say that most people do eventually align themselves with their nature more than their nurture because people end up finding themselves. Just my opinion.

[Finder]

20. Again, the terms spirituality and religion get blurred...

IMO. Spirituality is felt, religion is learned. I agree with your nature/nurture comments.

Before humans understood how reproduction worked, it was assumed creation was a feminine principle. That is why there were goddesses before there were gods.

[manic expression]

21. Yes,

but they do relate. Religion is a philosophy that many adhere to, while spirituality is (as you said) simply felt. I do think that spirituality does feed into religion; it is the source of the desire for religion.

Masculine and feminine deities were/are usually seen as complimentary and both were/are important in many religions. Religion reflected the understanding of the people who worshipped it, but that doesn't necessarily make one way of thinking about it incorrect (if that makes any sense).

[Nikia]

22. I know that I had an early belief in divinity

I don't know if it was a result in hanging out in the Church nursery or something else. I remember wondering about the nature of God and also of other people before I went to kindergarten. An early memory, when I must have been about three, was wondering if all other people were conscious and had feelings and a soul like I knew that I did.

[Proud_Democratt]

23. Interesting, earnest story.

[NMMNG]

25. Religion/belief in god is indoctrinated

I knew nothing of religion and God as a deity for eight years. I'd heard the name "God" but for all intents and purposes he was just somebody TV characters talked about from time to time. He wasn't real in any way to me. Then my mother got bitten by the religion bug and began taking me and my sisters to Sunday School and church services every Sunday. It was then that I was told that God was someone for me to worship, love and pray to. I got my first Bible shortly thereafter, and was later baptized by full immersion. A few years later my mom's church interest waned and we stopped gong to church (though she resumed attendance after I became an adult). If it hadn't been for that temporary burst of religiosity she had at that time I may have remained an atheist all my life rather than spending some +/- 21 years as a Christian.

[lvx35]

28. BS poll. It comes from EXPERIENCE.

Not indoctrination, not socially learned, internally learned from prayer/mediation.

[Proud_Democratt]

29. It might depend on religion.

[SPKrazy]

30. I Think That We Are Born With The Ability To Believe

but that belief comes from learning and experience

[TallahasseeGrannie]

31. I think we are born

with a need to believe. Some of us. I really buy into the whole "faith gene" idea.

[CarbonDate]

32. The only higher power we believe in at birth....

...goes by the name "mother". Within a few years, we also learn of another higher power named "father". In some cases, we also learn of the nemesis known as "older brother".

But no, "God" is strictly indoctrinated.

[NMMNG]

33. Interesting answer

But there's another nemesis some youngsters learn of...."older sister". ;-)

[beam me up scottie]

34. Yeah, mine learned to fear me later on, though.

When he kept falling down screaming that I had hit him in order to get me into trouble.

So I started hitting him since I was getting punished for it anyway.

Ah, life's little lessons...
:D

[NMMNG]

35. I was the "older sister"

I was quite mean to my younger sister for no valid reasons. By the time my baby sister was old enough to be beat up I'd grown out of it, so she got lucky.

[SPKrazy]

39. You Might Be My Sister BMUS

You even have the same first name I think

but my sister doesn't live in fundieland anymore:cry:

So now, I'm here, with my little family, fighting the good fight!

But my sister was just like you! Always setting me up to get the blame for everything!

Only I'm the one who started hitting her since I was getting punished for it anyway.

on edit, didn't change anything after all.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

36. You need to think about how to pose a poll.

"Yes" and "No" would have been perfectly good, but lumping people who think that we are born with that belief but not that it's natural (although I admit I can't imagine there are many such) together with people who believe that we are born without such belief but that it is not necessarily a product of social indoctrination (like me) muddles the issue - adding the qualifiers to the "yes" and "no" was a mistake.

It is, I think, fairly clear that most two-year-olds don't believe in a God in any meaningful sense- they haven't even thought about that sort of thing yet. It does not, however, seem to me at all implausible that if you were to put a group of babies on an island together and they were to grow up without external influence then they might well come to believe in something similar to a god, either initially or within a few generations.

After all, the first person to believe in a God *can't* have been indoctrinated into doing so.

[omega minimo]

37. Are we born with or without belief in a higher power?

Yes

[SPKrazy]

38. Yes?

what?


:shrug:

[omega minimo]

40. Are you supposing that we are all the SAME in this regard?

:hi:

[SPKrazy]

43. No I Was Trying To Figure If You Were Saying "Yes" To One, or Both

my guess is you are saying yes to both.

Am I supposing we are all the same?

I don't know.

I think that (my beliefs) we are all children of God, and I don't know why we would be different in that regard. Our upbringing, experiences, and free will come together with genetic influences that may or may not have an effect on our spiritual beliefs. (I think that the jury is still out on the idea that some have a "God gene" and others don't. I mean, what exactly would that mean if it were true? I think they discovered something, but a gene that determines belief in God?)

Of course, the truth is that no one knows what the truth is.


:hi:

[omega minimo]

44. The "right" answer is in #22 by Nikia

Many/most children experience the super/natural until they are of an age that their connection is shut down by adults

[SPKrazy]

45. I Think That Is True

But I'm not sure if it is just adults that shut it down.

Or maybe other adults outside of the family.

Or maybe we do.

I know I've never tried to shut down my son's beliefs

his first speaking of God, was referring to God as she, and her.

It could have been just gender specificity confusion, but we never "corrected" him.

He now only occasionally calls God she. (of course he occasionally calls me Mom)

[omega minimo]

48. !

:thumbsup:

[moobu2]

41. Like everything else

Homo sapiens are born with a predisposition for the ability, then “nurture” and social conditioning controls how that predisposition manifests itself.

[musical_soul]

42. I don't remember being born.

I can't answer that question.