Maybe, but I think if its in your genes to believe in God, then most likely you will be brought up to believe in God anyway. but, lets say it's in your genes to believe in God, and something happens and you're never introduced to God or you are not brought up to believe in god or go to church every week, will you still believe in God because it's in your Genes?

Someone might have to explain this better to me, because I don't think it can be in your genes to believe in something. My above thoughts were pretty jumbled, I didn't quite know how to say it..

I'm fairly sure there's no such thing as a genetic cause for belief in a deity, but there are genetic traits that lend themselves to it. Genetic contributions to personality (e.g., dependency), brain chemistry, etc, all contribute to believing or not believing.

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Shut up, davo.

I sure am glad mankind elected you spokesperson for us all.

I wouldn't f..king love to have an afterlife. It'd kinda bum me out.

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You're just pissy because you know you can't escape what's encoded into the very essence of your existence.

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You can't really know that for sure

You can't really know that for sure.

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You're cool

Chemistry, more than anything, does indeed dictate HOW one, thinks, WHAT one thinks, WHEN one thinks, etc, etc, etc. I recall seeing earlier that a wide variety of neurochemicals, like serotonin, have been observed to increase levels of religiosity in individuals who produce more of the stuff naturally. The funny thing is that when the brain produces large amounts of tryptamines (doesn't really matter the particular variety) or if large amounts are ingested, people tend to more easily believe things are there, that aren't. It's easy to fool the brain. . .too easy.

It's been postulated, but only loosely supported, that hyper religious folks' brains are cranking moderately larger amounts of native 'drugs' (see dimethyltryptammine) that put them in almost a blissful state. Again, it's only loosely supported, and only a single study has been done on the topic. Fascinating stuff nonetheless.

I wasn't mocking you, just pointing out epistemological irony. I'd say that there's nothing we can really be sure about, but I'm not really sure about that.

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I don't see how that's ironic. You can't know that the afterlife is boring since you haven't experienced it.

Or have you?