Why I Am Of The (fill-in-blank) Faith

It’s a generally well-known fact that most of the people in the world, past and present, identify themselves with a religion. In east Asia, we see the prevalence of Buddhism, while on the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu religion predominates. Islam covers northern Africa, parts of the Balkans, central and southwest Asia, Indonesia and some neighboring lands. Christianity is the “majority” religion in Europe, Australia, parts of Africa, and North and South America. Judaism is the main identified faith in Israel and in many local communities spread throughout the world, especially in the United States. And, of course, there are many other faiths as well. Besides this, the main religions are all subdivided into various sects. Someone in, say, Libya, is likely to grow up in the Islamic faith, while a resident of Bombay is very likely to be a Hindu. A Cambodian farmer is probably going to live his life out as a Buddhist, while a child in Alabama will find him or herself growing up in a culture of Christianity. And a student growing up in Tel Aviv will most likely consider herself to be Jewish.

As the children in the various diverse cultures all over the world grow up into adults, they often will become more aware of their culture’s and/or their family’s religious faith and will become educated as to that faith’s doctrine. More likely than not, that doctrine will teach that, whatever faith it is, it happens to be the exclusively correct divinely-inspired faith. By exclusively, I mean that this excludes all other religions from being acceptable to the believer. Thus, an adult believer in his or her predominant faith will learn to look down, either with concern, pity, or contempt, at the followers of other religions.

But the overwhelming reason that a person becomes an adherent to a particular faith isn’t that said faith is “The Way”: the reason is quite simply the fact that the believer was born and raised in that religion’s culture, either as part of a seriously devoted family, or simply as a general member of the society where that religion prevails as an accepted part of the culture. So, a born-again Christian in America may be considered to be a true convert by his church, but in reality he most likely had been exposed to Christian culture in one way or another his whole life, even if his family wasn’t religious.

True converts, that is, people who reject their beliefs that were prevalent in their home culture and adopt a “foreign” religion, are in reality relatively rare in number. The overwhelming body of religious believers in the world did not choose their faith: the accident of birth within a particular society or family mainly determined their religious identity. I believe that it is a gross form of self-deception for one, therefore, to ignore this fact while waving their own religion’s scriptures around to try and convince people that they are out of favor with (or separated from) God just because they were born and raised somewhere else.

An honest person, with few exceptions, would answer the question “Why am I of the ___ faith?” by saying “Because that religion was the prevalent one in the societal and family context that I was born and raised in.” I’m afraid that our planet is in for a very dismal future if people don’t just grow up and show a little mature awareness on this matter!