Catch them while they're young

I've been wondering whether it's easier to decide on your philosophy of life, a particular religion or lack of religion, when you are older or younger.

Like most people in the UK I was brought up in a culturally Christian household. The rest of the family believed in the religion they had been brought with, but didn't go to church and religion didn't really have any effect on our daily lives.

At the age of about 11-12, I decided to take myself off to the local Baptist church and Sunday school to find out what this religion business was all about. I began to realise that I couldn't take all the parables literally, as everyone seemed to, and the whole story started to make less and less sense.

Not long after my church experience, we were given a course in Comparative Religions in school. This finally convinced me that religion was a made-made phenomenon and that all the believers around me were just following the religion that they were brought up in.

So, by the age of 13 I was a devout atheist (although strictly I should say a strong agnostic - just to be logically consistent!). Maybe I was lucky as my parents hadn't forced religion on me, but I didn't ever feel that I had wasted any time or intellectual effort on believing. My  'belief' was just something that I went along with, like Santa or the tooth fairy and giving it up didn't worry me.

I can imagine that if I had truly believed what people had been telling me and I had run my life on that basis, that it would be very difficult to make such a change in philosophy later in life. I guess the longer you follow a particular way of thinking the harder it is to change. Also, you get comfortable with your way of thinking and you may not want to start thinking about it too deeply in case you realise you have been wasting your time.

I'm not saying that everyone ought to believe the same as me, but as most children are brought up in a society that is culturally religious, they should be given full sight of all the alternative viewpoints (through comparative religion or critical thinking courses) so they realise there is a choice and they don't have to believe everything they have been told.