"How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one" - Richard Dawkins.
It's amusing how people are totally fine starting with pretenses and assumptions and because they were born in an accepting community to that belief, they learn to never change or even challenge their core ideas. A literal 'safe space' - especially in the age of the Internet, ignorance is a conscious choice for religious people.
No matter where you are born, what religion you are brought up in, essentially you have a choice. Common sense prevails.
So why do people choose to remain ignorant? Cognitive Dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.
For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Your religion is merely a matter of geography. I’ve had this argument with religious friends who are critical of Muslims. They get angry when I tell them they’d be Muslim if they had been born 8000 miles east.
I tell this to Muslims as well. “You’d be a Christian if you were born in Europe instead of Pakistan”...and just like your Christian friends, my Muslim friends get extremely angry when I say this.
There are theists that will spin this and try to make it as evidence for a god bc they will say all the religions are the same god and it was man who messed up the interpretation.
But then the counter argument is why your specific sect the right one?
Unless their just a plain deist, the original counter argument wouldn’t hold much water..
also how coincidental that good things come to them as a "blessing" while bad things are challenges to them. how egotistical and they don't even know it, and huge confirmation bias..
When I was 12 years old I asked my mother why she was a Christian and she said it was because that's what she was taught. I said does that mean if you would have been taught a different religion you would have followed that and she said yes..