Second, you have ignored my main argument almost entirely. My argument was that - were people to accept Dawkins' epistemic claim here - it would affect not just their religious beliefs negatively but a whole host of other non-religious beliefs as well. You believe that many religious adherents' beliefs are unjustified because they receive them from authorities in their culture. My argument is that this is part of human nature. People just do this, on just about every topic imaginable. Do you think that political beliefs or aesthetic beliefs or moral beliefs are somehow immune from this syndrome? Do you think there isn't a large percentage of liberal Democrats who are liberal Democrats just because there parents taught them to be Democrats? Or are you under the impression that, aside from religion, people are naturally rational who think through every one of their beliefs carefully and logically and come to a justified conclusion? This is nothing more than special pleading against religion. It's a poor attempt at twisting a simple truism ("Don't believe something just because everyone around you believes it!") into a cudgel with which to bash religion.

Third, your and Dawkins' argument is a nice example of the genetic fallacy. Your attempted move from the premise ("All or a majority of religious people have beliefs which are unjustified because they received those beliefs from their parents or culture") to your conclusion ("No religion is true!") is logically invalid. If I ever write a textbook on logic, I might use this as an example of an egregious non sequitur. If I haven't characterized your premise or conclusion accurately, feel free to correct me.

Fourth, I'm not sure that a religious believer isn't at least partially justified by accepting his religious beliefs on the basis of a proper authority in his culture. Suppose I have someone in my life who I think is particularly perceptive, wise, virtuous, rational, etc., and suppose that person tells me to believe in Christianity. I trust this person completely. Why am I irrational if I put this person's authority in the plank of the foundation for my religious beliefs? I grant that it wouldn't be very rational to rely on such authority alone, but to tell you the truth I don't know a single Christian who does this. The oft-repeated skeptical claim that religious people believe on authority alone just isn't right. Some of them do, and some religions lend themselves more to groundless belief than others. So what? Some people accept atheism solely based on the authority of their parents or teachers as well.

Surely, you don’t think it’s just a coincidence that nearly everyone in Arkansas decided to become Christians based on cold logic and reason while nearly everyone in Afghanistan decided to become Muslim based on cold logic and reason. A visit to any Sunday school or Madrasah will confirm that the children in that particular cultural soup are being heavily indoctrinated in the preferred religion. “Reason and logic”, carefully selected and contrived, are added later to reinforce and justify the indoctrinees after they’ve been indelibly pre-conditioned to believe only what supports their indoctrination.

Wow! You must have visited every Sunday School and Madrasah in the world in order to come to that conclusion. How else would you be able to boldly claim that all of them are guilty of this kind of indoctrination? Plus, "indoctrination" is an emotionally-charged word. It is also ambiguous. Parents all over the world teach their children what they think is right regarding morality, religion, politics, etc. Some of them actually do indoctrinate their children by just telling them to believe in the absence of good reasons for believing. Others can make a very strong case for their beliefs and pass this on to their children. It's the same with Sunday Schools. I'm not sure how either of these facts are supposed to make a dent in the religious believers' justification for his beliefs. As Christians, the apostle Peter commands us to give an apologia for the hope we have anyway, so if Second Baptist Church down the street is trying to force Christianity down kids' throats without presenting the case for the Christian worldview, they're in sin. Oh and by the way, I'm sure atheist parents never indoctrinate their kids, do they?

Of course none of this is absolute, which as far as I can tell, is your only objection to the Dawkin’s quote and the purpose of the variations you gave on that quote. I’ll grant you that, but I’m sure Dawkins didn’t mean it to be absolute. He knows there are exceptions. For instance.…some kids don’t get much or any indoctrination, and some kids who do, break free and reason their way to a religious position different than their parents. (e.g. Cat Stevens, Tony Alamo, Charles Darwin, G.I. Boyette) Still others may reason their way to a position that is very much like the indoctrination they received from their parents. Although you didn’t say so, I gather you place yourself in this last category. If so, please feel “justified” to express your “Reason A, Reason B, Reason C and so forth. I’m anxious to hear them. In the meantime, Dawkins rules!

Yes, that was my point. But I don't think Dawkins would allow for exceptions. His policy is to give no quarter to religion, even if he has to make bad arguments to keep the policy intact. Further, it seems your argument only works if you accept the conclusion as one of the premises. If you are convinced from the outset that all religion is bunkum and that there is no way any religious worldview can ever be justified by evidence or argumentation, then of course you will think that every instance of religious teaching is "indoctrination." It's fine to think that way, but not to use that conclusion as a premise against the theist! That kind of argument (where the conclusion is a premise) may be appropriate for a meeting of the local skeptic's society, but that bird won't fly on this blog. You will have to earn your conclusions here. You can't just begin with your conclusions as premises and expect me (or any other Christian, for that matter) to be convinced by your argument. I'm sure somewhere there is a Christian apologetics society where the members sit around and complain that atheist or skeptical parents and teachers are "indoctrinating" their children with atheism. This is a reasonable opinion for them to share among themselves since they are each already convinced that there can never be a justified case for atheism that a parent or teacher may pass on to their child. But if one of them were to take that opinion and use it as a premise in a debate with an atheist, he would be laughed off the stage.

And I do place myself in the category you mention, although I wasn't actually converted until age 19. My parents were Christians, and so am I. That doesn't bother me in the least, and I don't think it should. If I suspected that they had somehow tricked me and I became convinced through other means that Christianity was false, then I would abandon my beliefs. But I don't, and I didn't, so I won't. I'm thankful they taught Christian beliefs to me, since now more than ever I see them to be true. Everyone has some moral, religious, aesthetic, or political beliefs they learned from their parents, including you. Tell me: have you identified those beliefs and, if so, do they keep you up at night worrying that those beliefs might not be justified because you learned them from your parents? Of course not. It's true that one isn't justified in accepting a belief just because they learned it from their parents, but the converse is also true: one isn't justified in rejecting a belief just because they learned it from their parents or culture either.

On the subject of why I accept Christianity, I don't have much time to give a detailed account here, but I'll give the short version. I accept the Christian worldview because it provides the best explanatory framework over the range of human experience. My beliefs thus rest on the foundation of a cumulative case for Christianity. There are many good evidences and arguments for God's existence, for the historicity of the Gospels, for the objective nature of moral facts, etc. that, when paired with my own religious experiences and the historical experience of my religious community, sets the Christian worldview well above all others in terms of explanatory power over the world. I do not claim that there are any conclusive arguments for Christianity (i. e. it can not be proven with Cartesian certainty), but that isn't a problem. I don't have conclusive arguments against solipsism, or against the claim that I am a brain in a vat, or for the claim that other minds like mine exist, or whatever. There are good arguments for all these things, just like there are good arguments for God's existence, but none that are fool-proof. Hence I put more stock in the coherence and explanatory power of my worldview than its proof status, although I do not discount evidence or good arguments for Christianity. There are many good and valuable evidences of this sort, but none that are likely to convince a committed skeptic like you. It takes a good old, road to Damascus, authentic God-encounter to do that.

As for Dawkins, he is a good scientist but a poor philosopher. He is too ignorant to even recognize how his own philosophical assumptions affect his reasoning. His recent books have, unfortunately, influenced a whole new generation of atheists who think belligerency, bluster, and sloppy argumentation are the way to defeat religious belief. For my money, I'd rather read John Mackie, Michael Martin, or Quentin Smith. Those guys actually have arguments that cause me to wrestle with some of my beliefs. Dawkins is a hack who attacks only the weakest versions of theism and then proclaims himself the victor. Such straw-man argumentation may be good enough for the growing community of atheist agitators, but not for me. If you want to see what I'm talking about, read the posts in my Contra Dawkins section of this blog. I've done quite a bit of work on him that you may find interesting. As to your other comments on my post about Chesterton, I hope to be able to address those soon.