I don't think that environmental factors are heritable traits, but environmental factors certainly favor some genetic configurations over others. So I would say that you are confusing the roles of parent and child. In any case, I suspect that you are flirting too much with a
genetic fallacy here.
Leaving aside the questionable assumption that people tend to move on the basis of their cognitive sympathies (and less so for factors such as job opportunities and family matters), you are again begging the question by claiming that "genetic qualities set the framework for the environment". That is the conclusion that your argument is supposed to support, but it appears as just a bald assertion. Stable environments tend to favor and disfavor heritable traits, but you haven't proven that religious behavior is even remotely correlated with genetic inheritance.
It bears repeating that I am not denying differences in the behavior of religious and non-religious people. The issue is over what causes those differences, and rank speculation gets very low marks as a premise when it comes to drawing a reasonable conclusion.
Look, I once took a seminar in language acquisition from the noted developmental psychologist,
Brian MacWhinney. We got to discussing Noam Chomsky's claim that the language faculty is innate in human beings--a claim that is considered one of his hallmark contributions to the study of language. Chomsky's claim was based largely on the existence of linguistic universals--traits that one could claim to exist across all human languages. Chomsky conjectured that there was no other good explanation for them other than the existence of some kind of "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) in the brains of human beings. MacWhinney was quite unimpressed by that claim, because, as a developmental psychologist, he never questioned that the linguistic faculty was at least partially attributable to human genetics. Our brains are predisposed to acquire spoken languages. At the very least, it helps us understand why there are no human communities anywhere that lack a naturally-acquired language. And we can observe a schedule of maturation with recognizable environmental trigger points to mature language behavior. However, MacWhinney dismissed a great many of Chomsky's more substantive claims about specific linguistic properties. He said that there needed to be more than the fact that a given property was ubiquitous (i.e. universal) in human language. Some could easily be attributed to other factors in human society. The question was always what was inherited or innate versus what was learned solely through environmental exposure. You can't simply jump to facile conclusions the way Chomsky was prone to doing. And it seems to me that several folks have been doing that in this thread.
You seem to have misunderstood my post in a number of places. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to prove anything to you, but you are the one making a strong assertion despite contrary evidence existing (which I've pointed you to).
You've made a pretty bold claim that there is no significant difference in brain architecture between the religious and non-religious, despite religiosity being correlated with gender, political orientation, and IQ. If you think that comes entirely down to the environment and not neural architecture I really don't know what else to tell you.
But if it wasn't clear already I'm not arguing that religious belief is heritable, I'm arguing that certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely.
I guess we'll have to let it go at that, since you aren't directing me to anything specific that I've missed or misrepresented in your posts. We can certainly agree that "certain cognitive faculties make belief more likely", but maybe we disagree on how individuals come to have those faculties. It is very easy to attribute differences between communities of believers to genetic, rather than environmental factors, as we've seen in debates over differences among racial, ethnic, and national groups. Therefore, I believe we should exercise extreme caution before trying to make the case, for example, that religious fanatics or political fanatics are genetically predisposed to be that way. That's not to deny that they could be, but we need some reasonably good evidence to support that conclusion. Merely observing that different groups are statistically more likely to exhibit certain behaviors is not enough.
Unfortunately with a one year old in tow and another on the way I get diminishing returns with more and more effort to convince people of something online.
I believe if you were to do some quick Googling on Google Scholar for something like 'cognitive differences between the religious/non-religious' the answer would be sitting right there. To me all I really need to see are the clear associations and trends, and the reality of a neural explanation is intuitively obvious.
I would also be careful in drawing an analogy between religion and racial, ethnic, and national groups with regards to cognitive differences. Religion is in an entirely different class, and it's identity isn't even well-defined. Your argument applies very well to race/ethnicity/nationality, but religion is cross-cultural and doesn't really respect any clear boundaries.
In my view, if you break it down, religious thought is pretty much just a puzzle that some people are able to break through, and others aren't. I could go into quite a bit of depth about how most of us
aren't able to break through it, and how this is completely normal, but that's another thread. The overarching point is that some people are never able to figure it out, while others are. Some people are deep into delusion, while others experience more subtle forms.
In my father's family there are 5 siblings, all identical upbringing, all went to church every week, all lived in the same town, none of them went on to higher education. But some of them are devoutly religious while others aren't. Some of them.. even after many decades are true believers. Of course this is just a single anecdote, but I think it demonstrates the point well: essentially identical upbringing and environment, but different outcomes. So what do we attribute the difference in outcomes to if not genetic cause? Randomness? Some people are unlucky enough to not be exposed to materialistic thought? That sounds a lot more far-fetched to me than
some people just think differently and experience the world differently than others due to innate qualities.