> 99.99% have it passed down by their parents and their extended family and the culture they live in. They live life without questioning it and can't even see past it.
I was raised in a religion that emphasizes understanding the belief system and arguments for it (the focus on valuing the truth was what caused me to ultimately leave, btw.). So I do have first-hand experience of what it means to believe in something for perfectly good reason with strong, consistent arguments. And I have to tell you, while most religious people probably believe for reasons like you just described, I've seen and talked to many self-proclaimed atheists and many refuse to believe for exactly the same reasons - they were raised as atheists. Or they discovered that atheism is what cool people do, or didn't want to stand out from the crowd.
People who don't believe in supernatural aren't inherently smarter than those who do. For many (I suspect most) of them, atheism is a blind faith, the same way Christianity is for their parents.
I was raised in a religion that emphasizes understanding the belief system and arguments for it (the focus on valuing the truth was what caused me to ultimately leave, btw.). So I do have first-hand experience of what it means to believe in something for perfectly good reason with strong, consistent arguments. And I have to tell you, while most religious people probably believe for reasons like you just described, I've seen and talked to many self-proclaimed atheists and many refuse to believe for exactly the same reasons - they were raised as atheists. Or they discovered that atheism is what cool people do, or didn't want to stand out from the crowd.
People who don't believe in supernatural aren't inherently smarter than those who do. For many (I suspect most) of them, atheism is a blind faith, the same way Christianity is for their parents.