You only believe because of where you were born. It is geography, not truth.
John Hick popularized the point: if you had been born in Saudi Arabia you would almost certainly be Muslim; in Thailand, Buddhist; in Mumbai, Hindu. The strong correlation between geographic accident and religious conviction suggests your beliefs are socially conditioned, not arrived at by truth-seeking. You should hold them with the epistemic humility due to accidents of birth.
The argument is self-undermining and proves too much. (1) The genetic fallacy: the origin of a belief has no necessary bearing on its truth. If I believe 2+2=4 because my parents taught me, the belief is still true. If beliefs are false merely because they are culturally transmitted, then the objector's own secular convictions - which are also predictably distributed by geography (Western Europe, elite universities, urban centers) - are equally disqualified. Secularism is far more statistically predictable from upbringing than, say, Christianity in China or Iran, where belief runs against the culture. (2) The argument proves too much: you would also have had different political, scientific, linguistic, and moral beliefs had you been born elsewhere and elsewhen. Do we therefore abandon all of these? No - we evaluate them on evidence and argument. Religious claims deserve the same treatment. (3) The relevant question is not where you happened to start but whether, on reflection, you have good reasons. Millions of converts in every direction - Christians in historically Muslim countries, Muslims in historically Christian countries, atheists in historically religious families, believers in historically atheist ones - show that the geographic correlation is not destiny. (4) Christianity is historically a religion that spread by persuasion and martyrdom, not inherited ethnicity; its center of gravity has shifted from Jerusalem to Rome to Northern Europe to the Global South, where it is now growing fastest. The idea that it is a "Western" religion is a parochial 20th-century view.
Granted: your starting point is accidental. But what you do with it is not. The question is not "where did you begin?" but "have you looked?"
Sources & citations
- The Reason for God — Timothy Keller (2008)popularFind on Amazon