How to convert

Seth is dead-on:

The most important thing you can do is choose who you're hanging out with.

Determinism is depressing, and yes, you are determined by your environment. The wonderful catch is that you can choose your environment, now more than ever. You can't choose to have grown up in Pittsburgh, but you can choose to move to San Francisco. (You're also determined by the chemicals in your brain, but that's a different story.)

This is the reason there are no more Amish in Europe. In America, there is still plenty of space for Amish families to live close to one another in larger or smaller communities. In Europe, land was already at a premium by the early 1700's, and so Amish families ended up scattered here and there throughout the cities, mixing with "the English." Over the next few generations, they simply faded back in. The Hasidim show that it's possible in the city, but again, not for isolated families.

This is also behind Prof. Callahan's advice to us back in the day: If you're losing your faith and don't want to, then go to church! And here Leander is also dead-on:

The church is not the community of those who believe so much as the community that enables belief.

(That's from his unpublished dissertation on Horace Bushnell, which I just finished. I passed it on to Jack, who is working on getting it published. Stay tuned.)

And this is also why tract evangelism doesn't work. People don't convert, they adapt to their environment. This takes a lot longer but holds a lot deeper, and it's why raising Christian children is the surest form of evangelism. But again, the surest way to raise Christians is to be one. Some call this brainwashing and child abuse, but only for positions they oppose, and really it's the lack of nuance they hate (cults are basically those systems where the opposition-to-nuance ratio is highest). Seth's point is that we're all brainwashed, but it happens slow enough that we can affect it. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.