From 2008: "Readers born to atheist parents have missed out on a fundamental life trial"
Not really, in my experience. First of all there are plenty of other silly things to believe in, such my parents tended to believe in feel-good liberal adages like "violence never solves anything".
But actually the experience made me learn from religious people quite a lot. For this reason: like for most modern secular liberal Europeans, for my parents the kind of history we live in began not so long ago. A few centuries ago. Or maybe 1945. Everything before is The Dark Ages. The Dark Ages are the period where people were both stupid and evil and we can learn nothing from them. Everybody before Galilei was an idiot. Modern ideas, from democracy to human rights are not simply right but obviously so.
Well, imagine my surprise when I made some Catholic friends with a slight conservative bent, who, through their religion, inherited quite older historical ideas, which came accross as new, interesting and thoughtful to me. Roughly the same kinds of ideas you can get from Chesterton. Or Tolkien.
Having said that, religion is not necessary for this, any atheist with a keen interest in history can have ideas like that. For example, my Catholic friends proposed it may not be entirely true that there cannot be anything wrong, ever, with gay people, it can actually be something like narcissism, as it is based on falling in love with people who are a reflection of the self. I still don't know if it is true but at least it explains a bit why some of the gay folks I knew from raves wanted all the attention all the time. Later on, I learned that this idea actually has nothing to do with Catholic tradition: it was invented by Freud. Who is generally not seen a particularly conservative fellow although this idea of his was clearly un-PC by now.
So, ultimately, it is not about religion then, it just seems my liberal-secular parents were too much in the narrow "canon" and my religious friends (who had some conservative bent) were simply aware of the existence of ideas outside it.
Have you discovered the neoreactionaries yet? :-)
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.