Why we really believe what we believe

So I’m on this religion discussion board, and recently the rather mundane observation was made that people’s religious beliefs tend to mirror their family of origin. Overwhelmingly, Muslim adults were born into Muslim families. Jewish adults were born into Jewish families. Christians in Christian families, Hindus with Hindus, Buddhists with Buddhists, etc. A very low number of people, statistically, tend to adopt a spiritual path that they did not grow up around and have extensive interactions with. Many Christians who commented on this discussion board seemed to have a huge problem with this mundane statistical fact. They found this undermined the veracity of their belief (because they assumed that a belief handed down from others is somehow less true), as well as the authenticity of their belief (because most wanted to think of their belief as something they chose for good reasons). But is this the case?

Atonement, Substitution, and Bad Analogies in Reformed Theology

Recently I was in a discussion with someone about the Reformed Theologian Michael Horton, and how he appropriates and comments on the language of sacrifice used by the early Church Fathers such as Athanasius and Chrysostom in his work on Justification. To be fair, I have only read a few pages from this particular work. But, speaking as a former Reformed theologian (Amyraldian, Infralapsarian, Four Point Calvinist to be exact), I have read a ton of stuff like this: Calvin, Berkof, Grudem, Erickson, Packer, Sproul, early Horton, and the like. I would say the entire Reformed tradition is all just an adventure in error, except for folks like Karl Barth and Jan Bonda and William Barclay. Horton here is trying to take the great riches of the Orthodox Theosis tradition, cut off its limbs, and shove its corpse into the coffin of Reformed Theology. Spoiler alert: I have a lot to criticize in the Reformed tradition, particularly in its vision of salvation and the ideas embedded in the so-called "TULIP" of Calvinism. Better off to ditch the Horton and just read the original sources.