If we look at someone who is born into a religion, lives their life holding those religious beliefs, and dies as a member of that same religion - is it valid to assume that they could have separated themselves from their beliefs? Just because a subset of the population undergo religious conversion or deconversion later in life (for whatever reason), does not imply that everyone has that capacity. It may well be that for those people, their religion is effectively immutable.

(Also, racial characteristics are at least partially alterable, using plastic surgery to modify physical ethnic traits, e.g. see http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/07/ethnic-plastic-surgery.html)

Ofcourse that's fully possible. My parents was Christian. They raised me a Christian.

It wasn't until my late teens, when I got a job that I was exposed to a critical thinking crowd. They were very much willing to speak their minds, instead of showing religion some special-cased "respect".

It made me think. It made me reconsider. I'm now an atheist.

But oh boy was the period in between then and now a interesting one. Somehow just asking yourself "what if there is no God?" felt so incredibly wrong and the mind many, many times tried to stop itself thinking that very thought. Confusion is certainly not a sufficient word to describe what went on then.

Anyway today I'm extremely thankful that people didn't show me nor my religion "respect". They treated me with reason, rationality and critical thinking even though they knew it might offend me. Now that is showing someone real respect!

Exercise — of both body and brain — is work. Not having done it does not mean one is unable to.

Many live entire lives without a taut muscle. Yet we know they could have lived differently.

Actually, its not. The term "race" refers to two things (which people often fail to recognize are two different things) -- self-identity with a particular group -- which can change -- or an external, social perceived association with a particular group -- which can also change.

> You are responsible for the memes you host and propagate

Group identity (both self-identification and which buckets you put other people in) is a set of memes as much as any religion is (in fact, historically, its often been a set of memes tied to religion.)

Race is a dubious concept to begin with, but if we hope to salvage any useful semantics the only sane way forward would be to define race as those things about you that don't change when Jor-El puts you on a spaceship and ships you off to Earth to be raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent.

(Have you seen Dave Chappelle's parody of a blind black man who grew up as a member of the KKK? It's relevant to question at hand. It's easy to find on Youtube. While you're watching, consider where the character places his identity.)

Race describes one of two things:

1. Self-identification in a class socially constructed to be a "race", and 2. Externally perceived membership in a class socially constructed as a "race".

Ethnicity is identical, but with "race" replaced with "ethnicity". The distinction between "race" and "ethnicity" being quite arbitrary.

> Race is a dubious concept to begin with, but if we hope to salvage any useful semantics the only sane way forward would be to define race as those things about you that don't change when Jor-El puts you on a spaceship and ships you off to Earth to be raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent.

I'm not interesting in redefining race to make it a category that you find useful, I'm talking about what it actually means as it is used -- which does not refer to an immutable trait. (Though it does refer to a trait that is not easy to change, and which -- especially in the external form -- is very hard for the subject to change, absent moving to a different society with different conceptualization of race.)