Vorkosigan

I think you missed the point. It is not that Stark relies on the sources. It is that he dismisses modern scholars -- with a strawman version of their arguments -- while embracing ancient writings without so much as a raised eyebrow. That's not a good critical attitude toward the sources (or toward fellow scholars). A better method would be to take a more archaeologically-based approach, and rely on what is available from inscriptions, and so forth (which he sometimes does), and place the comments of those like Dionysus in a richer comparative context.

Rational choice does not explain religious conversion; and Stark does not claim that it does, at least that I could see. Stark sees it the same way I do, as a social act. You will note that he spends some time establishing the way friendship and similar intimate contact plays a key role. Religious conversion is part of the toolkit dealing with social and in-group identities that the primate H sapiens has for dealing with the behavior of other primates in a complex sociality. That is why the actual content of the beliefs themselves is less important.

Vorkosigan

Toto

Stark uses "rational" to describe the choice of a religion based on his assertion that choosing a car or a toaster is a "rational" choice. But I think that everyone who is not a free market fundamentalist recognizes that choosing a car is not a completely rational act, if it is rational at all.

Layman

Jeepers. I'm about 1/4th the way through. Should I stop now? What's a better book on roughly the same subject?

gregor

I'd also suspect that churches themselves acknowledge that selecting religion is not a rational choice. Our church produced statistics (I do not recall the source) that a dramatically large percentage of Xians were converted before the age of 13. If you are not coverted by that time, the odds of become a Xian as an adult drop significantly.

Edit - I found some statistics, see:

http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert.fs/ages.htm

Layman

Stark was examining a different situation than you will find in modern day America. I'm skeptical that Christianity spread to prominence in the Roman empire by birth rate.

Vorkosigan

So am I. I think the numbers he gives are fundamentally unsupportable as well, although his general point, that growth of a given rate will eventually yield huge numbers of followers, was sound.